That’s the title of a nice little analysis that’s been making its way around the web recently. In brief, there’s a clear trend in the 2012 Presidential Election data: counties with less than 800 people per square mile are more likely than not to favor Republicans, and counties with more than 800 people per square mile tend to favor Democrats. Given that places with higher population density tend to have more people, and states with big cities tend to have more electoral votes, this represents a serious issue for the Republican party. How can they change their platform to be more appealing to city dwellers?
The fact that cities favor Democrats and rural areas favor Republicans has been known for ages. It’s only really significant if the demographics are shifting: Is the country any more urban than it was four years ago?
Well, I was a rightie when I lived by myself, but hanging around people turned me more leftie. Just sayin’…
Rather than changing their platform, they could enact legislation which would make people more interested in leaving the cities and moving to smaller towns. If the GOP starts behaving in a way that the city-dwellers will like, then they’re becoming democrats, which seems to me to be counter-productive. On the other hand, if they get people to move to where the GOP members are, maybe the democrats will change their way of thinking.
Sort of bizarre to make the x-axis of a graph half linear and half logarithmic.
Gerrymandering.
Actually, I don’t even think the right-hand side of the graph is logarithmic (because a logarithmic axis would show a constant spacing between multiplicative factors, e.g., each constant spacing could represent a doubling).
I don’t know what that axis is!
The graph is a little tricky, because there are a lot of different values of small population densities, and a few very large ones. Make the x-axis linear, and it has to be too wide for any page. Make it logarithmic, and you lose a lot of information about smaller values. I think the scale there is probably a reasonable compromise.
Rural/suburban vs urban. Of course, there is a blending of the two, and maybe it’s at the 800 p/sf mark. I wonder what this would like like with data from, say, 20 years ago. Is the 800 s/sf point time invariant, or does it become larger over time?
Anyway, I think you hit the nail on the head with whether or not the country is becoming more urban rather than rural/suburban.
The urban population grew a bit faster than the rest of the country between 2000 and 2010.
The Dems also have a challenge. In urban areas, people rub shoulders which makes minorities less threatening and public services more attractive. Unfortunately, land use restrictions drive up housing prices and displace people to the suburbs, where a different mindset takes hold. Sprawl isn’t especially energy efficient either.
So forget about set asides for “Moderate income housing”. Just add to housing supply: construct tall buildings along transit routes. Middle and lower income families will gravitate to older, more run-down housing. Stare down the neighborhood congestion groups and let the developers go wild.
I hear that Developers Gone Wild is quite the racy video!!
You’d get similar graphs comparing young vs old, whites vs minorities, religious vs secular, etc. Urban vs rural is just one of the demographic fights the republicans are losing, it is not even the main one.
The birthrate in the United States has been below zero population group since the seventies. If it wasn’t for immigration the population of the US would be going down.
The Census bureaus definition of “urban” seems to be “living in a political unit with a pop of over 50k”. That doesn’t directly have anything to do with population density. If people were flocking to the suburbs from both rural and urban areas, the Census bureaus measure of urbanized population might go up at the same time that population density dropped.
He says he “normalized the graph”, but its not clear what that means. I think what he did is set the x-axis so each increment contains an equal fraction of the total US population. Which is actually a pretty neat way to do it, if that’s what he did. But in any case, it only works if he’s more clear about what he’s doing.
In any case, assuming I’m right about what the graph displays, it appears that a large fraction of the US population lives in areas with less the 800 people/sq mile. Which makes sense, since people who live above that line vote for Dems in such large numbers that if they made up a larger fraction of the population, the Dems would never loose an election, which is obviously not the case.
It wasn’t always that way, tides shift. The northeast and west coast used to be republican. The south and midwest used to be democrat, rural areas used to subscribe to economic populism (as opposed to the plutocratic, anti-working class ideology they usually now support).
So things can and do change. The GOP has been facing a demographic pinch for the last decade and I think they know it, that is why they are pushing for voter repression so hard. But even that backfired, I believe minority voting went up in part because blacks and latinos were pissed about the GOP trying to take their right to vote away. I had no problem voting and I was in and out in 5 minutes, but if someone was trying to take my vote away I would’ve stood in line 10 hours to vote if I had to. The voter repression efforts may have only succeeded in motivating and cementing their opposition even more.
Millennials will be 40% of the electorate in 2020. Non-whites will also be close to 35% of the electorate (there is a lot of overlap between the two, something like 50-60% of millennials are non-white). Republicans are old white people who lose millions of talk radio/fox news viewers every election cycle to old age. There were more millennial voters in 2012 than there were 65+ voters. And politicians tend to fear the elderly, so the trend is going to get bigger in 2016.
But demographics can and do change. But in order for that to happen I think the parties have to realign. The south didn’t change, the democratic and republican party changed their views on civil rights.
But in those days, the Democrats and Republicans were different parties.
http://allaboutcities.ca/worldwide-cities-are-good-for-women/
The article doesn’t say it, but medical services are generally superior in cities. That can be especially essential for women of child bearing age.
The Democratic Party has been far friendlier towards women than the Republican Party and since women gravitate to cities, that might explain part of the reason.
This is true, but the impression I get is the base of the GOP is now made up of religious fundamentalists and angry white people. I don’t see the GOP changing anytime soon w/o losing a massive percent of their base.
It would be like if blacks and liberals were openly hostile to any attempt at outreach by the democratic party. The dems would just squeeze themselves into minority status after a while.
But the GOP is at least competent at politics. Even in minority status they know how to get their way.