Places that support Donald Trump also tend to have the most franchise foods. [View all]

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The most common restaurant cuisine in every state, and a chain-restaurant mystery - this is the title of the article from WaPo

When Clio Andris and Xiaofan Liang gave us early access to the latest update of their delightful data on chain restaurants, they already had identified its most compelling mystery: Places that support Donald Trump also tend to have the most franchise foods. But why? It turns out “the foodscape is very political,” said Liang, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech’s School of City & Regional Planning. “Places with a high percentage of Trump voters have a higher percentage of chains. We didn’t expect it.” Chain restaurants — those ubiquitous monuments to corporate consistency, from Applebee’s to Arby’s, Olive Garden to Pizza Hut — are most common in Kentucky, West Virginia and Alabama. They’re rarest in Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii. Maine, New York and D.C. also tend to have fewer chains.

The chain restaurant capital of the country is the metro area around Anniston, Ala., home to the Talladega Superspeedway. Nearly 3 in 5 restaurants there are chains. Nestled in the southern reaches of Appalachia, off the interstate between Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, Anniston is accustomed to life as a national punching bag. It has been named among the “most dangerous” and “fastest shrinking” cities and appears on lists of the worst places to live and the places where workers are most likely to be replaced by robots. In 2019, local reporter and author Tim Lockette wrote a helpful guide for residents titled, “FIVE THINGS to know when Anniston lands on a ‘10 worst’ list again.”

Anniston lies in Calhoun County, which Trump won in 2020 with 73 percent of the two-party vote, which excludes votes cast for third-party candidates. That makes it an exemplar of the Trump-chain restaurant nexus. In the Trumpiest fifth of the United States, counties where Trump received at least 63.3 percent of the two-party vote in the past presidential election, 37 percent of the restaurants are chains. In the least Trumpy fifth, where Trump received less than 32.1 percent of the vote, it’s 23 percent.

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While the Trump vote correlates with the presence of chain restaurants, it clearly doesn’t explain it. Our gut told us to look at population density. The density divide is the Ur-cleavage from which so many other modern American divisions flow. As places get more rural, education and income levels fall and Trump support rises. But chains don’t fit perfectly into this worldview. Chain restaurant concentration peaks in midsize cities and suburbs and tends to be lower in both the most urban and most rural areas. And at every density level, the political divide remains: Rural areas won by Biden have fewer chains than rural areas won by Trump. Same goes for suburbs and major cities.

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One by one, we ruled out the possibilities: It wasn’t age, either of people or of the community (as measured by the year a typical dwelling was erected). It wasn’t concentration of White population. It wasn’t income. In the end, we identified one factor that transcended politics and explained the presence of chain restaurants throughout the nation: driving. Specifically, the share of the workforce that drives to work each day.

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About 83 percent of workers commute by car nationally, but only 80 percent of folks in Biden counties do so, compared with 90 percent of workers in Trump counties. The share of car commuters ranges from 55 percent in the deep-blue New York City metro area to 96 percent around bright red Decatur, Ala. Alabama as a whole ranks second in car commuting (behind Mississippi) and third in chain restaurants (behind Kentucky and West Virginia) as people in the South tend to be more likely to drive to work than folks in other regions.

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