GA-6 Special election discussion thread

[RINO Tom]

Republicans need to hang on for dear life in this district and others like it, whatever it takes.  Let's recognize the Republican Party again, to post another poster's quoted quote.

[RINO Tom]

People REALLY overrate how many rural voters there are, period.

[RINO Tom]

People REALLY overrate how many rural voters there are, period.

yeah, rural voters need to vote in spectacular high numbers and for one single candidate to make a difference.

that was "strange" about 2016 - would be hard to repeat.

But my point is that most Trump voters WEREN'T rural.  Just using Illinois, a state that Trump lost by a bad margin, he got 2,146,015 votes.  Of those 2,146,015, 72.67% came from counties that are part of metro areas of 150,000 or bigger:

1,041,346 in Chicagoland
67,906 from the Rockford metro area
58,405 from the Illinois side of the Quad Cities metro area
93,110 from the Peoria metro area
42,314 from the Bloomington-Normal metro area
43,482 from the Champaign-Urbana metro area
54,175 from the Springfield metro area
158,857 from the Metro East (Illinois suburbs of St. Louis)

He won all of those metro areas except for Chicagoland and Champaign.  He also won every single county not included in those metros except for Jackson County in Southern Illinois (Clinton won 11,634 to Trump's 10,843).  What's my point?  Just because Trump won rural counties in Illinois by massive margins DOESN'T MEAN HIS SUPPORTERS WERE RURAL.  As I just demonstrated, the vast majority of his votes came from those metro areas, which don't even include CLEARLY not rural places like Galena (which Trump won), Decatur (which Trump won), Carbondale (which Trump won), etc.

The vast majority of Republican voters are not rural people.  For every rural Republican voter, there are two that live in a much more populated area that just happens to have more Democrats in it.

EDIT: And, doing simple math from the exit polls, only 22.57% of Trump voters lived in rural communities, compared to 52.26% living in suburbs and 25.16% living in urban areas.  So again, let that sink in, there were more Trump voters living in cities than in rural areas.  It doesn't matter that he won a vast majority of rural counties, they just simply didn't provide the bulk of his support, and that's a fact.

[RINO Tom]

People REALLY overrate how many rural voters there are, period.

yeah, rural voters need to vote in spectacular high numbers and for one single candidate to make a difference.

that was "strange" about 2016 - would be hard to repeat.

But my point is that most Trump voters WEREN'T rural.  Just using Illinois, a state that Trump lost by a bad margin, he got 2,146,015 votes.  Of those 2,146,015, 72.67% came from counties that are part of metro areas of 150,000 or bigger:

1,041,346 in Chicagoland
67,906 from the Rockford metro area
58,405 from the Illinois side of the Quad Cities metro area
93,110 from the Peoria metro area
42,314 from the Bloomington-Normal metro area
43,482 from the Champaign-Urbana metro area
54,175 from the Springfield metro area
158,857 from the Metro East (Illinois suburbs of St. Louis)

He won all of those metro areas except for Chicagoland and Champaign.  He also won every single county not included in those metros except for Jackson County in Southern Illinois (Clinton won 11,634 to Trump's 10,843).  What's my point?  Just because Trump won rural counties in Illinois by massive margins DOESN'T MEAN HIS SUPPORTERS WERE RURAL.  As I just demonstrated, the vast majority of his votes came from those metro areas, which don't even include CLEARLY not rural places like Galena (which Trump won), Decatur (which Trump won), Carbondale (which Trump won), etc.

The vast majority of Republican voters are not rural people.  For every rural Republican voter, there are two that live in a much more populated area that just happens to have more Democrats in it.

EDIT: And, doing simple math from the exit polls, only 22.57% of Trump voters lived in rural communities, compared to 52.26% living in suburbs and 25.16% living in urban areas.  So again, let that sink in, there were more Trump voters living in cities than in rural areas.  It doesn't matter that he won a vast majority of rural counties, they just simply didn't provide the bulk of his support, and that's a fact.

I think that a 150,000 person metro area is going to be culturally rural to someone who lives in a 1M+ metro area.  When people here say "city", they are usually thinking of those 1M+ metros.  And the Trump/Clinton divide really does look like 1M+ metros vs. everyone else!  The census view of urban is too broad to reflect the current cultural divide in the country IMO.

1) I guess we will just have to agree to disagree then, and I will have to stop putting so much stock into the term "urban/rural divide," if that is what it really means.  Given the usual connations of that term, that cutoff is ridiculous; I have lived my whole life in either a metro of around 400,000 (Peoria) or 150,000 (Iowa City), and both have had tons of people who are quite educated, both areas have every store/restaurant type/summertime event anyone would need, both get concerts/plays/musicals, etc.  Neither place would seem rural to anyone in his or her right mind.  If these are the types of places (yes, I know Iowa City is a university town and quite Democratic, so let's use all of the suburbs of Des Moines, which went Republican then) that Democrats discount as "rural" when they imagine Republicans as less enlightened than they are, then the joke is on them.

2) Even if I accept your strange definition, the point is that your voters aren't limited to the counties or metros that you win.  Trump lost Chicagoland handily and still had twice as many votes from Chicagoland than all of those other places combined.  There are millions of Republicans and Trump voters that live in places that might have gone Clinton by margins under 10%, which really isn't that lopsided when we take off our political nerd goggles, right?  Again, most Republicans aren't in rural areas, period.