The most common restaurant cuisine in every state, and a chain-restaurant mystery

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.”