12-04-2019, 01:27 PM
(12-04-2019, 12:37 PM)Snowflake1996 Wrote:(12-03-2019, 01:16 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-01-2019, 01:32 PM)Snowflake1996 Wrote: The overwhelming bulk of support for Donald Trump and the GOP lie in non-rural areas. These include exurbs, suburbs, small and medium sized cities, and even large cities.
Just looking at large cities alone:
- Los Angeles County had more Trump voters than the entire state of Kansas.
- Cook County IL had more Trump voters than the entire state of Idaho.
- Brooklyn + The Bronx combined had more Trump voters than Wyoming.
This isn’t to say Trump voters don’t have actual legitimate grievances. But in terms of raw numbers, the vast majority of them are not living in rural areas or small towns below the size of 20k people. Most live in metros the size of 50k-100k people or more.
You're comparing pumpkins and grapes. Sure, there are a lot of Trump voters in highly populated areas, but the percentage is what's important -- not the absolute number. Likewise, low population areas can only have so many voters, by definition. I live in the exurbs, and it's Trump, end-to-end. That's true of low and high education individuals, I might add. The two closest cities are small-to-medium size, with one being Purple (~80,000) and the other solidly Blue (~110,000). Their burbs are both very Red. I think that's typical.
My point is that the vast majority of Trump supporters even in red states do not live in small towns and rural areas. States west of the Mississippi have extremely parsley populated rural areas yet 2/3’s of them voted for Trump over Clinton. Even east of the Mississippi River where rural areas are more populated still have more Trump voters in the exurbs/suburbs/small to large sized cities than in the countryside. The average Republican in Tennessee lives either in a city the population of 50k or more or in the metro of Nashville or Memphis. Trump won the Midwest because of the shift of non-college educated whites to him primarily mid and larger sized cities (since most midwestern suburbs are already fairly Republican outside of like, Chicago’s or Dane county WI).
I just find this conversation around rural/small town Trump supporters to be very silly given that a strong majority of Republicans don’t live there. If the GOP were centered primarily in rural America then they’d be a minority Party.
No, this is not silly at all. You're not getting the point. The electoral college determines our elections for president; have you ever heard of it? Those small town Trump voters determine the outcome of our elections. Republican voters in big blue cities are grossly outvoted these days. They don't matter, since their electoral votes go to Democrats. "Rural" in this case also means small towns and cities. These are in "red" counties that vote Republican by 3,4 or 5 to one or more. There are thousands of them. They turn their states red, and they often turn purple states red. And speaking of color, these voters are almost all white, and they are predominantly non-college educated.
The Trump vote that turned blue states red in the midwest came primarily from areas outside the big cities.
In normally red states, like Oklahoma, Texas or Tennessee, the big cities there vote blue by narrow margins, or vote red in a smaller margin than in the more rural counties. In these bluer portions of red states, I've seen that in most cases they voted for Trump by a smaller margin than they voted for Romney, while in the rural areas the margin for Trump increased over that for Romney.