I have a friend that says (whether it’s true or not, I don’t know) Madison has the highest number of cab drivers with grad degrees in the country. If it’s true, I always assumed it’s because (like you said) they graduated and loved the city so much the couldn’t get themselves to leave and just keep telling telling themself a job is just around the corner so they’ll stick around a few more months and see what happens.
My brother and his wife got really lucky. He got his grad degree in physics and found a job right in town (in Madison) and she got her doctorate and managed to get placed at a local hospital.
It definitely wasn’t deliberate, I just noticed one day how two very conservative areas had two very notoriously liberal bastions, noticed that they were both the capital city, and wondered if there was a correlation, by no means was I stating a fact, nor was that the intention.
I still have problems believing the “it’s a city” thing completely, though; as I pointed out other cities in those areas (Dallas, Calgary) are, if anything, known for their conservatism, like the rural areas of the state or province.
But, as I pointed out, this isn’t always true, can you locate Salt Lake City from the surrounding red on the map? Indianapolis? Some of the other outliers that were mentioned in this thread? I think the “college town” aspect might have something to do with it. (College residents do generally tend to be more left (I know I’ve drifted steadily right over the last 20 years since college (though I’m still decidedly left of centre), and they also tend to vote more. If I had the time, I’d try to locate some college towns that are located in a red sea on the map that aren’t state capitals or large cities.
You would be hard-pressed to call Sacramento liberal. From the stories I’ve heard from students from Sacramento, it’s like going back to the 1950’s and not in a good way.
I don’t think your Texas example works as well as you think.
While there are several well known conservatives who call Dallas home, the city itself is also liberal compared to the rest of Texas (while still being conservative compared to the US as a whole). Ditto Houston and San Antonio. Likewise, while Austin might be considered “liberal”, compared to the rest of the country, it’s closer to being centrist or just slightly left-of-center.
Many of the people I went to college with who came in from “liberal” states still thought Austin itself was pretty conservative, after all.
In fact, if you look at the last set of statewide elections, you’ll note that the Democrats had their best results in the Houston-Dallas/Ft Worth-San Antonio areas (urban) than say West Texas (incredibly rural). In the last set of state judicial elections, Dallas county went almost straight ticket Democrat. The Democrats in the Texas Congressional delegation are also more likely to be from one of the big cities than otherwise.
Dallas has official non-partisan elections for mayor but in the real world, Democrats have won the position two of the last three times. There is a redistricting battle going on for the four new House seats, but the expectation was that one of them would be a majority Hispanic and Democratic district in Dallas.
Houston famously has a gay, female, Democratic mayor, BTW.
I thought we’ve had success on this board in stomping out the very silly notion that unless you can find 100% correlation something isn’t true. I guess we’ll have to work even harder.
Practicaly ALL of the large cities in Texas are solidly Democratic- sometimes even liberal.
The city of Dallas is perceived as highly conservative, but it isn’t. Oh, there are millions of very conservative people in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, but not in the city itself.
That’s true with most of the very large cities, but most state capitals aren’t very large cities. Try to find a city of, say, 50,000-300,000 people in a red state that doesn’t have a major university or a state capital that sticks out on that map. I don’t see any. At least not in the west where I’m familiar with the geography.
Saying the red/blue divide is merely urban/rural is somewhat oversimplifying things. If that were the case, the country would be overwhelmingly liberal, since only about 30% of the population is either rural or lives in cities with less than 50,000 people. I think you can safely say that the major metro areas tend to be more liberal and the rural areas and small towns tend to be more conservative, but the cities in the middle go either way. Considering that most state capitals are in the sort of “swing zone” of medium-sized, I think saying simply that they’re liberal because they’re cities is not a very useful explanation.
Large cities in this country do tend to be more left-leaning, so I’m not surprised that DC voters lean left, regardless of the collective bent of the president or legislators sent there by the rest of us.
This is mathematically wrong in two different ways. For one, being liberal or conservative is a tendency, not an absolute. Even in extreme cases, you won’t ever get more than 80% to one side or the other. In most cases, the split is less. The second problem is that you need to divide the country into center cities, suburban areas and exurban and rural areas with approximately one-third of the population in each. Just because a center city is liberal does not imply that the metro area is. That would say that surrounding suburban areas are also liberal; in fact, the opposite tends to be true.
I don’t understand how that makes me “wrong” on either count. Who said it wasn’t just a tenancy or a “lean” to one direction or another? I certainly didn’t. I would also agree that there are differences you can see if you break down a community, but for the purposes of this thread we’re talking about whether an urban area as a whole tends or leans one way or another. Pretty much every city has a hip downtown area that tends liberal, but I think most people wouldn’t say that alone makes the whole character of the city liberal. Or are you saying that a city’s overall politics can be predicted by the percentage of suburban vs. center city dwellers? Or that we can’t say anything about the overall politics of an urban area as a whole, because they vary from neighborhood to neighborhood?
GreasyJack, there is a critically important distinction between center cities and metro areas. It is not a matter of neighborhoods, but a matter of political lines. For example, every center city in upstate New York is heavily Democratic, but every one is surrounded by suburbs which are heavily Republican. This traces back to the flight of the middle class - read whites - from center cities to the newly developed suburbs starting in the 1950s and can be found all over the Northeast Rust Belt. The effects are somewhat different in the South and West, which began their huge growth in the 1950s, both because the center cities were not as large and because those states usually retained annexing powers that the Rust Belt states mostly don’t allow. Hipness has virtually nothing whatsoever to do it; it’s overwhelmingly about minorities and poverty. And, these days, minorities are a more complicated group than blacks were.
zombywoof, interesting numbers. My sense of those proportions is obviously outdated. I’ve read about Washington’s gentrification - again, read whiteness - but hadn’t realized the extent. I’m remembering the days when it was almost three-fourths black.
I don’t think the rest of my comments are similarly outdated, though. I’ll defend them.
Rusk is a huge advocate of consolidation, either of political boundaries or of services where that is not possible. He appears in the Northeast regularly to argue for this. I’m not sure he’s had any real success, though. The conservative suburbanites don’t want to take up the burdens posed by the center cities, for a huge number of reasons, some related to race, some to politics, and some just because of the enormous expenses it would involve. Unless and until we get out of the current slump that is so heavily affecting state and local governments, I can guarantee that consolidations will happen even less.
But only handful of state capitals are in the middle of big metropolitan areas like you describe. Most of them are medium-to-small sized regional cities that don’t have the populous center cities that large metro areas do and so the distinction between the center city and the suburbs is far less clearly-defined, politically and geographically. In my estimation anyways, it does make sense to look at those cities as a whole.
It is important enough that it ought to be mandated by the state governments (where inner-city voters have clout). But, we’re getting into GD territory now.
Medium to small cities have exactly the same problems as larger cities and usually a similar range of demographics. And you’re underestimating the size of state capitals. More than twice as many state capitals have a metropolitan district of over 1,000,000 than do under 100,000.