tpfkaw
wormyguy
Junior Chimp
Posts: 9,118
Political Matrix
E: -0.58, S: 1.65
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« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2013, 12:05:42 AM » |
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Cities are not more left-wing everywhere; they're more conservative while rural areas are more leftist in Sweden, for example, as well as IIRC Spain, and, in the United States, South Carolina (because blacks are concentrated in rural areas). Nevertheless, it is a pattern that holds true in most countries, if not as dramatically as in the US (for that matter, pre-1992, it wasn't nearly as strong a pattern in the US either).
To elaborate, the big deals are:
1. Urban areas have more minorities, and minorities vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
2. White people in urban areas vote overwhelmingly Democratic for the most part too. This is because they tend to skew younger, poorer, more likely to be a government employee or in left-biased professions such as university professors, more likely to be non-Christian, etc. This also is because crime has essentially disappeared as a wedge issue in national politics over the last 20 years. Whether it's because people are ignoring it as crime rates have gone down, Republicans are afraid of being tarred with the "racist" brush, or because of the DLC most national Democrats now at least publicly profess to be "tough-on-crime" death penalty supporters (or a combination thereof), the wedge issue that drove urban votes to the Republicans between Nixon and H.W. is now hardly ever discussed. It remains a wedge issue between whites and minorities within urban Democratic parties, however.
3. Which brings us to my next point; everyone who's anyone in a major city is a Democrat. There's no point in being a Republican, because the only race that matters is the Democratic primary. And you've got all that peer pressure; if you vote Republican then you're some backwoods redneck hick racist homophobic cow-[inks]ing gun nut woman-hater creationist anti-Semite evil corporate tool who probably shops at Wal-Mart and listens to bands people have heard of. Nobody will like you! But if you're a Democrat, you can say "I support Golda Schniffelstein for Mayor because she's a Jewish lesbian who likes food co-ops and bike trails and climate initiatives and gun buy-backs, and totally not because she's going to keep the police frisking people using similar 'holistic' criteria to the UC admissions system, so I can ride the subway without getting stabbed to death." And all your friends will still like you!
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