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Look at how spread out they are across the entire USA comparing to liberals whose presence seems to be more centered around certain coasts...
People in San Francisco could all look at each other with confidence and say yeah, this place will always be heavily democrat., and they
d be right. Look at how close they all are to each other.
If every big shot west coast GOPer (like Michael Savage) moved to the same county, could that make it a bulletproof conservative stronghold? (whether the county they agreed on would be in CA, AZ, NV, etc)
Part of the logic is that conservative snowbirds from the midwest and other cold areas might choose such a county to live in as their winter home.
Although I'm not a GOPer exactly, I basically just don't want a society where few people make decisions for many.
Uh...look how many "conservative" counties there are in the US based on the 2008 elections. There are states that are almost entirely Republican.
Conservatives just tend to not want to live in the bigger urban centers--that's their choice.
Looking at that electoral map one would have thought McCain had won judging from the "red" counties. The nine most populous states contain slightly more than half of the total population. Out of those 9 states Obama won 7 of them.
Conservatives seem to like rural states if you follow that map.
Conservatives seem to like rural states if you follow that map.
Perhaps the most common logical fallacy in these forums is people who argue that if A and B are both reported in the media to be true, then A must be the cause of B.
Do you think conservatives went to the rural states in order to enjoy the company of other conservatives? Or could it be the other way around, they were already in rural states, and became conservatives based on their observations and analyses from their vantage points.
Be careful how you assign cause and effect when you detect two facts that seem to be simultaneously true. Your two facts may be coincidentally independent of each other, and even if there is cause and effect, how can you be sure which came first? And even their apparent factuality could be deceptive, colored by your preconceived bias.
Do you think that so many Americans have quit their job and sold their house and uprooted their family, just in order to live in an area where there were 55% instead of 45% sharing their political viewpoint? That Oklahoma is so full of people fleeing from Massachusetts who got fed up with liberals shopping at their WalMart, that it has made Oklahoma a red state?
First of all, I'm not a conservative, so don't take what I say as speaking for the political right.
But I question your original premise. Are conservatives not, in fact, in as close proximity to each other as liberals? Certainly, it is correct that most big cities are heavily filled with liberals. I live in a large city, and I appreciate the preponderance of like-minded individuals around. But I suspect that if I moved to a small town in Kansas (or even pennsylvania for that matter), I would mostly be around more conservative folks, which would be a nice feeling were I conservative.
So I would say that conservatives probably do live in close proximity to one another, or at least about as much so as liberals. But the likelihood of a large city containing mostly conservatives seems unlikely, since the urban lifestyle itself seems to be a big draw for liberals.
In the South (from the Atlantic coast to Texas), the counties that Obama carried were mostly majority-black or Hispanic. For example, northwest Mississippi along the Mississippi River (the "Delta", where I live) is mostly black.
As people have noted, the trends are not universal. Nonwhite rural areas, along with some rural portions of the northeast and upper midwest, lean to the left. Admittedly, it's harder to find conservative urban areas. The only I'm aware of are the ultra-orthodox communities in the NYC area.
I think there's a couple of inter-related things which cause the pattern of rural area tending to be conservative, and cities tending to be liberal.
1. I think cities tend to make people more liberal to an extent, at least socially, as you can't help but be exposed to people with different ideas, religions, economic backgrounds, etc.
2. Liberal people who grow up in the country tend to be unsatisfied with their hometowns and head for the city. The reverse doesn't seem to happen as much with conservatives, even if they grow up in podunk liberal places.
3. Conservatives avoid migrating to the city due to a whole series of preconceptions. I'm not going to go into them now, because I don't want to start a flame war.
That said, there are undoubtedly conservative cities. Places like Colorado Springs, for example. Cities which grew up around military installations, like San Diego, leaned right as well, although that's changing. Most of these areas have a lot of suburban zones within their city limits, however, which means they aren't a "city" in the classic sense.
Even in overwhelmingly white areas, which tend to be conservative, the cities will always be a little more liberal, because the liberal locals tend to relocate there, as do out-of-staters who don't fit in with local culture.
It's simpler than that. Immigrants and rebellious youths settle in cities. Conservatives hate immigrants and rebellious youths because they embrace different sets of values which are intolerable to the very root principle of "conservatism", which means to unquestioningly keep things the way they have always been. So cities celebrate toleration for varied lifestlyes, and the rural hinterlands abhor it.
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