It’s not that cut and dried, actually.

There are no red and blue states in reality. We are all purple states. It’s a political quirk that states get described as blue or red because the electoral college grants all their votes to a simple majority winner. A simple majority is 50% plus one vote. So if Tennessee votes 51% Republican and 49% Democrat, the state is described as red and the Republican candidate gets all 11 of the state’s electoral votes. But the other 49% of voters don’t disappear, they’re still there. How could “blue” states leave them behind, going their own way, and still say people matter?

That’s why so many people hate the electoral college and how a president can win the election without actually being the people’s choice.

When you look at election maps by county breakdown you notice a particular trend. Counties in every state with metropolitan areas vote blue. Counties without vote red. This always made sense to me–the more people, the more you learn to share. Kind of like how in families with many kids vs families with few or one roughly equates to their level of selfishness. Isn’t that the primary point of the contention between the two parties? Social responsibility to care for each other vs rugged individualism?

So when a state has a metropolitan area large enough that the votes will outnumber the votes in all the other counties of that state, the state will be blue. If there isn’t a large enough metropolitan city, the state will be red.

But there are Democrats and Republicans living side by side in every city, county, and state in the country.

Of course, all that doesn’t address the issue of Independent voters like myself who are the largest group overall at 44-ish% nationally, according to polling, and do not belong to either party. Independents typically vote mixed tickets so we are definitely purple.