Hillary Clinton would not just have been the first female president. She would also have been the first modern Democratic candidate born in a northern state to have become president. The past four Democrats who have won presidential contests (or five, if you count Al Gore’s ambiguous election result) were not from the North.
This is counting Obama as a non-Northern politician, which may not be entirely unfair: Hawaii is the southernmost state in the US, Obama was raised by his Kansas-born mother and grandparents, and African-American society in Illinois remains recently rooted in the South. Obama himself has a bit of a southern accent that he is able to turn on or off as required. (Hillary Clinton had one too back in the early 1990’s, when she was still living in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas). Indeed, you have to go back all the way to John F Kennedy in order to break this pattern—but not to Truman before him, a Missouri-born Democrat.
In contrast, on the Republican side all the recent presidents who have won elections (in other words, all the recent Republican presidents apart from Gerald Ford, who inherited Nixon’s presidency post-impeachment) have had close ties to either California or Texas. The Bush family, though originally aristocrats hailing from New England, adopted Texas as their home, with Bush Sr. representing it in Congress for four years and Bush Jr. later serving as its governor for five years. Eisenhower too was from Texas. Reagan on the other hand was a Hollywood actor turned governor of California, while Nixon was born and raised in California and represented it in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Trump’s victory in a sense breaks this pattern (at least, if you ignore the fact that the new Celebrity Apprentice is being filmed in California). Trump will be the first New York-born Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt, and the first New York-born president of either party since Franklin Roosevelt. Trump is also the only Republican president to have ever lost the Texas primary (he got just 27 percent of the vote there; Ted Cruz got 44 percent) and was the first Republican presidential nominee to have lost the Texas primary since Ford lost it to Reagan in 1976, in an election Ford later lost to Jimmy Carter.
These patterns are telling. Most of the post-election discussions thus far have been devoted to the ethnic, rural-urban, class, age, or gender divisions that helped Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton, but this is partly a result of the fact that two of America’s other political macro-divisions — the North-South divide and the California-Texas divide — appear so obvious and are so normalized that they have been dwelt upon very little by comparison.
The North-South divide is partially obscured by the fact that there are large numbers of African-American and Hispanic voters living in most states in the South. Thus, Clinton fared worse in heartland states like Idaho, Utah, and the Dakotas than she did in southeastern states like Alabama, Georgia, or the Carolinas, even as her worst showing of all was among white Southern voters. More than 70 percent of white voters in Texas and in most of the Southeast (apart from Florida) did not vote for Clinton—a stupefying level of political unanimity for such a large region and demographic group. Nationally, by comparison, even an estimated 28 percent of white voters without a college degree voted for Clinton. Even white voters in the coal-producing states of Wyoming and West Virginia were not enticed to vote for Trump in such large proportions as Southern ones were.
Trump, meanwhile, received an estimated 49 percent of white college graduates, 23 percent of non-white college graduates, and even 29 percent of Hispanic-Americans, yet in California got just 33 percent of the overall vote, less than in any other state apart from Hawaii or Vermont. In Massachusetts Trump got just 33.5 percent. In New York he got 37 percent, the first time a president failed to win his own home state since Lincoln lost Kentucky in 1864.
Still, as with that 1864 election, race proved far more divisive even than intense regionalism; Trump only won 8 percent of African-American votes. By contrast, Trump received at least 29 percent of the overall vote in every state. Only in Trump’s future home of Washington D.C. was he blown-out, getting just 4 percent of the overall vote there.
Compared to the bitter North-South divide, which dates back to America’s early years, the California-Texas divide is extremely new and emotionally far less encumbered by historical(-racial) divisions. California and Texas have not voted in unison only since 1988. They have voted in unison in 5 of the past 13 elections — twice for Reagan (a Californian), twice for the Nixon (a Californian), and once for George H W Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president prior to the election. Indeed, Texas and California also voted in unison seven out of ten times between 1952 and 1988, and fourteen out of nineteen times between 1916 and 1988. During this span California voted for the Republicans nine out of ten times, while Texas voted for the Democrats four out of ten times.
Today, however, it is already becoming difficult to believe that this ever used to occur. The growing division between California and Texas has perhaps more than anything else defined modern American politics. California and Texas are the most populous states in the country, accounting for 17 percent of the electoral college votes in the election. The next most populous state, the swing-state of Florida, has just 52 percent the population size of California and 74 percent that of Texas. Illinois, the most populous state in the Midwest and the fifth most populous state in the country, has just 33 percent the population size of California and 47 percent that of Texas. Had Texas voted for the Democrats in this past election, Hillary Clinton would have won the electoral college by a score of 270 to 268. Had Trump fared better in California, he would not have lost the popular vote.
(The division between California and Texas might also be preventing both from pursuing their shared interest of achieving structural reform in the Senate. While Democrats are outraged that Trump and George W Bush both won the presidency even after losing the popular vote, what is arguably much more troubling is that tiny states like Rhode Island and Wyoming still receive as many votes in the Senate as do giants like California and Texas. Given the difficulty of amending the structure of the Senate, such reform would require at a minimum the cooperation of Congressional representatives from Texas and California).
Past presidents also used to transcend the more deeply entrenched North-South divide on occasion. Bill Clinton did it to a certain extent when he won in states like Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Reagan did it when he swept the Northeast twice, as to a lesser extent did George H W Bush. And Carter did it when he swept the entire Southeast, even as he failed to win any of the 16 states in the lower 48 west of Texas or Minnesota.
If such occurrences are impossible nowadays, we might see more elections in the future that are not too dissimilar from the recent one, with the Democrats no longer running a Southern candidate, the Republicans no longer running one from California or Texas, and both of the parties instead focusing their efforts squarely upon the Midwest, Florida, and a few other smaller states like Arizona. Perhaps, though, these divisions will not persist. Maybe a Northern Democrat will have a shot at winning states in the South next time—instead of just some Yankee showman like Trump.
Future Economics 
Superb analysis, Joseph!