This doesn’t seem ideally suited to GQ, but it doesn’t seem ideally suited to any other forums either. If you feel the need to move it go ahead.
Are state capitols more or less democratic than the rest of the state and more or less conservative. Part of this can be accomplished with simple facts and figures, part must be done with deduction.
My two experiences are Madison WI. Which was much more democratic than the rest of the state, and also more liberal.
And Sacramento CA, which isn’t (IMHO) more or less democratic but is more conservative.
Columbus, Ohio, is Republican. The rest of the state can be somewhat generalized that the Southern two-thirds of the state are conservative, and Republican. The Northern part is rather Democratic and more liberal. Had to do with industrialization, unions, and farm economy.
State capitals tend to be populated with career bureaucrats and in many cases (e.g., Columbus and Madison) students. In my experience, both groups are more liberal than the general population, and more likely to be Democrats. But of course generalizations are always bad.
I think that Bib is on the right track. Also, consider the size of the capital, i.e. the proportion of unionized Democratic state employees to general population.
Perhaps you meant state capitals. A capital is a city; a capitol is a building.
So who can explain what a place like Austin, for cryin’ out loud, is doing sitting deep in the heart of Texas? What’s a nice town like you doing in a place like this??
Springfield, IL is quite conservative… if the local paper is to be believed. As an anecdote, I also note that campaign signs around here were about 70-30 in favor of the Bush/Cheney ticket. Draw your own conclusions…
There is no way to generalize about state capitals. You would be comparing such wonderfully small towns as Cheyenne and Carson City with such lovely metropolises as Denver or Atlanta. Large metropolises will usually trend to the Democrats, because of the large urban populations with lesser incomes; smaller cities may tend to the Republicans because of local farm economies. The presence of a state university can affect the issue, as well, since they often tend to the liberal viewpoints. And one must keep in mind that, while the capital itself may be liberal, the outlying suburbs might be quite conservative.
To use as an example one of the capitals mentioned in the OP: Sacramento is quite Democratic itself, but all the suburbs to the northeast are Republican, and Republicans are becoming increasingly more evident in the new suburbs growing on the south. It would be difficult to encapsulate the political flavor of the city in one descriptive word.
On that count, chalk one more up for Lansing, MI. It’s got Michigan State University in East Lansing, and a strong Union presence (GM town) contributing to its irrational democraticism. Rupublican governer, though.
But Lansing isn’t so much conservative as populist, like many of the big-old-labor towns in that area of the country (Toledo, my hometown, is another one). Union presences tend to vote for Democrats who are known to be rather conservative on social issues even though they’re liberal on fiscal issues.
And MI has a Republican governor because, except for Dettroit proper (not the 'burbs), Ann Arbor, and most of Lansing’s voters (and possibly many of Flint’s voters as well), the state is mostly Republican/conservative voters. It’s a close call, though; the Republican Senator was just ousted by not very many votes.
I did a non-scientific analysis of the 1996 presidential election (because I didn’t want to go a lot of trouble just tracking down the data for this year). I chose 7 states at random and looked at the counties their capitals are in. Then I looked for counties in the same state of about the same size and compared thier votes, weighting the results so each county’s vote is given the same weight.
I found that capital counties voted 49% Clinton, 45% Dole, and 7% Perot (does not total 100% because of rounding). This is somewhat more Democratic than non-capital counties in the same states of about the same size, which voted 45% Clinton, 47% Dole, and 8% Perot.
Surprisingly, the capital counties I looked at were not more Democratic than the national vote which was 50%/41%/9%. I think this is because the procedure I used to choose the states gave every state an equal chance of being chosen, so most of them were small rural states, which are more likely to go Republican than big urbanized states.
Again, this is a simple and non-scientific analysis. To make it scientific, I would have to take into account a whole slew of demographic data, and I ain’t gonna do it.