One problem with these analyses is that counties are kind of arbitrary political divisions and the population density of a county taken as a whole might not be telling you the whole story.
For an extreme example, look at San Bernardino County. Virtually all of its population lives in the little corner containing San Bernardino itself and a few other LA suburbs. It also has a vast desert hinterland that’s mostly unpopulated, but does have some small cities and rural population. Even though it’s population is nearly all urban, the population density of 85 people/sq mile implies a relatively rural county. That’s an extreme example, but the same thing is true of a lot of especially western counties. I strongly suspect that most of those low-density Democrats seen on those charts are really urban and suburban voters from places like San Bernardino where funky county lines bring their population density figures down.
More generally, though, the picture I’m getting from most of those graphs, especially the one at the bottom with density plotted against % of the total population, is that the rural counties are overwhelmingly Republican, urban counties are overwhelmingly Democratic, but neither of those are a large portion of the population. The suburban or mixed urban/rural counties where most people actually live leaned Democratic… this year. That strikes me as pretttttty close to the conventional political wisdom. I don’t see anything here that would imply that a rise in population density across the board will necessarily result in a general shift to the left. It would be interesting to see him make the same graphs for the '04 election-- I’m guessing the shift in politics of the middle-density voters would be a lot more dramatic than any shift in density.
BigAppleBucky, that says that cities are good for women worldwide, and I can easily imagine that there are many countries where that’s true. In a first-world nation like the US, though, I suspect that most of those advantages are equally available, or nearly so, to women in the cities and country alike.
Actually, it would appear to be. See this “Red States/Blue States” map (based on 2008 election results), shaded from blue through purple to red, and broken down by county. The most urbanized counties are solid blue, the most sparsely-populated rural counties are solid red, and everything between is shades of purple.
There is a clear geographical-ideological division in American politics, and it is not North v. South, nor East v. West, nor Coasts v. Flyover, nor even Red States vs. Blue States – it is City v. Countryside.
And whenever a political/social conflict comes down to City v. Countryside, the City almost always wins, and almost always deserves to win.
The big map at this link shows 2012 election results.
Urban areas are dark blue–even in Texas! (The Panhandle towns–Amarillo & Odessa–are dark blue dots.) Here, the 'burbs tend to be dark red, with most of the pale/sparsely populated areas pink. Except along the Border…
(The “cities are better for women” does sound a bit old-fashioned. Unless you’re talking about places like Texas, whererural women’s clinics are feeling the financial pinch. Partly because of the persecution of Planned Parenthood–& Ricky Perry’s hatred of The Feds. Cities offer a few more options.)
But nobody lives in all those solidly red rural counties (or the solid blue Indian Reservation counties) and there’s very few solid blue urban counties. The real story is what’s going on in the suburban and mixed counties, and that does vary quite a lot by region and by political trends.
That truly rural people are overwhelmingly conservative and people living in city cores are overwhelmingly liberal is clear, but there simply aren’t enough people in either of those categories to come anywhere close to dictating the political landscape on their own. There are more suburban liberals than urban liberals* and FAR more suburban conservatives than rural conservatives. The urban-rural divide is certainly there, but looking at politics entirely in those terms is far too simplistic.
*If you’re looking strictly at population density, not necessarily just whether you’re in the city limits of a big city.
It is not simplistic, and it is not exactly a “divide,” either, except in the sense of having opposing poles; it is more of a continuum: countryside red, suburbs shades-of-purple, city blue; which certainly is significant – the more urban you are, the more liberal you are likely to be/vote. Significant, also, in that it identifies the suburbs and exurbs as, everywhere, the battleground.
Women have been graduating college at a higher rate than men for a few years now. As for home schooling, there aren’t many good numbers out there, but this US Census study says it’s about 50-50.
Again, the title of the article was :“Worldwide, cities are good for woman”. I’m not sure it could be any more clear that the author isn’t addressing woman in the US.
We’d need to check the raw data to determine whether women were more likely to be home schooled in rural areas, The census data reports rates are higher in “nonmetro” areas than cities and that there’s roughly an even distribution of homeschooling for both genders, but it may be the case (however unlikely) that slightly more girls are homeschooled than guys in nonmetro areas compared to a small minority of girls being homeschooled in cities.
