Red counties are doing better under Trump -- but not as well as blue cities

These twin trends -- consolidation at the core, revival at the periphery -- underscores the breadth of the economy's gains during the prolonged expansion that began over a decade ago following the financial crash of 2008. But they also document the continued divergence between the economic power concentrating in large places mostly resistant to Trump and the political power centered on the primarily smaller places that underpin his support.

Since Trump took office, jobs -- and to a lesser extent economic output and population -- have all grown at a faster rate than earlier in the decade in the counties that he carried, most of them exurbs, smaller cities, small towns and rural areas.

But, in absolute numbers, most of the nation's new jobs and an even greater share of its new economic output are still flowing into the large urban centers that have moved sharply away from the GOP since Trump's emergence, according to the new calculations by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

The result is that halfway through Trump's presidency the geography of political and economic power continues to diverge. Though Hillary Clinton in 2016 won less than one-sixth of all counties (about 490), her counties accounted for about two-thirds of the nation's total gross domestic product and three-fifths of all its jobs in 2018, Brookings found.

The more than 2,600 counties that Trump carried, although growing faster than in the final years of Barack Obama's presidency, still generate a distinct minority of the nation's output and employment. And over half of Trump's counties have lost population since 2010, according to Brookings' calculations.

The Trump counties "are winning a little more by the terms that have been set...there is a little more growth," said Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "Meanwhile you have this massive, unchanged structural orientation toward an advanced sector, large urban economy that is continuing to move along. Both things are happening."

The economic gains in Trump country will likely compound the Democratic challenge in regaining meaningful ground in places already drawn to the President's brusque message of economic nationalism and resistance to demographic and cultural change. Conversely, the continuing antipathy toward Trump, largely on cultural and personal grounds, in prosperous metropolitan centers helps explain why he has not politically benefited more from the strong economy. In the latest national CNN survey nearly one-fifth of adults who say they approve of Trump's handling of the economy also say they disapprove of his job performance overall, a striking separation.

The Brookings data show a clear growth spurt since Trump took office in the counties that he carried in 2016. Primarily located at the outskirts or beyond the largest metropolitan areas, many of these counties are propelled by the industries that dominated the 20th century economy, including energy production, mining, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.

From January 2017 through September 2018, employment in the counties Trump won grew at a robust average annual rate of 2.6%, according to the Brookings analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. That was a significant improvement compared to January 2010 through January 2017, when employment grew in those places at an annual rate of just 1.5%.

Throughout that earlier period, job growth in the Trump counties lagged behind the average annual rate of 1.7% in the Clinton counties. But since January 2017, the 2.6% annual job growth gain in the Trump counties has exceeded the 2.2% annual increase in the Clinton places.

Muro says the Trump counties, mostly located outside the core metropolitan areas, have benefited from several factors under his presidency. The most important is an upturn in the heavily cyclical industries on which many of them depend, particularly energy production, construction and manufacturing. Another factor, he notes, is that economic activity tends to diffuse into more places further into an economic expansion, such as the prolonged growth period the US is experiencing now.

The largest metropolitan centers, he says, also face something of a headwind from a slowdown in international trade around the advanced services -- such as financial, computing and business consulting -- that they specialize in. By contrast, he sees less impact on the red county revival from actual administration policy shifts so far. "President Trump's impact on trade rules, for example, or energy policy, have been minimal thus far -- more noisy and contradictory than consequential," Muro and Brookings senior research assistant Jacob Whiton write in their blog post releasing the data.

But even this improved performance in red places didn't materially dent the underlying dominance of the biggest urban centers, whose large concentrations of skilled workers and capital investment have made them the hubs of the 21st century information-age economy. The counties Clinton carried tend to be much larger than those that Trump won, and they began Trump's presidency with a much greater number of total jobs. As a result, even though the Trump counties have enjoyed a faster rate of employment increase since 2017, the Clinton counties have still added a greater absolute number of new jobs since then: her counties have added nearly 3.3 million jobs since Trump took office, compared to almost 2.5 million for his, Brookings calculates.

That means the relative recovery of Trump places since 2017 hasn't derailed the long-term centralization of employment into the largest urban centers that dominate heavily digital industries, from software development to consulting. The Brookings calculations show that as of September 2018, the counties Clinton carried accounted for 60.9% of all the nation's jobs, compared to 39.1% for the Trump counties. That's a slight further tilt toward the Clinton places since 2010, when they housed 60.6% of all the nation's jobs, compared to 39.4% for the Trump counties.

The centralization trend is equally apparent when viewed through the prism of size, rather than partisanship. The 100 largest counties, regardless of who they supported in 2016, now account for 47.6% of all jobs, compared to 46.5% in 2010. The top 250 counties now account for almost 68% of all jobs, up from about 66% in 2010. Meanwhile, the 2,500 smallest counties have seen their share of total employment shrink over this decade from 20.4% in 2010 to just over 19% now.

"In terms of long term growth, most of the trends are oriented toward the biggest, densest cities with the highest education levels," says Muro. "Redder places are growing, but there are still structural challenges that they face. The bluer, more urban places are better positioned to participate in the global economy."

That imbalance is even more lopsided when looking at economic output. Total gross domestic product in the Trump counties increased slightly faster in 2017 and 2018 (1.9% annually) than it did from 2010 through 2016 (1.8%), according to Brookings calculations from data provided by Emsi, a private economic analysis firm. Since 2017, the Clinton counties (with 2.0% annual growth) have roughly matched the economic growth rate in the Trump counties, though that's a decline from the Clinton county pace earlier in the decade (2.4% annually).

Yet, again, because the Clinton counties started from such a much higher absolute position, they have accounted for over twice as much of the total new economic output since 2017 as the places that voted for Trump. The less than one-sixth of counties that voted for Clinton still generated fully two-thirds of the nation's total domestic product as of September 2018 (66.6%), according to the Brookings figures. That constituted continued growth from their share of 65.5% in 2010.

Of the 25 counties that generated the most economic output in 2018 -- a list topped by Los Angeles, Manhattan, Harris (Houston), Cook (Chicago), Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), King (Seattle) and Dallas-Trump carried only two. And each of the two highest-output counties he carried in 2016 swung sharply toward Democrats in Senate races in 2018: Maricopa around Phoenix, and Tarrant, centered on Ft. Worth, Texas.

Measured by size, the 100 largest counties alone now account for over 54% of the total domestic product, up from around 52% when the decade began. That centralization of total economic activity into the very largest metropolitan areas remains the "structural underpinning of the economy, " Muro says.

The population trends are more mixed. Compared to 2010, the counties Clinton carried have very slightly increased their share of the total population: from 54.6% then to 54.8% in 2018, according to the Brookings analysis of new figures from the Census Population Estimates Program. Similarly, the 100 largest counties have upped their share of the total population from 46.5% then to 47.6% now.

But since Trump took office, the counties he carried have added slightly more total new residents (about 1.2 million) than the Clinton counties (about 827,000). That's partly driven by the dispersal of economic activity deeper into the business cycle that Muro noted. But it also likely reflects the cost of success for the largest urban centers, many of which are experiencing soaring rents and home prices that are driving middle-income families to outlying communities, particularly once they have children.

"At least for the really dynamic big elite places those pressures are very real," Muro says. "So that may be throwing some growth into redder places." The Trump counties, in fact, added slightly more people than the Clinton counties even in the 2015-2017 period before he took office.

Despite these signs of recovery, the long-term prognosis for many of the smaller red-leaning counties remains daunting. Brookings calculates that since 2010, fully 1460 of the 2622 counties that Trump carried have lost population: that's 55% of them. By contrast, 188 of the Clinton counties, or about 38% of them, lost population over that period. The Trump counties that have lost the most people since 2010 present an itinerary of mostly blue-collar centers across the industrial Northeast and Midwest, including Westmoreland, Beaver, Mercer, Erie and Cambria in Pennsylvania; Trumbull, Columbiana and Ashtabula in Ohio; Kanawha in West Virginia; and several across upstate New York including Broome, Oneida and Oswego.

Through American history, political power has usually followed economic power. Economic ascendance shifted political influence from the agrarian South to the industrializing North for decades after the Civil War and from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt starting in the 1960s. Today, economic and political power are diverging as the metropolitan centers driving most of the nation's economic innovation face a Republican coalition rooted in smaller, less economically dynamic places, that has pursued a national agenda most big cities mayors consider hostile to their growth -- from eliminating the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, to favoring rural infrastructure projects over mass transit, and restricting trade and immigration.

How long that separation of economic and political clout can endure may be one of the central political questions of the 2020s. Or, put another way, one of the crystallizing issues in American politics is becoming: how long can Paducah tell Seattle what to do?

For the near-term, though, the improved economic performance in smaller, red-leaning counties seems certain to bolster Trump's position there for reelection. The bigger question may be whether the soaring economic performance of the largest metropolitan areas does anything to diminish the intense cultural and personal resistance to the president that they displayed in both 2016 and 2018.

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