Thank you all for your responses. They are greatly appreciated.
That I am uninformed is not in question – one does not ask a question if they are informed. In other words, if I knew the answer, I would not need to ask the question.
As to the snarkiness of your response, I will simply say this:
I have three children. One is now in college and the younger two are in high school. Of course, they weren’t always of that age – there was a time when they were little and asked a thousand questions a day (well, not literally, but you know what I mean) about the world around them. And yes, some of their questions were silly. However, I always made it my policy with both my kids, with other kids that I teach (I do some private tutoring in various subjects) and with people in general to not denigrate them for asking questions, even if the question is silly or reveals a gross misunderstanding. Instead, I encourage them to continue asking questions. When a person has to feel afraid of asking a question because he’s worried about nastiness on the part of the respondent is the day that that person stops learning.
The Huffington Post Electoral Map will give you county-level results if you click on each state. Lots of big cities have the same borders as their containing counties, so you can get city-level results (or, in NYC, borough-level results) for large cities.
And, as pointed out by kenner116, I did mean the Bronx was 91% for Obama. Queens was 78.8%. Sorry for the mistake.
I think another reason why cities tend to vote Democratic is that the population there sees more directly the benefits of government spending: They see the benefits of public transportation, public hospitals, etc.
There’s a chicken-and-egg question here; Democrats are generally the party of “we’re all in this together” while Republicans are more the party of self-reliance and “you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.” It’s easy to see why the Democratic attitude is fostered by city living, but it’s also easy to see why people inclined to that sort of attitude prefer high population density.
The Republican party believes in leaving other people alone? I wish. This is the party whose official platform includes passages about limiting people’s freedom to make choices in their personal lives, like “the union of one man and one woman must be upheld as the national standard, a goal to stand for, encourage, and promote through laws governing marriage” and “Numerous studies have shown that abortion endangers the health and well-being of women, and we stand firmly against it”.
