Most New Hampshireans live in a Trump-Ayotte-Sununu town

[Fmr. Speaker anna0kear]

By my calculations, 737 978 New Hampshirites (that's 55.7% of the Granite State's 2016 population) live in a city or town that voted more Republican, on aggregate, than the state as a whole, over that year's presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections.

For reference, election results are sourced from the New York Times or David's atlas, where appropriate, and I used population estimates for 2016, published by the government census, to arrive at this outcome.

I found this information somewhat interesting, since it's usually true for large states, with a clear rural-urban divide, but New Hampshire doesn't seem to fit that bill. For instance, everyone here knows that Hanover and Lebanon, the towns which contain students attending Dartmouth College, are most liberal places in the state, not population centres like Manchester, Nashua, or Concord.

What could be a likely explanation for this widespread phenomenon?

[pops]

I would imagine you would find this in a lot of states that didn't vote for Trump, such as Maine, Minnesota, and Nevada in particular. This just means that the higher population areas voted with a higher percentage for Democrats than the lower population areas voted for Republicans, and more people live in those lower population areas.

[DPKdebator]

I'd say it's because Democratic voters in NH tend to be very concentrated: Manchester and Nashua might only be D+6 and D+8 respectively, but most of the other notable Democratic-voting areas are big-time vote sinks: Portsmouth/most of the D-voting towns around it, Keene, and Lebanon are over 60% Democratic, and Hanover is over 80% Democratic. This is countered by Republican-leaning towns, which appear more numerous but only a handful are over 60% Republican.