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The One Minute Geographer: The Great Plains — Age and the Trump Vote
Can age help explain the overwhelming Trump vote in most of the Great Plains and the counties along the 100-degree meridian? Certainly some of it can be attributed to age.
Of the 54 counties along the meridian we have been focusing on, 44 (more than 80%) have higher than average percentages of people over age 65. In the US as a whole in 2020, 16.5% of Americans were over age 65 but some counties on the median have remarkably higher percentages. Keya Paha in Nebraska, and Menard, Kimble and Real counties in Texas all have between 30% and 33% of their populations over age 65, almost double the national figure. (These four counties can be identified on the map, in the order listed, by the red dots, north to south.)
These aren’t retirement communities. The age difference comes about through out-migration that results in the losses in population we’ve seen in earlier posts. Young people move out, leaving the older folks behind. Of course because these counties have much older populations we have also higher death rates, contributing to population loss as well. Below is a chart of the ten counties on the strip with the highest percentages of people 65 and over.
