And I’m sure quite a few people occasionally shopped at both, depending on the item, the occasion, and the state of their bank accounts at the particular moment.
It’s unfortunately gotten very uncommon for voters to treat politics in that fashion. Of course, that’s happened in large part because it’s gotten very uncommon for politicians to treat politics in that fashion.
That’s not what they’re getting from the Left. That’s only what the Right keeps telling them the Left is saying.
Exactly. Right wingers believe everything right wing media tells them about the left, but they will never just talk to anyone on the left to find out how far away we are from the right wing boogie man version they’ve been selling.
The left can’t compete with that when those on the right refuse to listen to anyone other than right wing media or memes.
I don’t think you can paint all religious people with that brush. More than half (56%) of people self identifying as religious claim to attend church “seldom” or “never”. Those folks aren’t “religious right”. The ones who are, likely inhabit that 31% that attends church weekly or almost weekly. And even then, that’s not a 100% assumption. Most Catholics aren’t “religious right”, even though they may share a handful of views with them. And there are a lot of devout Catholics as well.
I think the bigger issue is how they’re concentrated in society- they tend to dominate rural areas and compete in suburban areas. So in states like Oklahoma, there’s a pronounced rural lean, and consequently a pronounced GOP lean as well. And no surprise, there’s a 47% Evangelical Christian religious composition as well.
In general, I don’t have any problem with what you said. Where there may be some room to argue is in the numbers themselves.
While “Evangelical” may have debatable denotations and connotations, it is generally used as shorthand for some pretty rigid, doctrinaire positions.
And … there appear to be tens of millions – maybe north of 100 million – of those folks in the US:
Also, amplifying your point about their geographic concentration is their generally rather monolithic voting preferences (and strong voter turnout figures).
They – metaphorically – wear T-shirts that enumerate their hot buttons making it relatively simple to identify them, ‘market’ to them, and get them to vote your way and advocate that others do the same.
They could always just read this MB.
There is nothing and nobody on this message board that is close to the depraved, evil and stupid caricature of the left that the right has been screaming about for, well, as long as I can remember. If you think this message board has anything in common with how the left is depicted on Fox news and on RW social media, then I don’t know what to tell you.
That’s not what I said. (I’m not familiar with “how the left is depicted on Fox news and on RW social media”).
What I was saying is that the notion of white privilege is endemic on this MB, and anyone reading it would be getting it straight from left wingers themselves, not from any RW caricature.
They will certainly talk at anyone on the left, and repeat all the things that Hannity and Carlson have accused them of.
Well, it certainly wouldn’t stop them from making a caricature of what they read on this messagebaord, I see that quite often.
Out of curiosity, are you claiming that people on this board acknowledging that the color of your skin does in fact give you advantages and disadvantages in our country is the reason that you vote for Republicans?
Then the problem is the misunderstanding of what white privilege is.
They’d have to actually read it; not just squint at it askance from way off to one side.
And anyone paying attention would find out what the term actually means, and that people who have white privilege may be, and often are, massively not-privileged in any of multiple other fashions.
The problem is that due to the primary system and Gerrymandering they really have no other choice. Their base demands puirty of viewpoint, and they are the ones who control the primary. So any deviation or tolerance for alternative views will result in their being kicked to the curb in favor of someone who will given them the amygdala shot they expect. By being so extreme they might lose votes outside their base which would hurt them in the general election, but thanks to Gerrymandering and self segregation general elections are foregone conclusions. So there really isn’t any way for them to expand their base even if they wanted to.
Which returns us to my demographic question: if their base is unexpandable, and the base of the other party is growing rapidly, then the voting results will go worse and worse for them.
Doesn’t gerrymandering actually make districts less safe? By picking up extra seats, they are incorporating strong D areas and reducing the margin of a potential win.
Yes you pack the Dems into a big district, but you do so to make your swing districts safely Republican. So for example suppose you have 5 districts that are a mixture of swing to treading seats with Republican percentages 57% 53% 50% 47% 43% you would rearrange them to get districts that are 60%, 60%, 60% 60%, 10%. so concede one loss to get 4 safe wins.
Yup, there’s the rub which is why they are doing everything they can to give themselves structural advantages to try to keep alive. Recall that since 1992, Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once. The problem is that when if reach the tipping point where they start losing stathouses then their structural advantages disappear (or maybe reverse if the Dems are revenge minded) and their ability to win elections will drop sharply.
I was talking about the rural / urban divide. Is it always necessary to bring race into the discussion?
Since when is Philadelphia in the midwest?
Yes it is. Pretending race doesn’t exist and isn’t a factor is not going to make this problem go away. Again, as a society we aren’t willing to admit how backwards and unevolved we are, so we are told to just pretend this is all about economics.
Also the urban/rural divide seems to only apply to white people. There are non-white rural counties all over the US. Black majority rural counties, latino majority rural counties, Indian majority, etc. To my knowledge rural minority counties are not far right, only white rural counties are.
Jefferson county in Mississippi, for example, is a very rural county with a population of 7100 and a very bad economy. It is 85% black, and Biden won 85% of the vote there. In rural counties that are white majority, the democrats usually only win 20-40% of the vote. Why didn’t black voters in rural counties with struggling working class economies vote GOP like white rural voters?
I mentioned earlier that the partisan education gap among whites disappears if you control for racial resentment (less educated whites harbor more racial resentment which moves their politics to the right). I don’t know if the partisan gap among whites based on rural vs urban living disappears if you control for racial resentment though. It would be interesting to see.
This study implies that attitudes about race are the strongest predictor of the urban/rural divide when you evaluate multiple different potential factors.
So which of these factors, if any, is most closely linked to the 32-point gap in 2020 presidential vote choice between urban and rural voters? To answer this question, we calculated the urban-rural divide and used a regression model to control for each factor individually to see whether the urban-rural divide persisted after accounting for each explanation. Put simply, the smaller the remaining urban-rural divide after controlling for an individual factor, the more evidence we have that the factor explains that divide. The graph below summarizes our findings.
The first bar shows that rural Americans of all races were 32 points more likely to vote for Trump than urban voters. When we controlled for evangelicalism, the urban-rural divide dropped by just six percentage points. In other words, even after accounting for born-again Christianity’s prevalence in rural areas, a 26-point gap in vote choice between urban and rural Americans remains, suggesting that faith-related differences are relatively limited for understanding Republicans’ rural strength.
Accounting for gun ownership closes the urban-rural divide more than faith, reducing the gap to 21 points. However, most of the urban-rural divide remains unexplained even after accounting for higher rates of gun ownership in rural areas.
Racial attitudes among all Americans best explain the gap in vote choices between rural and urban areas. Controlling for racism denial, the gap in vote choice between rural and urban Americans drops to just eight percentage points. In other words, the different rates of racism denial among rural and urban Americans appears to explain about three-quarters of the urban-rural gap in voting for Trump.