A new analysis of 471 U.S. counties has found that, for everyday travel, people from counties with particularly strong political leanings—whether liberal or conservative—are more likely to visit like-minded destinations. Zhengyi Liang and Jaeho Cho of the University of California, Davis, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on January 28, 2026.
Prior research has shown that U.S. residents increasingly live in areas where their neighbors share similar political leanings. This clustering can limit how often people of differing political views cross paths with each other, further deepening political polarization.
In addition to choices about where they live, political leanings may also influence people's choices about where they go in their day-to-day lives. However, research into this possibility is limited. To build a clearer picture, Liang and Cho conducted a computational analysis of travel patterns between different U.S. counties with varying political leanings. Their dataset consisted of anonymized phone tracking data from more than 40 million phones collected between November 2018 and 2019, as well as county-level voting records for the 2020 presidential election from 471 counties.
The analysis showed that, in general, the political leanings of a county were unrelated to the political leanings of other counties visited by its residents. However, for counties with particularly strong political leanings, people travelling from them were more likely to visit other counties with similar leanings. For instance, people traveling from the strongly liberal-leaning New York County made significantly more trips to like-minded counties. Meanwhile, people from the weakly liberal-leaning Jefferson County did not, instead traveling more often to conservative-leaning counties.
These findings held true even after statistically accounting for other factors that could influence everyday travel, such as income, gender, and race.
The researchers suggest that people's strongly partisan identities may influence not only where they live but also where they travel on a daily basis. More research will be needed to confirm the findings and to build upon them, such as by including more phone tracking data from rural regions. This study could also help inform efforts to reduce political polarization.
The authors add: "People don't necessarily travel more to places that match their political party, but they do travel differently when they come from strongly partisan areas. In particular, people from counties that are strongly Democratic or strongly Republican are more likely to visit destinations with similar politics."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/49Gw2tG
Citation: Liang Z, Cho J (2026) Political polarization on the move: Analyzing geographical mobility between counties in the U.S. PLoS One 21(1): e0339333. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339333
Author countries: U.S.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
