How Each State's "Richest" County Voted

[rhody]

Rhode Island- Washington County--- MHI $ 72.1k--- Pop 126.6k

1.) Richmond--- MHI $94.0k--- Pop 7.7k
2012: (54 D- 42 R)   +12 D;  2016: (42 D- 50_R)  +8 R    +20% R Swing

What happened here???

2.) New Shoreham--- MHI $ 90.5k--- 836 People
2012: (69 D- 28 R)    +41 D;  2016: (68 D- 24 R)    +44 D   +3% D Swing

3.) Exeter--- MHI $81.6k--- Pop 6.7k
2012: (52 D- 42 R)   +10 D; 2016: (44 D- 51 R)      + 7 R    +17% R Swing

?



   

I can explain what happened in Richmond and Exeter, RI. Basically, these towns, while perhaps wealthier than the average in RI, are nowhere near the wealthiest in the state and don't identify as such (they are very rural, have very few upscale neighborhoods and are more low key rich) and as a result didn't vote like actual wealthy towns such as Barrington (Bristol County) and East Greenwich (Kent County). Even though the wealthiest parts of the state are outside of Washington County, Washington is the wealthiest overall because the richest areas are in the same county as poor areas. Richmond and Exeter are very white and republican on the local level, with a lot of wwc voters that flipped them.
New Shoreham is coextensive with Block Island and behaves politically more like Barrington/East Greenwich. I'm surprised that Richmond has a higher MHI.

[rhody]

Thanks for the welcome!
Regardless of what MHI says, no RIer would identify Richmond as one of the wealthiest RI towns. Parts of Richmond have some nice neighborhoods that probably saw some Romney-Clinton swings, being on Interstate 95 the town serves as a rural bedroom community for Providence. However, backwoods northern and southern Richmond contain a significant portion of the population and feature some mid to very low income areas. People who live in these parts of town are white working class, a lot are WASPs/Swamp Yankees, and are responsible for the town's heavy swing to Trump. Richmond is not as uniformly wealthy as the suburban or coastal towns that are more stereotypically rich (Barrington, EG, Jamestown, Little Compton) that saw swings to Clinton.
The few wealthy areas of town do explain why Richmond actually had one of the smaller swings to Trump in western RI (Trump made even bigger gains in Hopkinton, Coventry, Foster, Burrillville, Glocester, etc.)
Hope this helps!