Washington: How come Jefferson County is so heavily Democratic, similiar to King County and San Juan County which make sense, but why is not your typical Dems in the 50s and GOP in the 40s like the rest of Western Washington.
Port Townsend is an artsy liberal enclave. It's full of people who used to live in Seattle but wanted a more rustic environment. Similar to Bellingham, except that Bellingham shares its county with a super-Republican Dutch Reform area around Lynden. Also similar to southern Island County, but northern Island County has a super-Republican military area around Oak Harbor. Jefferson County just doesn't have a corresponding super-R area like Island County and Whatcom County do.
UC Santa Cruz is a big part of it. In general, the city of Santa Cruz has been a hub of "alternative" (read: hippie and druggie) culture for a long time, and the presence of a big, very liberal college has perpetuated that. Similar to Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, but less rural.
Military.
Tucson has a larger college presence, relative to its size. They also attract different sorts of new residents; Tucson takes heavily from California, but most retirees in Phoenix are from the Midwest.
Butte (in Silver Bow County) is an old mining community, very different from the surrounding area. I believe it's been the dominant copper-mining location in the country for over a century. Unions are very strong and influential there. Deer Lodge County is in the ambit of Butte as well.
As to why they haven't swung... being isolated in a state that otherwise has very little industry going on and where fights over unions and labor and deindustrialization are all but unheard of as political issues has probably helped preserve old traditions.
Big Native populations in some areas, too. But the white population in northern New Mexico is also very liberal, especially in Santa Fe. That's not really an explanation, I know.
Combination of enormous college (UT-Austin) and state capital. (State capitals are almost all more Democratic than their state because there are more government workers there.)
Enormous college (University of Wisconsin-Madison) plus state capital, again.
This baffles me, too.
University of Ohio is a huge college and the center of Athens County's economy. Ashtabula County is not "mostly rural". Most of the population lives in the small rust belt cities of Ashtabula and Conneaut. It's similar to neighboring Erie County, PA (Erie) or Erie County, OH (Sandusky).
The sort of people who move from Massachusetts to New Hampshire are quite conservative, generally moving there to avoid paying state income taxes. They tend to settle near the MA border. Northern and western NH are much more similar to Vermont.
1. Nearby areas of Quebec are quite conservative.
2. There's little crossover because of the language barrier.
3. The border is quite liberal except in Essex County, VT, which is just incredibly isolated.
Like Vermont and western NH, it's one of the most intact areas of rural WASP New England, which is uniformly overwhelmingly Democratic these days.
UNC-Chapel Hill (huge college) is in Orange County. Asheville has been a hippie-liberal enclave for a long time, not quite sure why. There's no big college there, but there are a bunch of small, lesser known colleges.
University of Georgia.
