Salt Lake City is not conservative in its voting patterns. Among the 237 cities in the U.S. with over 100,000 people, it ranks as the 95th most liberal and hence the 143th most conservative. It’s a big city. It’s not that large within its borders, but it’s the center of a large metropolitan area. It’s only three-quarters white non-Hispanic. It has a large Hispanic population and a significant homosexual community, and less than half its population is Mormon. It has a Democratic mayor and a mostly Democratic city council:
What does the fact that the streets are numbered according to how far they are from the Temple have to do with anything? The streets in Washington, D.C. are numbered and lettered according to how far they are from the Capitol Building in the same way, and D.C. is the fourth most liberal city in the U.S. And D.C. has its own Mormon Temple, incidentally, which, while it’s just outside the city, is very prominent:
You’re trying to rate the liberalism/conservatism of a city according to its superficial look, not according to the beliefs and voting patterns of its inhabitants.
Shannon County in South Dakota is very heavily Native American and pretty poor, so it would be surprising if it wasn’t very liberal in its voting record.
Salt Lake City has had Democratic mayors continuously since 1976. My congressman, Jim Matheson, is a Democrat (a Blue Dog Dem, but still). SLC is the lone liberal bastion in one of the reddest states in the country.
Provo has to be one of the most conservative cities of its size in the country. Certainly the most conservative major college town. I can speak to this from experience, as my wife went to high school there, my MIL works for BYU, my FIL is a retired Provo police captain, and I live about 30 miles north of there right now.
It’s a little more complicated than that. A map of, say, the 2008 election results by county is pretty informative.
In essence:
Rural counties dominated by African-Americans (parts of the Deep South), by Mexicans (parts of South Texas and New Mexico), and Native Americans (in places like South Dakota and northern Arizona) vote Democratic.
Rural whites in New England vote Democratic.
Rural whites in the South vote extremely Republican.
Rural whites in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (and to a lesser extent other parts of Michigan) are swing voters who lean Democratic. This might be because of the Scandinavian cultural influence, the greater history of unionization in those areas, etc.
Rural whites in most of the rest of the country favor Republicans, though less so than in the South.
And if you think it’s conservative now, you should have seen it 30 years ago, when I was living in Salt Lake and dating a girl at BYU.
The story goes that a transfer student from California showed up at the Provo Democrat precinct on caucus night and the woman whose house was pissed because she wasn’t expecting visitors. . .
