Aside from their political views, Joshua Fisher and Ryan Troyer have a lot in common.

In 2020, they lived across the street from each other in Sioux Falls, S.D. They are both white men of a similar age. Mr. Fisher, 42, is an auto technician; Mr. Troyer, 39, is a sanitation worker. They are both married. They both have associate degrees.

They have something else in common, too: They both moved away from Sioux Falls. Mr. Troyer left in the fall of 2021, and Mr. Fisher about a year later.

In the process, they unwittingly became a part of a nationwide pattern that could matter in a close presidential election.

They made the country more geographically polarized.

Mr. Troyer, the Republican, moved to a more Republican neighborhood. Mr. Fisher, the Democrat, moved to a more Democratic one.

Mr. Troyer, the Republican, moved to a more Republican neighborhood. Mr. Fisher, the Democrat, moved to a more Democratic one.

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This is just one pair of voters, but they are part of a trend. Consider the moves of Republicans from relatively balanced neighborhoods like theirs:

This is just one pair of voters, but they are part of a trend. Consider the moves of Republicans from relatively balanced neighborhoods like theirs:

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The picture for Democrats is almost the reverse:

The picture for Democrats is almost the reverse:

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Put the two groups together, and you see political polarization in action.

Put the two groups together, and you see political polarization in action.

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These estimates, based on a New York Times analysis of detailed public voter registration records of more than 3.5 million Americans who moved since the last presidential election, offer a new and extraordinarily detailed glimpse into one of the ways that we segregate from each other — down to the street level.

Across all movers, Republicans chose neighborhoods Donald J. Trump won by an average of 19 percentage points in 2020, while Democrats chose neighborhoods President Biden won by the opposite margin (also 19 points). In total, movers started in neighborhoods 31 percentage points apart; they ended in neighborhoods 38 points apart. Across the country, the result is a widening gap between blue neighborhoods and red ones.

The independents and unaffiliated voters in our set picked more evenly balanced neighborhoods.

The different choices that movers made are not easily explained by things like voters’ ages, race, income or if they were leaving a rural or urban area. Even when narrowing our comparisons to demographically similar pairs of people from the same kinds of neighborhoods — people like Mr. Fisher and Mr. Troyer — Democrats and Republicans still chose neighborhoods that were 24 points apart in the 2020 vote.

Our analysis suggests partisanship itself, intentional or not, plays a powerful role when Americans uproot and find a new home. And their very personal decisions about where to resettle help power the churn of migration that is continuously reshaping American life at the neighborhood level and contributing to a sense that Americans are siloed in echo chambers, online and in their daily lives.

It also has real stakes for our elections: Political scientists say the more partisan a district or state becomes, the less a candidate needs to woo voters from the other party — or, after winning, govern on their behalf.

Interviews with 20 recent movers found that, consistent with research on the subject, politics alone did not drive a decision to move. But most we spoke to said it did influence their decision, and for some it topped the must-have list — the movers in our analysis are all registered to vote, and nearly all we spoke to intended to vote on Election Day.

Impact on the 2024 election

It’s unclear how much of a direct effect movers might have on the election next week. Each cycle, the electoral landscape changes in ways that have nothing to do with moving: People turn 18; people die; people change their minds or decide not to vote. But in an extraordinarily close race, even small shifts could prove decisive.

The 3.5 million movers in our analysis are a small number compared with the 158 million people who voted in 2020, but they do help explain some recent electoral trends — like Florida’s electoral shift to the right or the gains Democrats have made in Georgia.

In all but three states that voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, more Democrats have moved in than Republicans. The reverse is true for states Mr. Trump won — in all but one, more Republicans moved in.

In 36 states, polarization happened in both directions at once: More newcomers were of the winning party, and more of those who left were of the losing party.

Our analysis is an undercount of partisan migration; it may be missing some movers who haven’t yet filed a new address or registered to vote in their new homes. But it probably accounts for most voters who moved, and it shows how population shifts can have political consequences.

Consider Florida: Once a critical swing state, it has become more reliably Republican. Out of the 3.5 million voters we tracked, more than 200,000 registered Republicans have moved in over the past four years, more than twice the number of Democrats.

Mr. Biden won Georgia in 2020, the first time a Democrat won the state since 1992. Among more than 140,000 newcomers, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 9,000. Over the same span, at least 10,000 more Republicans than Democrats moved out of the state — a third of them to Florida.

In Arizona, a state Mr. Biden won by less than 12,000 votes, incoming Republicans — a third of them from California — outnumbered incoming Democrats by a margin of three to two. Accounting for departures, Arizona gained about 17,000 Republican voters.

In all three Northern battlegrounds — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — Democrats made small gains through migration. In Pennsylvania, this year’s key battleground, Democratic gains actually came amid population loss: For both parties, more voters moved out than in. But Republicans lost more.

California has contributed to this trend in a different way: by exporting Republicans en masse. More Republicans have moved out of California than any other state. And those who did have made other states redder in the process — particularly Texas, Arizona, Florida and Nevada.

What drives moving

Tens of millions of Americans move each year, whether across town or across the country. Most of the voters in our set moved during the pandemic, when home sales surged and many Americans were ready for a change.

Mr. Troyer, the Republican from Sioux Falls, moved closer to his wife’s family in Minnesota. Mr. Fisher, the Democrat, moved to escape the harsh South Dakota winters.

And yet both ended up in places that were more partisan than where they came from, a phenomenon known as “sorting.” Research on partisanship and migration has found politics typically figures into the equation only indirectly — or even coincidentally.

Previous research has found that most people don’t intentionally seek out politically homogenous areas, but instead share similar preferences with people who vote as they do, with Democrats favoring cities and Republicans favoring the country, on average. A 2015 study, however, found that people favor properties in neighborhoods that reflect their partisan identity.

“Am I going to fit? Fittingness is a very important criteria for a place to live,” said James Gimpel, a politics professor at the University of Maryland, and co-author of the study. “Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, I’m looking forward to having a fight with my neighbors.’”

Our analysis and interviews suggest just how intertwined political and lifestyle choices can be when it comes to choosing a new home, particularly since 2020.

Mr. Fisher, the Democrat, said that while he was eager to escape the snow, he also found the local politics increasingly oppressive. An outspoken liberal, with bumper stickers on his Jeep to match, he was eager to find a place that better reflected his sensibilities.

“For the most part, you just kind of kept to yourself,” Mr. Fisher, a South Dakota native, said of his old neighborhood, a precinct Mr. Biden won by five points. He says he feels more comfortable in his home in southwest Charlotte, in a precinct Mr. Biden carried by 46 points. “It’s definitely bluer than where we were before, and kind of a nice change,” he said.

And Mr. Troyer now lives in Otsego, northwest of Minneapolis, which Mr. Trump won by 27 points. Mr. Troyer said he chose his neighborhood because it was close to his job and family. While he did not intentionally seek out a conservative community, he feels at ease at home and at work. “Everybody I associate with is Republican,” he said. “Everybody at work, the hardworking kind, we’re all Republican.”

Somewhere to belong

For a handful of the people interviewed for this article, politics was the impetus.

Erin Thompson, 39, felt out of step as the lone Republican voice among her Seattle friends. Even dating was hard. “You want to find someone who has the same fundamental belief system as you,” she said. Absent that, “It’s just a little isolating.” In 2021, in search of warmer weather and a community more closely matching her worldview, she moved to Gilbert, a conservative Phoenix suburb.

Romance was also a factor for Andrew Clohessey, 35, who moved to Minneapolis in 2021 from Cedar Falls, Iowa. He’d spent the previous year deliberately applying for jobs in liberal cities, eager to get out of an area that felt increasingly conservative to him, even though his precinct voted for Mr. Biden. He moved into a neighborhood with a lot of shops within walking distance, one that Mr. Biden carried by 61 points. “It’s been great,” he said. On dating apps he is now “more likely to match with people who have left-leaning political views.”

In contrast, Naomi Hattaway, 48, said politics “did not register one bit” when she moved for work to Fairburn, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, from Omaha (after a stop in Florida). An independent who previously registered as a Democrat, she said diversity mattered more to her than party affiliation. She feels more at home as a Black mixed race woman in a city with a large Black population and a diverse local government. “It’s everything,” she said, adding that she is “better off living somewhere I belonged.”

All movers we spoke to felt politically comfortable in their new homes. Upon retiring, Robert LaRoche, 60, moved from Las Vegas to Spring Hill, Fla., about an hour north of Tampa to live closer to family. While the majority of his old neighbors in a precinct that voted for Mr. Biden by 41 points “did not align with our values,” he said, that’s not why he moved, nor was it why he chose his new home. He sees it as a bonus that he gets to live in a precinct that voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 by 26 points.

Mr. LaRoche’s sentiment is shared by more and more Americans — that life is less contentious when the people around you vote the way you do.

“Now I can talk to my neighbors about absolutely anything and not start a big argument,” he said.

The optics were perfect. The crowd was massive. The media reviews were glowing.

But there was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Kamala Harris’ speech on the Ellipse that virtually no one is talking about. 

First, I’ll give the vice president her due. It was a well-written address and strongly delivered. It contained a fair amount of policy, such as Medicare payments for home health care and aid to first-time home buyers.

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Harris acknowledged that many voters were just getting to know her. She mentioned her mom and her middle-class upbringing, as she always does. She said she’s not perfect and makes mistakes.

But the backbone of the speech was a two-fisted, no-holds-barred attack on Donald Trump.

Harris likened him to King George III as a “petty tyrant.” She called him “unstable” and “consumed with grievance.” She said he’s seeking “unchecked power” and is “obsessed with revenge.”

In short, after a 100-day campaign, Harris is still running as she did when she quickly seized the nomination, as the anti-Trump.

Now such rhetorical assaults can be traced to the dawn of the republic. You may not love me, but that other guy is so much worse.

That’s why she used the White House as a backdrop, standing at the spot where Trump gave his speech on Jan. 6, urging his supporters to go to the Capitol, where many proceeded to riot.

Fine. Fair game. Especially for a candidate who’s trying to win some Republican votes, aided by Liz Cheney, a number of former Trump officials and, as of yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But then the veep tried to make the pivot, presenting herself as the candidate of unity.

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And therein lies the fatal flaw. You can’t beat the crap out of your opponent and, in practically the next breath, say you want to bring the country together. You can’t have it both ways. You can be an attack dog, but if you’re baring those teeth, you can’t suddenly be purring like a puppy.

Not that Harris didn’t have some good lines. Trump has an enemies list and she’ll have a to-do list. And of political opponents: “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

The segue: “It is time to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms.”

But, um, she just spent a good chunk of her speech pointing fingers.

Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally on the Ellipse on Oct. 29, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

And then she kept circling back to Trump in the second half, such as when discussing abortion rights.

Harris also went beyond political exaggeration. “He tried to cut Medicare and Social Security every year he was president,” she said. That is simply not true. But she gets very little fact-checking.

Overall, the speech was a plus for her, despite its clashing ideas. But make no mistake, she’s running as the alternative to a man she paints as dangerous.

As the Free Press put it: “This campaign is and always has been all about Trump. And it will be all about Trump all the way to the finish line now.”

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But Harris’ big moment was marred by Joe Biden – the, ah, previous nominee – to the point where it almost seems like he’s trying to undermine her.

Last week, the president said of his predecessor, “Lock him up.” Harris always says she’ll leave that to the courts.

And now, referring to the racist comic at the Madison Square Garden rally who called Puerto Rico an island of garbage, Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The president stumbled for a couple of seconds and added: “His–his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

President Joe Biden speaks at an election campaign event in Pittsburgh, Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024.  (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Boom. Too late. There were instant comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” swipe at Trump supporters in 2016.

Biden posted a clarification, saying he was referring only to comic Tony Hinchcliffe. (Trump says he doesn’t know the performer and didn’t hear the so-called joke.) 

The White House put out a transcript that included an apostrophe, as in “his supporter’s,” trying to indicate that he was talking about one person. Who would have thought the campaign would turn on a lowly apostrophe? 

A reporter asked Harris about the Biden blunder yesterday before she boarded Air Force Two.

“He clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for…I believe the work that I do is about representing people whether they support me or not.”

Kamala finally broke with the boss, wisely distancing herself from the blunder. No wonder she’s resisted his suggestions that they campaign together. He’s doing enough damage on his own, with some pundits even suggesting it’s deliberate. 

And that gave Trump an opening: “Now, on top of everything, Joe Biden calls our supporters ‘garbage.’ You can’t lead America if you don’t love the American people.”

It’s a distraction that Kamala Harris didn’t need in the final days of the campaign.

Former President Trump rolled up to the battleground state of Wisconsin in a garbage truck on Wednesday, an apparent reference to President Biden’s remarks about supporters of the Republican nominee, which has caused a firestorm for Vice President Kamala Harris in the final days of a hotly contested election. 

Trump was pictured in Green Bay inside a white garbage truck wearing an orange reflective vest with “Trump Make America Great Again 2024” emblazoned on the vehicle. 

“How do you like my garbage truck?” Trump asked reporters. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”

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The stunt is an apparent dig at Biden, who has come under fire for calling Trump supporters garbage. 

During a virtual Harris campaign call with Voto Latino, Biden took a swipe at former Trump’s weekend rally in Madison Square Garden, which made headlines after insult comedian Tony Hinchiffe made jokes mocking different ethnic groups, with one joke referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it is un-American.”

The comment quickly went viral and sparked swift condemnation from critics. 

BIDEN CALLS TRUMP SUPPORTERS ‘GARBAGE’ DURING HARRIS CAMPAIGN EVENT AS VP PROMISES UNITY AT ELLIPSE RALLY

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump climbs into a garbage truck Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, as he arrives in Green Bay, Wis.  (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson))

Biden’s remarks were quickly compared to Hillary Clinton, who declared that Trump supporters were “deplorables” during the 2016 presidential race. 

Trump himself reacted to the “terrible” comment from Biden while speaking at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 

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“Remember Hillary? She said ‘deplorable’ and then said ‘irredeemable,’ right? But she said ‘deplorable.’ That didn’t work out. ‘Garbage’ I think is worse,” Trump said to his supporters at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Tuesday night. “But he doesn’t know- you have to please forgive him. Please forgive him. For he not knoweth what he said.”  

“And I’m convinced he likes me more than he likes Kamala,” Trump quipped.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden doesn’t view Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he sits in a garbage truck Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Green Bay, Wis.  (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

“He has said multiple times that he is a president for all. It doesn’t matter if in a red state. It doesn’t matter if you live in a blue state,” she said. 

Vivek Ramaswamy was also seen riding on the back of a garbage truck in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday. Ramaswamy, who threw his support to Trump after dropping out of the presidential race, wore a yellow reflective vest while greeting supporters.