When I was reading through the examples I sort of wondered why sometimes these geopolitical phenomena persist, and other times not. For example, at one time lo

When I was reading through the examples I sort of wondered why sometimes these geopolitical phenomena persist, and other times not. For example, at one time long ago in the US, politics were dominated by "frontier-interior" versus "urban-coastal" dynamics, and then as the US grew, and the civil war came about, it established a lot of the geopolitical patterns evident today (although I'd argue the urban-rural distinction is maybe reemerged in a more distributed way today). To explain cherry-picking versus something else, you'd want a theory for why patterns sometimes change and other times remain the same.