NP: Team Sleep, Team Sleep

Via Kevin Drum, this is a really, really interesting article on how the urban/rural split in this country seems much more salient than blue state/red state or liberal/conservative. Which I seem to remember talking about almost immediately after the election.

One thing that puzzles me, though, is how urban populations, as per the second chart, can outnumber rural by 5-to-1, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and still lose. I suspect it's because they're omitting suburban and exurban segments, and it's not just a binary state. I'd still love to see county-by-county results as a function of either distance from large populations or by population density itself.

Jumping completely onto a different tangent, you've got the exurban exodus contributing to the conservative side of the "distance from cities" model, but what about the "super suburb?" Do places like Naperville, IL start to shift blue as they reach some critical mass? Or is it more the case of some more conservative suburban enclaves further insulating themselves from big cities through self-sufficiency from a broader, more cultural perspective?