Yes, sorry - I missed the “in national elections” part of your OP.
None of the cities in the Netherlands vote Democrat or Republican. For what should be obvious reasons.
Most of the larger cities in the Netherlands are more liberal than the countryside. We just don’t have one big “liberal party”. Also, even the largest christian party is arguably more than, or least as as liberal as the current largest party at least from a US perspective, and definitely far off to the left of the Democrats in the US - and certainly much more diciplined.
So what? This doesn’t at all prove your contention that there is a difference between the US and Europe. Large areas of London, Toronto, Montreal, and Paris voted for the more liberal party, as did other major cites. And there is no indication of the population density in different sectors of the city; the mapped patterns don’t necessarily translate to total votes.
It might be easier to find answers to the question of why the boondocks contain such a high percentage of religious cnservatives.
Having just driven thru them, can verify that the airwaves in western NE, and northern NV, are still eerily full of conservative/religious radio stations.
Yeah, I gotta ding you on this, too.
This may well be the ‘myth’ of the red state areas but in my experience it is utterly untrue. I live in what is inarguably the most rural area of Ohio, far away from anything resembling a city (my town in the biggest in several counties at 14,000) and we have over 40% of the county on some form of state or federal assistance. You can see it in buying patterns all over the area when the dollar store and cheap restaurants suddenly fill up the week after checks go out.
God help the politician who suggests cutting those services, too. Just God help them.
American Democrats are less liberal than conservatives in Europe. Take that as you will. America is a very politically conservative country compared to most of the first world.
It could alternatively be argued, of course, that after WW2 was the first time there was a middle class sizable enough to matter as a social force and a political bloc. What we had before WW2 was really no more than a thin layer, a white-collar and merchant class that was mostly conservative and aspired to higher-class status.
Remember the infamous 1936 presidential poll that wrongly predicted Republican Alf Landon to crush FDR? Their mistake was surveying telephone subscribers and automobile owners. If you could afford either a car or a phone in 1936 - never mind both! - you were that much more likely to vote Republican. FDR won because a solid majority of voters had neither a car nor a phone.
The short answer is because all the Republicans have moved to the suburbs.
Although the traditional “boss” system of party politics has mostly disappeared in major cities, the old Democratic coalition of labor, minorities and intellectuals remains more or less intact the core city. As a result, there’s little Republican infrastructure left to support existing candidates or nurture aspiring ones.
In Missouri, the 3rd Congressional District was originally designed to be a Democratic seat. Over time, population shifts have caused redrawing the district to include more outlying, non-urban area. In the 2010 election, the urban and older suburban areas of the district voted solidly for the Democratic candidate while the newer suburban and outlying areas went heavily Republican.
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Toronto “Tories” are way, way to the left of the Republican Party.
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In fact, Toronto does not currently have a Conservative MP in the House of Commons. The suburban cities do, but not the city proper.
To throw another parameter into the mix; are large cities more likely to have colleges/universities, where the students and professors may tend liberal? That certainly seems to be the case here in the metro-Boston area. (Granted, Massachusetts as a whole is regarded as “the blue-est of states.”)
On the other hand is Lincoln, Nebraska fairly conservative?
Large cities (again as in Boston) may also have more large hospitals and medical institutions - although I’m not sure if they lean liberal or conservative.
Because poor people are too busy working two minimum wage jobs to have time to devote to conservative values like gay marriage, flag burning and prayer in the schools.
There’s a fundamental error at the root of this OP and it’s the same error that underlay the thread about which party you would support in other countries. The parry systems in each of these countries are very different. The Canadian and British Tories are not Republicans, and those are the two countries we’re closest to culturally.
As another counterexample, the second largest city in Switzerland (Geneva) consistenly votes more “left” than the rest of the country.
The OP’s thesis is full of so many flaws – Just take a look at any map of British general elections – the Labor party’s base is London and the (formerly) industrialized urban North.
Electricity? Since when do taxes pay for electricity?
1) Race. Black (and to a lesser extent Latino) voters make up a significant proportion of the electorate in almost every major American city, and black voters, urban and rural, have overwhelmingly supported the Democrats since at least the 60s. This would be enough in and of itself to make many “cities proper” Democratic strongholds unless white urban voters monolithically voted Republican which they don’t in part because of
2) Historic ethnic divisions among white voters. The Democratic Party has been the historic home of new immigrants in general, and non-WASP immigrants in particular, pretty much as long as there has been a Democratic Party, long before the GOP even existed, and far longer than you could safely generalize that the Democratic Party was the more liberal of the two. In the cities of the Northeast and Rust Belt Midwest, the Republican Party (and its semi-predecessor the Whig Party) was favored by Protestants of British extraction for a variety of reasons, and the Democrats thus became the logical political vehicle of Catholics of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European descent, and of Jewish immigrants, and thus by extension the party of the urban working class, which pushed the policy views of the Democrats to the left, particularly on economic issues. This is less of an factor than it was in the past, in part because these voters are increasingly divided over “cultural” issues like abortion, in part because anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice are much less significant forces in contemporary politics, and in part because many of these voters have assimilated and moved out of their traditional urban enclaves, but loyalties change slowly.
3) Demographics and cultural preferences. The stereotypical American view of urban life is that it is more expensive, more difficult to raise children, and potentially more dangerous to live in cities vs. the suburbs. At the risk of overgeneralizing, people who have the means to live wherever they choose and decide that the benefits of city life (tolerance of cultural differences, access to more diverse arts and entertainment, less car dependence, etc) outweigh these costs are more likely to be young and/or childless (and thus risk-averse) and/or LGBT, all of which are groups statistically more likely to vote Democratic than the median American.
All of the above factors contribute to:
4) Political parties picking their battles. There are probably a fair number of potential GOP voters living in cities (and Democratic voters living in rural/exurban areas) who are not targeted or encouraged to do much by the national parties because the odds are against them. For all intents and purposes, all elections in America below the state level are winner-take-all votes in geographically based districts, so there is little percentage in it for the GOP to spend money and effort (both finite resources) to try and improve their share of the vote in, for example, the Massachusetts 8th district from 15% to 25%, when they can more profitably target seats they can actually win. After a while, the electoral infrastructure of the parties tends to wither away in places they never win or even put up a fight in.
But there are lots of hardcore conservatives among the poorest classes of white Americans.
There are more conservative poor in rural areas.
Shouldn’t the question really be why are there so many conservatives in non-urban areas? By the standards of industrialized countries, America is markedly conservative; so the outliers are the conservatives not the liberals. Furthermore, most conservatives are voting against their own best economic interests.