(09-01-2016, 03:49 PM)Public services, including law enforcement and K-12 education, do not come cheaply. David Horn Wrote:(08-30-2016, 11:12 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:(08-30-2016, 07:42 AM)Marypoza Wrote:(08-08-2016, 12:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: If the electoral college vote was distributed fairly, you'd never see another Republican in The White House.
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I'm surprised that Phoenix, AZ and Tuscon, AZ are not in there. Ditto Vegas.
Just guessing, but population density is probably the key. All those cities sit in very large counties, yet two smaller cities in Virginia, Lynchburg and Roanoke, make the list because Virginia has independent cites separate from counties.
Population density, most likely. Also missing are Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, which include some of the very urban parts of Greater Los Angeles, but also huge tracts of thinly-populated desert, very Democratic-voting counties. I can't assume that the huge tracts of deserts of those counties are very Democratic in their voting. Clark County in Nevada (Greater Las Vegas) is much the same, and I would not guess how places in Clark County with more rattlesnakes than people vote. As a general rule, the denser the population is, the more that people must put up with large, intrusive, costly government. With few obvious exceptions (Allen County, Indiana; suburbs surrounding Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta; the two metro areas of Oklahoma) these are rather liberal-voting areas for their regions. Even Salt Lake City is very liberal by Utah standards. Question: why are Oklahoma City and Tulsa so Republican-voting?
Public services which might be fairly inexpensive in rural areas, including law enforcement and K-12 education, do not come cheaply in urban areas. Teachers have plenty of lucrative alternatives in urban areas (like sales, for which teachers have practically an ideal skill set), and if the community underpays the cops it will surely experience massive corruption in the police force because organized crime can easily supplement the meager income of a city cop. Transportation is more expensive; a four-lane freeway might be far more than is necessary for local needs anywhere on Interstate 90 west of Madison, Wisconsin except for Greater Seattle, but it would be fully inadequate as a main route in any giant city. Widening any road is relatively cheap in rural areas because abutting property to be condemned is relatively cheap, but it is not so cheap to expand an eight-lane expressway in northeastern New Jersey from wight lanes to ten (one in each direction) as it is to build a four-lane freeway in a rural area in which a two-lane blacktop is adequate. Even in personal matters, you can reasonably trust that one can walk one's dog around corn fields without using a pooper-scooper. Do not try that in a city. Urban government is costlier and more intrusive, but cities have the opportunities that rural areas don't. Who wants to return to a rural area with a college degree to be a farm laborer or to be a checker-cashier should such be all that is available?
The New York Times had an interactive device (the Election Tool) connecting demographics to the Obama victory in 2008. Sixty-three political entities alone determined that Barack Obama would win the election, and the rest of America went for John McCain. To be sure, Barack Obama was a horrible candidate for winning rural America, picking up rural communities only if they had large proportions of minority voters (this held as true in Alabama as in Minnesota). Those 63 communities were the most densely-populated counties, cities not within counties, and the District of Columbia. Population density overpowered income and even ethnicity. (Education? Barack Obama did better the higher the level of education was, inverting the usual common wisdom about the connection between education and political conservatism).
But only 63 communities? Those were the most densely-populated such polities in America, and they included the obvious. Counties included the famous independent cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Arlington, Alexandria, St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco; the boroughs of New York City (except Richmond, which barely went for McCain) and most surrounding counties in the Tri-State; the giant metropolises of the West Coast, Greater Boston, the densely-populated metropolises of Florida; the densely-populated cities on I-75 from Louisville to Cleveland and the burgeoning cities of North Carolina; the Flint-Detroit-Toledo triangle; Indianapolis; Chicagoland; Milwaukee; the Twin Cities; Atlanta; Dallas; Houston... this also included such comparatively small entities as Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, and Fredericksburg in Virginia that do not pass my spell-check* that went Democratic. But this is where the people live, the part of America that does not qualify as the "Real America" of Sarah Palin. Americans are where the very artificial concrete and asphalt are, and not where the grain fields, cattle pastures, and tracts of lumber are. A few of those counties did go Republican (Orange County in California, Tarrant County in Texas, DeKalb County in Georgia, and the oddity of Colonial Heights, Virginia, which appears as an 'independent city'). Those 63 polities were enough to give Barack Obama the election. If Hillary Clinton should win, then it will be because she won much the same communities by similar or even larger margins. I see no indication that she is doing any better in Rural America than Barack Obama.
Some of the poorest counties in America went heavily Republican -- if they were predominantly white, as in parts of Kentucky that look like Third-World locations. But such famously rich communities as Loudoun County in Virginia, Westchester County in New York, Stamford County in Connecticut, and Marin and Santa Clara Counties in California went to Obama. The only really-rural state that went to Obama was Vermont.
*Spell-check simply fails to recognize towns too small to get recognition on their own unless they share their name with another significant community (as in Cleveland, Texas; California, Pennsylvania; or Warsaw, Indiana), the name of someone famous, including saints (Webster, New York; Churchill, Manitoba; San Pedro, California; Clinton, Oklahoma); or words that would pass spell check automatically (Poplar Bluff, Missouri; Cripple Creek, Colorado), or just simply common given names or surnames (Douglas, Arizona; Frederick, Maryland) . As an example, Paragould, Arkansas has a population of nearly 20,000 people, but it does not spell check unless you wish to add it to the list of correct spellings.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
