How we crunched the numbers [Video]

To assemble our database, we looked at all 1.7 million car listings on cargurus.com from August 2 to December 16, 2023. The local popularity of vehicles was ranked not by a model’s total number of listings in a particular county but by calculating how much its local listings exceeded its average across all counties nationwide. To weed out anomalies, we considered only counties with at least 400 car listings, and only car models that appeared at least 400 times nationally. (In calculating political popularity, we included models that appeared at least 250 times nationally.)

Cars were included in a county’s listings if they appeared in a ZIP code associated with that county. For example, a car in Massachusetts listed for sale in 02149 would be included in the listings for both Middlesex and Suffolk counties, portions of which fall under the ZIP code.

Political scores for each vehicle were calculated using …