A three-lens assessment of Paige Meierhofer’s 2019 ArcGIS StoryMap, “Trumpism vs. Soccer,” prepared for scientific readers, city planners, civic leaders, and public policymakers.
Opening map. MLS team locations and 2016 presidential election results.
Source: Paige Meierhofer, “Trumpism vs. Soccer” ArcGIS StoryMap (2019). The map is reproduced from the supplied project files and reflects the league and election geography available at that time.
Original student research: Paige Meierhofer, Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning, 2019
Report prepared by: Gervais W. Tabopda
Date: July 2026
StoryMap: Trumpism vs. Soccer
SOCCER, NATIVISM, AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF BELONGING
Executive summary
In 2019, planning student Paige Meierhofer posed a provocative question: could the nativist and counter-cosmopolitan politics associated with Trumpism obstruct soccer’s long-term growth in the United States? Her StoryMap connected the location of Major League Soccer (MLS) clubs, the 2016 presidential map, and Atlanta’s rapidly changing demographic geography. The central insight was that soccer’s American future would be negotiated not only through stadium economics and team performance, but also through contested ideas of nationhood, immigration, and cultural belonging.
The project remains unusually strong as public scholarship. Its national-to-local map sequence makes an abstract argument visible: a club can sit in a Republican-leaning state while drawing its core audience from a diverse, younger, and more Democratic metropolitan coalition. Atlanta is the exemplary case. The metropolitan area’s Hispanic/Latino population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, and it continued to grow by 31 percent across the Atlanta Regional Commission’s 11-county region between 2010 and 2020. In parallel, Atlanta United became one of the world’s best-attended clubs; MLS reported 65,520 spectators at its 2025 home opener. In 2026, Atlanta hosted eight FIFA World Cup matches, including a semifinal. These later developments do not invalidate the StoryMap. They show that political culture is a constraint, not destiny, and that metropolitan institutions can create bridges across ideological boundaries (ARC, 2018, 2021; MLS, 2025; FIFA, 2026).
Bottom line The StoryMap’s strongest finding is not that “red America rejects soccer.” It is that the relevant political geography is metropolitan and multiscalar. Statewide election maps conceal the urban, suburban, and demographic coalitions that actually sustain clubs. The project becomes publication-ready when it reframes nativism as one explanatory factor among several and tests it with individual-level fan data, travel-time analysis, and comparative city evidence. |
Key findings for policymakers
• A red state is not a red market. State-level election results are too coarse to explain the audience of a metropolitan sports institution.
• Atlanta’s soccer success is geographically plausible because the region combines a large younger population, substantial racial and ethnic diversity, and strong growth in suburban Latino communities.
• Nativist discourse may shape symbolic acceptance of soccer, but the StoryMap does not directly measure fan attitudes, attendance, viewership, or causal effects.
• City governments should treat major soccer institutions as civic infrastructure: mobility, public space, youth access, multilingual communication, safety, local procurement, and immigrant-community partnerships all influence who belongs.
• The next research step is a multilevel geospatial design linking anonymized fan origins, stadium travel times, neighborhood demographics, election returns, survey attitudes, and club performance over time.
The three analytical lenses
1 | Electoral geography: scale is the argument The national map suggests a partisan divide, but the Atlanta and Georgia maps reveal a more important pattern: metropolitan political coalitions differ sharply from statewide majorities. The analytical unit must match the behavior being explained. |
2 | Urban political economy: institutions create markets Atlanta United’s success cannot be reduced to demography. Ownership, stadium design, team performance, branding, transit access, ticket strategy, media distribution, and community partnerships help convert a potential audience into an active public. |
3 | Civic policy: sport can build belonging, but not automatically Soccer can offer shared rituals across language and nationality, yet it can also reproduce exclusion, commercialization, and unequal access. Public value depends on deliberate policies, not on the sport’s global symbolism alone. |
A global game meets an American culture war.
Soccer has always carried more political meaning in the United States than its rules require. To supporters, it is the world’s common sporting language: a low-equipment game, a transnational media product, and an arena in which immigrant identities and local loyalties can coexist. To some critics, precisely those qualities have made it appear foreign, insufficiently “American,” or emblematic of globalization. Markovits and Rensmann describe the tension between globally circulating sports cultures and national sporting traditions. Waalkes similarly argues that soccer both reflects globalization and creates a hybrid “glocal” culture in which global forms acquire local meanings (Markovits & Rensmann, 2010; Waalkes, 2017).
Meierhofer’s StoryMap brought this literature into the political moment after the 2016 election. Drawing on the cultural-backlash framework associated with Inglehart and Norris, it treated Trumpism as a politics of threatened status, anti-immigrant sentiment, and resistance to cosmopolitan social change. This was a plausible theoretical move. Lindner and Hawkins had already found that attitudes toward cultural globalization were stronger predictors of soccer sentiment than conventional ideology or class in their survey of Nebraskans. The StoryMap’s innovation was to ask whether that cultural divide had a visible spatial expression in MLS geography (Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Lindner & Hawkins, 2012).
The resulting argument was deliberately sharp: because soccer depends heavily on younger, urban, and Latino audiences, a political movement that stigmatizes immigration and imported culture could narrow the sport’s path into the American mainstream. That proposition is analytically valuable because it moves beyond the usual explanation that soccer competes against the “Big Four” professional leagues. It asks whether the deeper competition is over national identity itself.
What the original project gets right Sport markets are cultural institutions, not merely collections of consumers. The meaning attached to a sport can affect media coverage, public investment, family participation, sponsorship, and the willingness of political leaders to treat it as part of the civic mainstream. |
The national map is a hypothesis, not a verdict.
The StoryMap’s national figure overlays 2016 presidential results by state with MLS team locations. Visually, many clubs appear in states won by the Democratic presidential candidate. In contrast, clubs in Republican-won states are concentrated in major cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City. The map succeeds as an invitation to investigate. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that partisan ideology determines soccer demand.
The main reason is scale. MLS clubs are metropolitan institutions, while the election layer is statewide. A state can vote Republican while its largest urban counties vote Democratic, its inner suburbs diversify, and its outer suburbs remain competitive. The geographic pattern relevant to attendance is therefore not “red state versus blue state.” It is the distribution of population, income, age, ethnicity, transportation access, and political culture within each club’s realistic travel shed.
This is a classic ecological-inference problem. Individuals who live in a Republican-won state cannot be assumed to share the state majority’s vote, and Trump voters cannot be assumed to dislike soccer. The problem is intensified by the modifiable areal unit problem: the apparent relationship changes when analysts move from states to counties, tracts, ZIP codes, or drive-time catchments. A scientifically stronger article should therefore present the state map as a first-stage visualization and immediately test the same proposition at smaller geographic scales.
Figure 2. Georgia’s 2016 county election geography with the Atlanta club location marked.
Source: Paige Meierhofer, “Trumpism vs. Soccer” ArcGIS StoryMap (2019). Red counties indicate Trump pluralities; blue counties indicate Clinton pluralities. The figure illustrates the contrast between statewide outcomes and metropolitan voting clusters.
Atlanta reveals the metropolitan coalition behind soccer.
Atlanta is the StoryMap’s most persuasive section because it changes the scale of analysis. Instead of treating Georgia as a single political unit, it maps demographic change across the metropolitan region. The non-White population-change map and the population-age map show a broad, uneven field of potential supporters extending far beyond the city limits. The Hispanic population maps add an especially important dimension: the strongest concentrations are not confined to downtown Atlanta but appear in suburban corridors and municipalities across Gwinnett, Cobb, north Fulton, and DeKalb.
The demographic evidence is substantial. The Atlanta Regional Commission reported that the metropolitan Hispanic/Latino population grew from 268,851 in 2000 to 547,400 in 2010, an increase of 102 percent, and that the group’s median age was only 26 in the late 2010s. The 2020 Census then showed continued growth: the Hispanic population increased by 31 percent between 2010 and 2020 in the ARC’s 11-county region, with double-digit growth in every county. Gwinnett alone had more than 220,000 Hispanic residents in 2020, and dense concentrations remained visible along the Buford Highway corridor (ARC, 2018, 2021).
These patterns matter because stadium attendance is a regional mobility behavior. A fan base is assembled through transportation networks, household schedules, social ties, youth clubs, workplaces, media habits, and the symbolic appeal of the team. The StoryMap correctly recognizes suburban diversity as central to Atlanta United’s market. A downtown stadium can be regionally embedded when it is reachable, when the team’s identity feels inclusive, and when supporters see the club as representing the entire metropolitan area rather than only the central city.
The later evidence: political constraint did not prevent institutional success
The seven years since the StoryMap was published offer a natural stress test. If nativist politics were an overriding barrier, Atlanta should have struggled to sustain a major soccer institution in a Republican-leaning state. Instead, Atlanta United remained an attendance leader. MLS reported that 65,520 spectators attended the club’s 2025 home opener, the third-largest soccer crowd anywhere in the world that day. Atlanta also became one of the central US stages of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosting eight matches, including a semifinal (MLS, 2025; FIFA, 2026).
This does not prove that the cultural-backlash thesis was false. It suggests that its effect is conditional. Nativist rhetoric may influence the symbolic status of soccer. Still, strong metropolitan demand, effective ownership, high-capacity infrastructure, competitive teams, media access, and civic branding can outweigh or transform that constraint. The institution does not simply wait for a preexisting culture of acceptance; it helps produce one.
Atlanta therefore changes the article’s central claim. The most defensible conclusion is not that Trumpism prevents soccer’s growth. It is that soccer’s growth depends on how metropolitan institutions navigate a politically fragmented territory. Clubs succeed when they build a coalition broad enough to cross municipal, racial, linguistic, and partisan boundaries without pretending those differences have disappeared.
A more publishable thesis Nativist politics can make soccer a contested symbol of globalization, but metropolitan demographic change and institution-building determine whether that symbolic conflict becomes a material barrier. Atlanta demonstrates that the barrier can be crossed. |
Policy agenda: turn a sports event into civic capacity
For planners and public officials, the relevant question is not simply whether soccer grows. It is whether the institutions built around the sport widen access, strengthen public space, and create durable relationships across the metropolitan region. The following actions translate the StoryMap’s cultural insight into a practical urban-policy agenda.
1. Build a regional sports-data compact Cities, transit agencies, clubs, universities, and community organizations should establish privacy-protective agreements for aggregated ticket origin, travel mode, and attendance data. Public subsidies and major-event partnerships should include transparent evaluation provisions. |
2. Make mobility part of inclusion Event access depends on late-night transit, safe pedestrian routes, affordable fares, multilingual wayfinding, accessible shuttles, and coordination across county lines. A downtown stadium is not regionally inclusive if only car-owning households can reach it reliably. |
3. Invest beyond the stadium World Cup and MLS legacies should include neighborhood fields, school partnerships, coaching pipelines, heat-resilient play spaces, and low-cost programs for girls, immigrant youth, and lower-income families. |
4. Practice year-round cultural partnership Engagement with Latino, African, Caribbean, Asian, refugee, and international communities should not be confined to heritage nights. Clubs and cities should co-design programming with trusted organizations and compensate them for their expertise. |
5. Protect pluralism in the public realm Fan codes of conduct, anti-harassment enforcement, language access, inclusive security training, and visible reporting channels are essential. Soccer’s global identity does not automatically prevent racism, xenophobia, or exclusion. |
6. Measure the civic legacy Success metrics should include transit mode share, geographic diversity of attendance, youth participation, local and minority-owned procurement, neighborhood field access, resident satisfaction, and the distribution of public costs and benefits. |
Conclusion: the politics of soccer are local, regional, and national at once
“Trumpism vs. Soccer” was an ambitious student project because it treated a sports league as a window into the politics of globalization. Its most memorable maps place Atlanta inside overlapping geographies: a Republican-leaning state, a Democratic urban core, diversifying suburbs, rapidly growing Latino communities, and a national sports market still negotiating soccer’s place in American identity.
The evidence available in 2026 supports a more nuanced conclusion than the original title implies. Soccer’s growth has not been halted by nativist politics. Atlanta’s attendance records and World Cup role demonstrate remarkable institutional success. Yet the project’s deeper concern remains relevant: belonging is unevenly distributed, and public culture is contested. The same metropolitan region can celebrate a global game while remaining polarized over immigration, race, and national identity.
That tension is precisely why the StoryMap deserves further development. Its cartography should be updated, its causal claims narrowed, and its research design expanded. With those revisions, the work can become a high-quality citizen-journal article and a serious agenda for urban political research: not a story about soccer defeating politics, but about how cities build institutions capable of living with political difference.
References and source notes
Atlanta Regional Commission. (2018, July 24). Data Dive: Metro Atlanta’s Latino Population Fast-growing, Young, and Diverse.
Atlanta Regional Commission. (2021, October 4). Hispanic population shows strong growth across metro ATL.
Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). (2026). Atlanta: FIFA World Cup 2026 host city and match schedule.
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2016). Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash. Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper RWP16-026. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2818659
Lindner, A. M., & Hawkins, D. N. (2012). Globalization, culture wars, and attitudes toward soccer in America: An empirical assessment of how soccer explains the world. The Sociological Quarterly, 53(1), 68–91.
Major League Soccer. (2025, February 24). MLS is Back: Atlanta United host third-largest soccer crowd in the world.
Markovits, A. S., & Rensmann, L. (2010). Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture. Princeton University Press.
Meierhofer, P. (2019, July 18). Trumpism vs. Soccer: Explaining how nativism and counter-cosmopolitanism in the US hinder soccer’s potential to grow. ArcGIS StoryMaps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d9a9b718becf42f289d88dc17dea3e53
Openshaw, S. (1984). The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Geo Books.
Robinson, W. S. (1950). Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review, 15(3), 351–357.
Waalkes, S. (2017). Does soccer explain the world or does the world explain soccer? Soccer and globalization. Soccer & Society, 18(2–3), 166–180.
Figure source note
All maps reproduced in this report were supplied by the user from Paige Meierhofer’s 2019 ArcGIS StoryMap. They are retained as historical evidence of the original analysis. A publication submission should regenerate the maps from documented source data, add complete legends and metadata, and update the political, demographic, and MLS layers to a common date.
