Yet in 1984 Reagan carried Massachusetts yet not Minnesota in his landslide. Also if northern New England is rather centrist by your count why hasn’t it gone Republican since New Hampshire in 2000.
1984 was an electoral anomaly. The only reason Minnesota went for Mondale is because of the favorite son vote, and even with that he won it by 0.18%. Reagan wiped the floor with Mondale without having to campaign very much at all.
Had he made an effort, he could have pulled off a fifty state rout.
Yeah…Fritz was…well, lousy. He didn’t inspire ANYONE. His pick of Ferraro was such a blatantly cynical publicity stunt that nobody bought it. And the man actually said, on television, that he was going to raise taxes!
I was only 13 but I remember thinking that I wasn’t at all surprised at the electoral results…
It’s also a good rule, if you’re trying to disassociate yourself from the Carter years, don’t nominate his vice president.
Which is why I said:
Sorry, even by the standards of the day, it’s hard to argue that New England as a whole was any more liberal than other areas. For example, Philadelphia and New York, especially the latter, were widely considered to be more open and welcome and less oppressive than Boston. Upstate New York was as much a hotbed of anti-Abolitionist sentiment and did more since it was the route of the Underground Railroad. Post-war, the Midwest grew the Progressive, Populist, and Farmer-Labor parties. There are any number of examples.
Funny, Maine has kept electing two Republican Senators, Vermont has this Republican governor since 03 who is now retiring unbeaten, New Hampshire had GOP members of Congress until '06. The Presidential election is not the only measure.
No, not all of southern New England either. The only truly urbanized areas in southern New England are the major cities and their immediate surroundings (e.g. Hartford, Providence, etc.) and the suburbs and exurbs of Boston and New York City.
I’m originally from Houston, Texas, and lived all over the country growing up, because my father was in the Army. I always had this idea that the Northeast and New England were completely urbanized.
I now live in eastern Connecticut. The area I live in is far more rural than just about any place I’ve ever lived. I live in a town of about 10,000 people with just one grocery store. On the other hand, I’m just 30 minutes from the city of Hartford (where I work). I often am bemused by the fact that if you replaced Hartford with Houston, my home would be well within city limits. Instead, my home is surrounded by forest. Indeed, Connecticut today is more forested today than it has been since the first European settlers first landed here.
Eastern Connecticut is not unique. Similar rural conditions exist in northwestern Connecticut, western Rhode Island, and especially western Massachusetts. Then you’ve got areas of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that are complete wilderness. These areas are so very unlike southwestern Connecticut (near New York City), that it is truly a different world.
I remember the first time I passed through Putnam, Connecticut (in the northeastern corner of the state). I saw 20-year guys in the McDonald’s drive-thru with hunting lights and gun racks on their pick-up trucks with the pimped-out chrome exhaust pipes. It could have been rural Texas or rural Tennessee (where I’ve also lived). I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, even Connecticut has hicks.” 
Yes, especially in bars. And they usually arrive together.
The Irish were rather self-hating, I take it?
I know Connecticut pretty well and it’s very much like Upstate New York. Farms exist alongside suburbs and Appalachia starts literally less than an hour’s drive south of Rochester. And I mean Appalachia in terms both of the start of the same mountainous upheaval and the social/cultural attitudes.
And all of Upstate shares the same characteristic: the cities are staunchly, even monolithically Democrat, and Republican territory starts at the cities’ edges.
So why do I say that both areas are so urbanized that they are among the most liberal areas of the country? Mostly because of their size. You can find locations that aren’t part of the newspaper coverage or television and cable viewing area of a major city but you have to look for them. Regular suburban housing infiltrates all the former farm areas and new developments go up regularly. Housing prices dictate that commuters looking for affordable housing live farther and farther away from the main city centers. The Hudson corridor heading up from New York City is threatening to hit the Albany metro area going south and the city’s tendrils keep pushing farther into Connecticut.
Modern urbanization does not mean city centers. It’s a pattern of density, accessibility, and influence. Most of New England does share these characteristics, even for places that are numerically small individually. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut rank 2, 3, and 4 in density among states, ahead of New York. Even New Hampshire is 20th. And then there’s the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont. 
(Which, I should note, voted for a Democrat eactly once in its history before Bill Clinton but has never failed to since.)
As a region, New England is the most heavily urbanized area of the country. Individual areas elsewhere may be denser and individual areas within may be rural but I repeat that I’m talking only of the area as a region and with regional characteristics.
Even “private” is in adequate word for it. People do not normally talk about religion outside of church. This is why, when people start threads about their coworkers being at odds with them over religious matter, it’s met by bafflement by some of us who have grown up here. I rarely talk to close friends about religion. No one ever talks about religion at work. We certainly don’t have that person who talks your ear off about this church or that at work, never mind badger you about attending, because it’s simply not done.
I disagree with the OP that New England is “so liberal” anyway, though. Massachusetts certainly is, and those people moving to southern NH have changed election outcomes to a degree, certainly, but there is still a lot of conservatism here. Unlike religion, politics is discussed at work and I’m far from alone in being a conservative.
I would say that all this applies throughout Europe, in both left and right leaning areas (including the bafflement at people getting angry about religion at work in parts of America).
Most of Exapno Mapcase’s post was on target, but this generalization about Boston sports teams is not generally accurate.
Yes, the Red Sox did not integrate until 1959 when they promoted Pumpsie Green. The Sox were notoriously the last major league baseball team to field African-American players, but other Boston sports team were among the leaders in integration.
Boston Celtics: In 1950, the Celtics drafted Chuck Cooper, the first African-American chosen in an NBA draft, and he made his debut in the 1950-51 season the first season in which African-Americans appeared in the NBA. In the 1960s, the Celtics were the first team with an all-black starting five, and, in 1966,Bill Russellwas the first black coach in the NBA.
Boston Braves: The Braves became the 5th major league team to hire an African-American, when Sam Jethroe cracked the lineup in April of 1950. The Braves signed several talented black players like Hank Aaron before their move to Milwaukee in 1954.
Boston Bruins: The Bruins hired the first African-American player in NHL history in 1958 when Willie O’Ree took the ice.
Boston Patriots: The Patriots did not exist until 1959, but their first draft pick as a franchise was African-American running back Ron Burton from Northwestern.
Certainly, many black athletes had unpleasant experiences in Boston (and many other cities) in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but it is unfair to generalize Tom Yawkey’sstubborn resistance to integration to the city’s other teams.
Don’t forget that Unitarianism has roots in New England, LONG before WWII.
Also, my husband likes to observe that in Vermont, the rural conservative farmers get along very well with the hippies that moved there in the 60s, because they share a live-and-let-live attitude; i.e. I’ll do what I want and you can do what you want. So it’s an interesting mixture of conservatism and liberalism.
That is true and that is the form of Vermont libertarianism that some of us referenced above. New Hampshire has even more strong libertarian leanings but there are differences from those of Vermont. I don’t know what to say about Maine. If you take Maine as a whole, it can be quaint, very beautiful, odd, spooky, eccentric, charming or any combination of those those especially in the very long winter. There is a reason Stephen King chooses to live there. It has its own thing going as well.
This was mostly true up until the gay marriage debate spawned the “Take Vermont Back” movement, which has hopefully died out.
Speaking of horror writers does HP Lovecraft in any way embody the spirit of Rhode Island?
Yes, NH long had a noticeable contingent of John Birchers – people with signs on their lawns saying “U.S. out of the U.N.” (And that was way before Reagan made this his theme.) I haven’t been up in those parts recently so I don’t know whether they’re dying out.
Excellent post. I grew up in Boston and most of that was news to me.