How would fictional towns vote?

[Asenath Waite]

Spinoff on the how would fictional characters vote thread.

A few ideas:

Hill Valley from Back To The Future: Initially a wild west town with a populist streak, tended to vascilate between support for William Jennings Bryan and TR who also won it in 1912. Tended to be a bellweather after that with Wilson consolidating the TR and Debs vote to win handily in 1916. Significant dropoff in Democratic support in the 20s with Harding and Coolidge winning. Al Smith managed to flip it in 1928 thanks to local Democratic Party leader William McFly managing to galvanize the burgeoning Irish-Catholic community in the town. Went for FDR four times and Truman in 48 then as the town suburbanized went for Eisenhower, became heavily Republican in the 70s and 80s but went narrowly for Clinton in 96 and Democratic in every election since.

Hawkins Indiana from Stranger Things: Rural farming community initially settled by New England Yankees in the antebellum era, was heavily Republican until a handful of Irish and German immigrants began settling in the early twentieth century and formed a coalition with Bryanite farmers to allow Democrats to begin succeeding at the local level. Republicans continued to win most presidential elections with the exception of 1936, 1940 and 1964. Trump won a plurality in 2016 with Gary Johnson getting 5-6% and Biden won outright this time, albeit narrowly.

In 1984 Reagan wins the town with 60-65% of the vote. The Mondale voters in town would be (in addition to Dustin's mom) unionized city employees, Joyce Byers, some of the older farmers who still had fond memories of new deal era subsidies, Mr Clark and Bob Newby who I see as Atari Dems that had supported Gary Hart in the primary.

Charlestown, Massachusetts from Slap Shot: Unionized mill town in Worcester County, MA. Heavily Democratic from 1912 to the present, with Eisenhower being potentially the only Republican to win it.* A post-industrial wasteland by 1992 still longing for the dearly beloved Charlestown Chiefs created ample opportunity for Ross Perot to get around 25-30% of the vote and lead to a third place showing for HW Bush. Went for Gore, Kerry and Obama by increasingly narrow margins before finally flipping to Trump in 2016.


* Based off actual voting patterns in similar towns. The only towns James Cox won in 1920 MA were in this area and even McGovern managed to win with approximately 55-60% of the vote.

Arkham, Massachusetts: New England college town, hasn't gone for a Republican since Calvin Coolidge. In 2000 Ralph Nader put up respectable numbers while Bush came in a distant third as a town which honored the legacy of Dr. Herbert West, reanimator turned heavily against his anti-stem cell research stance.

[KoopaDaQuick 🇵🇸]

Springfield, North Tacoma might be safe D considering how Democrat Joe Quimby has literally been the mayor for 30 years.

[Orwell]

Springfield, North Tacoma might be safe D considering how Democrat Joe Quimby has literally been the mayor for 30 years.

He briefly lost reelection to Sideshow Bob (100.0%-0%) but it later turned out to have been fraud.

[Tiger08]

Pawnee: rural Indiana town, seems largely blue collar and it's not the most refined town in the world. So Trump. Eagleton would have been Romney-Clinton-Biden

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

I can't imagine New Port, Washington (the setting of Dreadnought and hometown of its titular character) votes too differently from Seattle.

[Orwell]

I think Philadelphia (Always Sunny) would be pretty swingy

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Pawnee: rural Indiana town, seems largely blue collar and it's not the most refined town in the world. So Trump. Eagleton would have been Romney-Clinton-Biden

Don't forget that Pawnee becomes the tech hub of the Midwest by the end. So at some point it becomes thoroughly liberal.

[Asenath Waite]

Pawnee: rural Indiana town, seems largely blue collar and it's not the most refined town in the world. So Trump. Eagleton would have been Romney-Clinton-Biden

Don't forget that Pawnee becomes the tech hub of the Midwest by the end. So at some point it becomes thoroughly liberal.

In that case it may have remained a consistently Democratic town with the transformation preventing it from going Obama-Trump. The last time a Republican won it was Bush SR in 88.

[Mike88]

Quahog would probably vote Democratic.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Crabapple Cove probably voted for Trump, since the murder capital of fictional New England is probably desperate for some LAW AND ORDER by now.

[Crane]

I think Philadelphia (Always Sunny) would be pretty swingy

I'm glad that place isn't real. Seems almost too scary to be believable.

[Agonized-Statism]

Metropolis, DE: Strongly Federalist, Whig, and Republican until the immigrant community made it competitive for Bourbon Democrats, Wilson, and Al Smith, broke hard for Roosevelt and all New Dealers thereafter, still Democratic today.

Golden Age Metropolis was a corrupt and unequal steel city, and Superman had a very negative opinion about bankers, jailers, and businessmen in the oldest comics, so they definitely had a lot of union activity. By the Silver Age, it transformed into the shiny international city we know and love, so I'm guessing Metropolis became the face of New Deal liberalism. Would definitely be the most liberal place in America and would have some of the most Democratic districts in the nation. Interestingly, given the population of 11 million, Delaware goes from the 46th largest state in our world to the 6th largest in the DC universe and gives Biden a much bigger EV victory in 2020.

Gotham City, NJ: Like Metropolis, solid for Democrats after 1928, but a better climate for Republicans and might have even trended toward Trump.

Gotham is given a more troubled history with gang and occult activity. Starts off much the same as Metropolis in the Golden Age, then gets a little better during the Silver Age (recall the clean streets and civic pride of Batman '66), then goes to hell in the Bronze Age. Probably put all its chips on wartime industry and rot into a rust belt city, hence all the abandoned factories and warehouses. Given the distance between Wayne Manor and the inner-city, there's white flight. The inner-city is permanently Democratic, while the surrounding white collar areas were Republican until Bill Clinton, went Bush after the events of No Man's Land in 1999, and most definitely went Biden in 2020.

Smallville, KS: Solid Republican since the beginning with the possible exception of the populists in the 1890s (Weaver and Bryan), progressives in the 1910s (Roosevelt and Wilson), FDR in the 1930s, LBJ in 1964, and Carter in 1976 because of a Kansan drought that made the state closer than usual.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Assigning States to DC cities is a fool's errand.

Part of the problem is that both Gotham and Metropolis began as analogues to New York City. My own view is that an Earth-W (Batman) and an Earth-K (Superman) were magically merged by the 5th Dimensional Duo of Bat-Mite and Mxyzptlk so that they could see whether Batman or Superman was the greater hero/square.

Of course, it could be worse. Keystone City, which began as the DC analogue to Philadelphia got moved all the way to Missouri to be the sister city of Central City.  At least both Gotham and Metropolis stayed on the East Coast, and Coast City has always remained somewhere in California.

[Agonized-Statism]

Assigning States to DC cities is a fool's errand.

I'm going by the general wisdom established in World's Greatest Super Heroes, World's Finest Comics #259 (November 1979), New Adventures of Superboy #22 (October 1981), and the 1990 Atlas of the DC Universe. A majority of comics depict Gotham in New Jersey and Metropolis in Delaware, and more still depict the two as twin cities.

I can't speak for the others, but the Flash (Barry, Wally, and Bart) and Captain Marvel are Midwestern and Hal Jordan is based out of California. I used to know the rest of the superheroes but it's been a while. As in, as a kid in the '00s browsing DC Database.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Assigning States to DC cities is a fool's errand.

I'm going by the general wisdom established in World's Greatest Super Heroes, World's Finest Comics #259 (November 1979), New Adventures of Superboy #22 (October 1981), and the 1990 Atlas of the DC Universe. A majority of comics depict Gotham in New Jersey and Metropolis in Delaware, and more still depict the two as twin cities.

I can't speak for the others, but the Flash (Barry, Wally, and Bart) and Captain Marvel are Midwestern and Hal Jordan is based out of California. I used to know the rest of the superheroes but it's been a while. As in, as a kid in the '00s browsing DC Database.

The modern Flashes are Midwestern, but Jay's Keystone City was definitely a Philadelphia analogue originally. Hal isn't just California but Coast City which at various times been anywhere from north of San Francisco to north of Los Angeles.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I'm fairly confident that Twin Peaks, Washington would vote for Trump.

[Agonized-Statism]

Port Charles, NY: Mid-sized city proximate to Buffalo and Rochester on the shores of Lake Ontario, probably in Orleans County. General Hospital mostly focuses on the gentrified areas, but all the mob storylines since the '70s suggest some nasty urban decay. Definitely a Democratic stronghold since FDR but swung toward Trump in 2016.

Genoa City, WI: Young and the Restless. Way bigger than the real life one, a middle-class industrial city that not only escaped the worst of the Rust Beltification but also got an influx of billionaires and corporate headquarters into the 21st century, a success story like Minneapolis. Probably a second urban anchor to the WOW counties, historically very Republican but generally Democratic since the '80s. Might have been enough to keep Wisconsin for Clinton in 2016 in-universe.

Oakdale, IL: As the World Turns and totally unrelated to the real Oakdale. Definitely in northern Illinois, probably somewhere between Peoria and Chicago and closer to the former (one episode said Lee County). Large town at maybe a hundred thousand residents, but big enough for a few skyscrapers in a commercial district as early as 1960 and a university. Democratic by slim margins since 1992 and powerfully Republican before that, like Peoria. Maybe went Bush in 2004 depending on how big Oakdale University was supposed to be.

Punchbowl, PA: Stubbs the Zombie as a palette cleanser from the soap operas. Planned city built near what was a small farming community in the '30s, the inhabitants of which became Bircherites by the time of the game. Before it got nuked in 1959, would have been solidly anti-New Deal Republican as the magnus opus of the world's richest man. Draconian on homelessness, zero non-white residents in-game, and pretty openly owes its retro-futurism to a famous former Nazi scientist, so we can guess the trajectory had it survived. But that's low-hanging fruit as a Bush era satire.