Hi, I’m curious why Republicans are stronger in the Midwest and middle America in general,and Democrats are stronger in the coasts. if I had to guess, I would say that urban centers are concentrated around areas with ports, but even if that were true, it still only gets me halfway to understanding why urban centers are more democratic. Plus there are obviously urban areas that lean conservative. what are the real reasons for these geographic and political divides?
I’m not going to guess, but it’s an interesting question. But, don’t forget that you’re talking about relatively minor variations. Washington State, for example, although considered a “liberal” area, votes about 45% “conservative” in governors elections (sometimes 49%). Even cities like Seattle have at least 35% of the voters leaning right. Conservative areas have a lot of liberals too, just not half. I am not disputing that your general observations are true.
The geographic dependence is almost entirely on the rural/urban divide. The reason for the urban/rural divide, though, is complicated and due to a wide variety of factors, which are difficult to describe in a nonpartisan way.
Rural/urban divide is part of it, but not the whole story. Urban areas tend to be filled with non-whites and the whites that are there are either liberals or more libertarian republicans. The true right wingers generally don’t prefer the city life. I don’t think there are many/any large cities that lean republican anymore. My understanding is pretty much all cities with 500k or more people had a democratic majority. Probably because non-whites make up at least 40% of the population in most large cities.
But there is more to it. Vermont is blue and the state is pretty rural. The white vote varies drastically by geography (going from about 75% dem in Vermont, to about 50-60% in California, to about 40% in Ohio, down to 10% in Alabama). As to why, I have no idea. Part of it is racial politics. The states with the most racial diversity have whites that lean more republican, whereas the states that are mostly all white tend to lean more left.
But even that isn’t true. Idaho is almost all white, but so is Vermont. However Vermont is progressive and Idaho is not.
The northeast is more progressive, but they were the same in US history. The northeast abolished slavery voluntarily about 100 years before the civil war.
Republicans aren’t ‘that’ strong in the midwest (at least not the eastern midwest, they rule much of the western midwest. Nebraska, Kansas, Dakotas, etc). Areas like Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. tend to lean left. States like Ohio are swing states. However the republicans are much stronger in the mountain west.
Plus the coasts are no guarantee of political views. North Carolina and Virginia have coasts, and they have only recently become swing states. South Carolina has coasts.
So, I don’t know. Glad I could help though.
Remember too that before LBJ’s civil rights legislation in the late 60s, all of the South was solid Democrat since before The Civil War (Lincoln was the first modern Republican Party President). They were often called ‘Dixiecrats’. After the civil rights movement the South switched primarily to Republican.
The warmer the climate, the more radical and unstable the political base. Not 100% accurate, but it applies across a surprising range of nations, and within the larger ones as well.
With the urban/rural divide, it’s true that the sparsest rural parts of the country are overwhelmingly conservative and the densest urban are overwhelmingly liberal. But this turns out to not be as useful an observation as some people think, since neither of those groups make up a particularly large portion of the population these days. The US is really a nation of suburbs these days and the suburbs are all over the place politically.
This is usually true if you look only at the city limits (although there’s some like Wichita, Indianapolis, and Oklahoma City that are tossups or even a little Republican-leaning), but taken as whole metro areas they’re pretty evenly divided. If we are just talking about a city itself, the degree of left-leaningness depends somewhat on where the city limits are drawn and how many of the more suburban neighborhoods are included or not.
If you look at a district map of California, it’s blue, blue, blue except for the urban concentrations that aren’t San Francisco. It’s an interesting study in how the bluest of blue states, in many perceptions, has the same differing concentrations of political leaning as the US.
We moved in part because we lived in a bright-red pustule; shit like IMPEACH OBAMA bumperstickers were just the foundation of expressed political thought and politics was a topic to studious avoid at gatherings… unless, of course, you wanted to engage the nodding crowd on whatever you heard on AM radio that day.
No it isn’t. It is mostly red except for urban concentrations (including, but certainly not limited to San Francisco), the northern coasts and the Imperial Valley. Most of the democrats returned to congress are from the Los Angeles area, where most of the population is.
On the whole, with a few exceptions, California follows the pattern of most of America, with rural areas (with sparse population and geographically large congressional districts) being Republican, and urban areas being Democrat. I believe the Imperial valley leans more Democrat because of the very large numbers of poor Hispanic farm workers there. I am not sure what is going on with the sparsely populated Northern coastline being so blue.
“Albion’s Seed” by historian David Hackett Fisher explains this as the result of separate migrations of early English settlers in the new world. The first phase was from the East Anglia region of England starting with the arrival of Puritans on the Arabella to the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts (many of my ancestors came during this migration) from 1631 for about a decade. They settled New England.
The second phase was the so-called “Second Sons” (male offspring of wealthy families who were not the first born and stood to inherit nothing), who started coming from southwest England and Wales and settled the Virginia colony. This was the crowd that spread throughout the coastal deep South and brought most of the slaves.
The third phase was William Penn’s group of Quakers, a progressive population that practiced inclusion (and so brought what are now called the Pennsylvania Germans or Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch)). Coming from central England in the mid and late 1600s (and including many more of my ancestors), they settled Pennsylvania and migrated westward in waves, particularly also settling the Pacific Northwest.
The fourth phase was a xenophobic and isolationist group from the north of England and from Scotland. They came in a broad wave in the late 1600s and early 1700s and settled in Appalachia.
Fisher refers to these as four British folkways and demonstrates how work, play, worship, construction, cooking, writing, politics, language, dress, economics, and just about any other cultural feature you could look for, predominate accordingly in the large parts of the United States in which these groups were substantially the first major European settlers.
There are other groups and effects, such as the fast paced and businesslike Dutch settling what is now New York city, but Fisher maintains these four British groups had the major formative influence on our geographical cultural distribution.
It is the most fascinating history book I’ve read. “Albion”, by the way, was the Roman name for Britain (the island that includes England, Scotland and Wales).
Moderator Note
Amateur Barbarian, in the interests of keeping this in GQ as long as possible, let’s refrain from extraneous political commentary and stick to the factual aspects of the question. Phrases like “bright-red pustule” are out of place in this discussion.
This goes for everyone.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
A quick look at history is helpful. The modern political parties emerge from the FDR era. At that time, the majority of the population was in the industrial northeast, which was heavily urban, Catholic, blue-collar, unionized, and ethnic. These groups tended to vote Democratic. The South was solidly Democratic. The Midwest outside of the larger urban areas tended to be rural, Protestant, non-ethnic and voted mostly Republican. The West and Southwest weren’t big enough to make much of a difference.
After WWII, the urban cores of cities began to sag and white flight took place to the suburbs. These groups were mostly middle-class and concerned about crime and disorder, which led to Nixon and Reagan. Center cities jumped in minority percentage, who perceived correctly that they were despised and feared by the white majorities surrounding them. Reagan’s policies were deliberately anti-urban, feeding into this discontent. At the same time, the Democratic South reacted to the embrace of Civil Rights by national Democrats. The Southern Strategy started by Nixon and continued by national Republicans since coded pro-white, anti-minority policies and managed to turn the South majority Republican.
All that is true and works in broad, gross terms. Yet drilling down into county, zip code, and precinct level districts shows more nuance. The density mentioned above becomes extremely critical in modeling behaviors. What seems to explain this is that denser areas contain more diversity. It might seem counterintuitive, but more diverse areas are more tolerant than areas where one element has a supermajority. It appears that having to live close to and deal with “others” makes them more familiar, less alien, and more like you. Instead of a faceless “they” that can be stigmatized as a group, the others become individualized people that are on average as nice as everyone else. Even if not, they have similar problems and concerns based on local conditions.
Back in the days when blacks were literally barred from white suburban subdivisions, the all-white suburbs could be played into becoming single party bastions. But that was 50 years ago. Over time, minorities have built up in the suburbs. They are actually more diverse than many central cities. This is true all over the country. And so suburbs even in the South are swinging from pure Republican to mixed to majority Democratic. That’s why you can find blue areas in the middle of red Southern states and red areas in the rural outlands of blue Northern states. Less diverse - more white - areas all over the country tend to vote Republican. Here’s a map that shows this at the county level nationally.
Diversity at the local level is the best predictor of overall voting patterns today. States have very unequal distributions of diversity. In some the diverse areas predominate and they are blue; in some the less diverse areas do and they are red. That accounts for the difference in the makeup of the House and the Senate; one represents small non-diverse areas, the other represents diverse states. This pattern is almost universally predicted to continue into the future, which is why the parties are pursing the policies toward minorities that they are in hopes of solidifying their national bases. Turnout can trump diversity, as seen in the 2010 election.
Diversity is not a single-word answer to the OP: nothing is. But I’ll bet that in a regression analysis local diversity provides a much greater percentage of the answer than any other factor.
Sorry. I wasn’t really thinking of context or location, here.
That sounds like an awesome book, I just put a request in at the library for it. Thanks.