Nate Silver: Win the Cities, Win America

Barack Obama's strength in cities won him the election, meaning he "might be America's first urban" president, statistics whiz Nate Silver writes in Esquire. Obama's "pragmatic, superior, hip, stubborn, multicultural" ways make him unmistakably urban, Silver writes, and America's changing demographics mean that urban voters matter now more than ever.

The percentage of voters identified as rural has shriveled since 1992 while the urban percentage has risen steadily, Silver notes. Suburban voters now make up almost half the electorate, and they are starting to look—and vote—more like their urban counterparts. "Among the many mistakes the McCain campaign made was targeting the rural vote rather than the suburban one," Silver writes.
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