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That's not true. While in a state like Pennsylvania you can get an abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy, the issue is only indefinitely a state's issue. Congress could pass a law at any time codifying national abortion law that supersedes state law. They haven't yet, but I'd expect it to happen sometime this decade. Not to mention that, under a different composition of justices in the future, the Supreme Court could hear out the issue once more.
Now that the Supreme Court has officially removed abortion from federal law, it really falls on the states now, however you feel about the issue, meaning that candidates on the gubernatorial elections this year will have to talk about it while federal candidates will either sparingly talk about it or outright avoid it depending on their positions to abortion now that Roe has been removed as a constitution right.
It's not the wishes of a few posters here on this forum that's going to decide the midterms, it's going to depend on how voters vote this election and whether the voters want Republican and, many of whom don't want the law in the federal ranks, and Democrats, who want to bring back Roe as a constitutional right again. If abortion isn't the number one issue, no matter how many people feel strongly about it, if Dems hold on to abortion, as much of the needle that abortion may move, that may not be enough as economic, quality of life, cost of living, employment, and even national security and immigration are going to remain at the top of the list.
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Originally Posted by Muinteoir;64046943[B
]It may not be a "number one issue nationwide," but for the people for whom it is a number one issue, it is a HUGE issue. And they are a big enough contingent to move the needle in swing elections if enough turn out for that issue as their #1[/b].
The needle can say either way, depending on the mood and the sentiment of the country. If Laura Kelly can get a second term as governor in KS due to abortion, then she may do so, but everywhere else, it may not be as strong an issue as KS. While I do lean pro-choice, personally I hate to see abortion used as birth control, as there's many other options to prevent pregnancies other than abortions but I understand why abortions are needed and won't restrict a woman's right to choose because of that!
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Originally Posted by Muinteoir
For people who are pro-choice swing voters, yes, it will absolutely swing them toward Democrats. It is a question fundamental to freedom, and whether women should be as free as men in their bodily autonomy. As a man, I feel strongly that women should be as free as me.
There are also 2nd Amendment voters, economic voters, environmental voters, civil rights voters, and stock market voters. The pro-choice swing voters who you just described, as well as the other voters I described are called single issue voters and while abortion may be one of the strongest issues regarding women, overall, it hasn't even cracked the top or one of the top issues, as threats to democracy, the economy, and the cost of living/prices round out the top three!
Yes, women should be equal as far as voting and autonomy is concerned, but it doesn't mean that boys should be playing in girls' sports and vice versa, that's where I draw the line and if there are any Dems that can see that supporting that isn't just physically wrong, but morally wrong, then I'll support him/her. This is one of the reasons why I haven't been as gung-ho with my party like I was in the past!
wanderer34: He anticipates your counterpunch in his essay, which rings just about all the changes most of us Mastriano critics, Democrat and Republican alike, have made on this forum.
I also need to advise you that, while the point I was making about Pennsylvania vs. Missouri was indeed that the Keystone State had more industrial centers (and activity overall) than the Show-Me State — and you obvoiusly either missed or ignored my parenthetical noting that there were about twice as many Pennsylvanians as Missourians, you got my native state and some other explanations of Midwest history wrong when you wrote this:
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Plus PA is much bigger than MO with PA having 13 M people while MO, being a bigger state than PA in terms of land area (21st in land area), has about 6.1 M, less than half than what PA has in population. STL was mainly manufacturing and aerospace, while KC's economy revolved around it's stockyards. I'm thinking the reason why MO doesn't have as many regional cities as PA is because of the lack of railroads that where based in MO (Frisco is the only railroad that comes to mind based in MO and it was HQed in Springfield, MO; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...ouri_railroads), plus MO's central location compared to other states.
IL is the home of the IC (Illinois Central), the CNW (Chicago and Northwestern Line), the CBQ (Burlington Route), the MILW (Milwaukee Road), and the RI (Rock Island Route). I'd wager the reason why there were so many railroads HQed in Chicago as opposed to STL was because Chicago was a major port situated along Lake Michigan plus Chicago which is younger than STL was a boom town and STL, a northern outpost founded by the French in 1764, was stunted in growth (known to many STL natives as "the Great Divorce") despite growing as large as the fourth largest city in the 1900 US Census when the city of St Louis decided to sever ties with St Louis County and became an independent city and St Louis County placed it's new county seat in the small city of Clayton.
STL was never reliant on railroads, as the Mississippi River was the major conduit of commerce for that city, and the city's economic leaders felt that the N-S route was much more important than E-W and when the leaders wanted to have an E-W route, they had to deal with the IL government, who always favored their young booming city of Chicago over the older city on the west bank of the Mississippi, making it too late for STL to grow as a metropolis in the same vein as Chicago or even a city like Detroit (which is going through a similar decline and funny enough, STL lost more people than Detroit).
So even though STL's Union Station rivaled Chicago's Union Station during their heydays, Chicago's Union Station still serves a lot of the local and intercity routes today while STL's Union Station, which was resurrected as a shopping mall, is now closed again and it's fate is uncertain and replacing STL Union Station is the less prestigious Gateway Transportation Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatewa...rtation_Center)
There's a reason why PA has the world-famous Pennsylvania Railroad, the Reading Railroad, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (based in Pittsburgh), the Erie Lackawanna, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad (the latter two HQed in Cleveland and NYC, respectively), and being close enough to the Atlantic Ocean and Philadelphia being the largest freshwater port in America, made it fertile ground for the railroads to thrive, and the coal and steel industries helped the PA railroads thrive even further, even developing cities in the eastern portion of PA (Allentown, Bethlehem, Reading, Lancaster, and Harrisburg). There's no such industry in MO other than aerospace in St Louis or the KC stockyards!
Partly true, partly false — and more false than true as far as Missouri is concerned, especially that last sentence you wrote.
The true part: As with every other state that lies wholly between the Mississippi and the Rockies, agriculture plays a bigger role in their economies.
However: Even in the "agricultural Midwest" — the West North Central (or Plains) states, manufacturing is more important than agriculture in most state economies. Of the seven states in this region, agriculture ranks in the top ten sectors only in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa; in Missouri, it's the second smallest sector of the economy. Manufacturing is the largest sector in Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska (source). (BTW and FWIW, in Pennsylvania, manufacturing ranks second to real estate in economic importance.)
The railroads made commerce more efficient, but I wouldn't place as much weight on where they were headquartered as you do. And Kansas City was when I was young and is now second only to Chicago as a rail hub; in the era you speak of, it was served by the Union Pacific (which entered the city through acquisition of the Kansas Pacific), the Burlington, the Missouri Pacific (which was also headquartered in St. Louis), the Rock Island, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (which was headquartered in the second city in its name, 60 miles west of KC, which was its principal hub), the Chicago and Alton (later absorbed into the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio, which then merged with the Illinois Central), the Chicago and Northwestern, the Frisco (St. Louis and San Francisco), the Cotton Belt (St. Louis Southwestern, again, also headquartered in St. Louis but later moved), and the city's hometown railroad, the Kansas City Southern (now merged with the Canadian Pacific, making it the only railroad with operations in all three North American countries, as the KCS acquired a Mexican railroad in the 1990s, finally realizing builder Arthur Stilwell's vision of a railroad from Kansas City to Veracruz, the never-finished "Orient Line"). Kansas City Union Station, which also fell into disrepair in the 1980s, also had plenty of passenger traffic ("Service to Everywhere from the Heart of America"), and it is now part science museum, part entertainment complex, and part train station (Amtrak trains now stop in the station proper once again) after a massive restoration job in the 1990s paid for by taxpayers in both Missouri and Kansas (a rarity).
Industrially speaking, both of Missouri's two largest cities had more of it than you mention. In addition to aerospace, St. Louis was a major center of chemical manufacturing (Monsanto, Mallinckrodt) and home to both the country's largest brewer and the nation's largest single brewery (Anheuser-Busch's flagship facility. Kansas City was home of the nation's largest vending machine manufactuer (Vendo, since relocated to Dallas) and the company that invented the Crock-Pot (Rival Manufacturing, since absorbed into other firms). It also had a large steel mill (Sheffield Steel, Armco when I was growing up; its closure in 2001 became a minor issue in the 2012 Presidential race because a hedge fund Mitt Romney was an investor in had acquired its corporate parent), and it was home to the first branch assembly plant of a major Detroit automaker (Ford, which opened a plant in KC in 1912 and still produces vehicles there today. In terms of total vehicle production [cars and trucks], KC ranks second to Detroit). In car assembly alone, St. Louis ranked second to Detroit for decades.
So aerospace and the stockyards weren't the only industrial activity in Missouri. The difference between it and Pennsylvania, total population aside, is that its secondary cities weren't significant industrial centers (St. Joseph, the state's third largest city for much of the first half of the 20th century, did have some, but Columbia (which has grown large only recently based on the growth of the University of Missouri) and Springfield (the largest city in the Ozarks, whose economy rests on tourism) didn't have much. As I pointed out in my prior post, most of Missouri's other large cities are suburbs of either Kansas City or St. Louis (or were overrun by their suburban growth, as in the case of both St. Charles and Independence).
Anyway, you're just far enough off on enough stuff that I can't simply take what you say at face value, and this further demonstates it.
The "Great Divorce," btw, also is not what you say it is. Rather, the term refers to the City of St. Louis separating itself from St. Louis County in 1876. Had that not happened, Kansas City (which, like many Western cities but few in the East after World War I, was able to annex a lot of unincorporated territory around it after World War II) would not be the state's largest city today, for it too would probably have annexed much if not all of the surrounding county, and we'd be talking about a city of 1.5 million (equal in size to Philadelphia) rather than one of less than 300,000.
Yes, Roe v. Wade short-circuited a debate that was taking place state by state, and Dobbs basically returned the debate to the status quo ante Roe. But Roe nationalized the issue, and just because the Court ruled that abortion is not a Constitutional right doesn't mean that the national debate is over; Congress can indeed codify into law rights not necessarily guaranteed by the Constitution.
The conservatives who pursued overturning Roe apparently failed to consider that this might be the case. And as we now have examples of staunchly anti-abortion Republicans erasing their staunchly anti-abortion statements from their campaign Websites, abortion is an issue that's firing up voters on a national level.
If you are in the north and fly that flag, or wear their uniform, explain to me why you aren't neither racist nor just ignorant.
Furthermore, the confederate flag you typically see wasn't even the flag of the Confederate States government in Richmond, it was the battle flag of their army. It is a literal symbol of an army of traitors fighting against the United States and slaughtering US soldiers. There is almost nothing more disrespectful to the soldiers and veterans of our country.
Yes, Roe v. Wade short-circuited a debate that was taking place state by state, and Dobbs basically returned the debate to the status quo ante Roe. But Roe nationalized the issue, and just because the Court ruled that abortion is not a Constitutional right doesn't mean that the national debate is over; Congress can indeed codify into law rights not necessarily guaranteed by the Constitution.
Never said the debate wasn't over! I just said that it's not the strongest issue these midterms, there's a difference. If it was, then it would've been either number one or at least top 3 and according to the NBC News poll I just posted on the video, it's number 7.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
The conservatives who pursued overturning Roe apparently failed to consider that this might be the case. And as we now have examples of staunchly anti-abortion Republicans erasing their staunchly anti-abortion statements from their campaign Websites, abortion is an issue that's firing up voters on a national level.
I guess the reason why many of the anti-abortion Republicans are erasing the anti-abortion statements from their websites is because if seems to be that abortion just is not a strong issue to debate, so a lot of them aren[t even going to debate it and if they have to debate it, then they'll probably reference the recent SC ruling.
wanderer34: He anticipates your counterpunch in his essay, which rings just about all the changes most of us Mastriano critics, Democrat and Republican alike, have made on this forum.
I also need to advise you that, while the point I was making about Pennsylvania vs. Missouri was indeed that the Keystone State had more industrial centers (and activity overall) than the Show-Me State — and you obvoiusly either missed or ignored my parenthetical noting that there were about twice as many Pennsylvanians as Missourians, you got my native state and some other explanations of Midwest history wrong when you wrote this:
Partly true, partly false — and more false than true as far as Missouri is concerned, especially that last sentence you wrote.
The true part: As with every other state that lies wholly between the Mississippi and the Rockies, agriculture plays a bigger role in their economies.
However: Even in the "agricultural Midwest" — the West North Central (or Plains) states, manufacturing is more important than agriculture in most state economies. Of the seven states in this region, agriculture ranks in the top ten sectors only in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa; in Missouri, it's the second smallest sector of the economy. Manufacturing is the largest sector in Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska (source). (BTW and FWIW, in Pennsylvania, manufacturing ranks second to real estate in economic importance.)
A lot of people don't look at KS, IA, NE, or even MN as huge manufacturing states the way IL, IN, OH, and MI are seen. I'd be curious to know what type of manufacturing KS, IA, NE, and MN has. I'm well aware that MN has iron ore nearby Lake Superior and still mills around Duluth while around the Twin Cities, flour milling was the preferred industry around that area. As a result of the flour milling in the Twin Cities, I'm assuming that's the reason why the Twin Cities (until recently) didn't have such a large black (African American) population the way Detroit, Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee have large populations, where the strength of the black migrants was needed in those steel mills and auto factories
I'd still like to know what type of manufacturing KS, IA, NE, and MN has other than steel mills, glass factories, rubber and auto plants.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
The railroads made commerce more efficient, but I wouldn't place as much weight on where they were headquartered as you do. And Kansas City was when I was young and is now second only to Chicago as a rail hub; in the era you speak of, it was served by the Union Pacific (which entered the city through acquisition of the Kansas Pacific), the Burlington, the Missouri Pacific (which was also headquartered in St. Louis), the Rock Island, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (which was headquartered in the second city in its name, 60 miles west of KC, which was its principal hub), the Chicago and Alton (later absorbed into the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio, which then merged with the Illinois Central), the Chicago and Northwestern, the Frisco (St. Louis and San Francisco), the Cotton Belt (St. Louis Southwestern, again, also headquartered in St. Louis but later moved), and the city's hometown railroad, the Kansas City Southern (now merged with the Canadian Pacific, making it the only railroad with operations in all three North American countries, as the KCS acquired a Mexican railroad in the 1990s, finally realizing builder Arthur Stilwell's vision of a railroad from Kansas City to Veracruz, the never-finished "Orient Line"). Kansas City Union Station, which also fell into disrepair in the 1980s, also had plenty of passenger traffic ("Service to Everywhere from the Heart of America"), and it is now part science museum, part entertainment complex, and part train station (Amtrak trains now stop in the station proper once again) after a massive restoration job in the 1990s paid for by taxpayers in both Missouri and Kansas (a rarity).
I've compared Chicago and St Louis because both cities had similar economies back in their day as manufacturing powerhouses and it was Chicago that added banking, healthcare, tourism, conventions, and tech into it's economy while St Louis is still stuck with a lot of the older industries that that in it's heyday.
KC is a Midwestern city, but because of it's physical position, it's the least likely city to be Midwestern, and I can blame sports as to why I have trouble thinking of KC as not a midwestern city, but more of a western city like Denver (Chiefs and Broncos play in the same division, the AFC West, while the KC Royals used to play in the old AL West before being reshuffled into the AL Central Division)
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
Industrially speaking, both of Missouri's two largest cities had more of it than you mention. In addition to aerospace, St. Louis was a major center of chemical manufacturing (Monsanto, Mallinckrodt) and home to both the country's largest brewer and the nation's largest single brewery (Anheuser-Busch's flagship facility. Kansas City was home of the nation's largest vending machine manufactuer (Vendo, since relocated to Dallas) and the company that invented the Crock-Pot (Rival Manufacturing, since absorbed into other firms). It also had a large steel mill (Sheffield Steel, Armco when I was growing up; its closure in 2001 became a minor issue in the 2012 Presidential race because a hedge fund Mitt Romney was an investor in had acquired its corporate parent), and it was home to the first branch assembly plant of a major Detroit automaker (Ford, which opened a plant in KC in 1912 and still produces vehicles there today. In terms of total vehicle production [cars and trucks], KC ranks second to Detroit). In car assembly alone, St. Louis ranked second to Detroit for decades.
I know about Monsanto and of course you can't forget AB but AB is no longer a Fortune 500 company due to AB being acquired by InBev during a hostile takeover back over a decade ago plus the KC companies that you listed I don't even recall and didn't know KC even has a steel mill. KC is still well known for it's stockyard, that I can say. I do recall Ford having a car plant in St Louis, and am not sure what they're making out the St Louis plant.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
So aerospace and the stockyards weren't the only industrial activity in Missouri. The difference between it and Pennsylvania, total population aside, is that its secondary cities weren't significant industrial centers (St. Joseph, the state's third largest city for much of the first half of the 20th century, did have some, but Columbia (which has grown large only recently based on the growth of the University of Missouri) and Springfield (the largest city in the Ozarks, whose economy rests on tourism) didn't have much. As I pointed out in my prior post, most of Missouri's other large cities are suburbs of either Kansas City or St. Louis (or were overrun by their suburban growth, as in the case of both St. Charles and Independence).
Anyway, you're just far enough off on enough stuff that I can't simply take what you say at face value, and this further demonstates it.
I did recall that the railroads did help develop secondary cities like Allentown, Bethlehem, Reading, Scranton, and Wilkes-Barre to become either coal or steel centers. There's even a town south of Harrisburg called Steelton which used to manufacture iron and steel products. I did recall the subject that because of PA's position in the East Coast, that it industrialized much more than the Midwest and developed cities because of the railroads. I believe you stated that after KC and STL, the next largest cities were suburbs of KC and STL while the largest cities in PA are somewhat independent of either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, meaning those cities have their own MSAs (Reading is a part of the Philadelphia CSA).
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
The "Great Divorce," btw, also is not what you say it is. Rather, the term refers to the City of St. Louis separating itself from St. Louis County in 1876. Had that not happened, Kansas City (which, like many Western cities but few in the East after World War I, was able to annex a lot of unincorporated territory around it after World War II) would not be the state's largest city today, for it too would probably have annexed much if not all of the surrounding county, and we'd be talking about a city of 1.5 million (equal in size to Philadelphia) rather than one of less than 300,000.
"The Great Divorce" had a lot to do with providing service to the rest of St. Louis County (https://www.stlmag.com/news/politics...back-together/), and since St Louis County only had 27,000 in 1876 and since STL was already one of the biggest cities at that time, it wasn't a necessity to provide services to the rest of the mostly rural St Louis County, which is now the biggest county in MO at 1,004,125 according to the 2020 Census.
This was at a time when New York was bound to the island of Manhattan alone and Brooklyn and even Long Island City were independent cities and Chicago was a smaller, but bustling boomtown which surpassed St Louis in 1880 and became the preeminent city of the Midwest into the present.
If you doubled St Louis in land area (currently 61.72 sq. mi.) and had the same density today as it has today (let's pretend STL has 123.44 sq. mi), and you had the same socioeconomic issue that's going on in STL, since STL had a population of 856K back in 1950, double that and you would've had a city of 1.714 M people, making it the 6th largest city if that happened behind only NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, and Detroit and surpassing Baltimore and Cleveland from it's original position. Now, with the same density and socioeconomic issue that it's facing, it wouldn't be a city of 1.5 M liked you said, but rather a similar declining industrial city like Detroit of 596K, a far cry from the 1.5 M you fantasize about.
Even with the decline, having 596K would still make STL retain the largest city title in MO, and because of the manufacturing and the aerospace, STL still has the largest metro over KC, but I'm willing to wager that KC just has the better economy and the cleaner city as well as the better football team (the 1985 World Series gave KC one of their two WS titles over the NL's best baseball team, the Cardinals). Plus Country Club Plaza is the best shopping center in MO. Would love to check that place out once I get to KC again, there's no equivalent of Country Club Plaza in STL, and I'm referring to inside the city.
Also, STL's smaller size made it "seep down the cracks" when it comes to cities. Had it reached at least a million people, then people would've gave it much more notice as to why STL is declining since in 1950, there were only five American cities that attained that mark, but because STL didn't hit the million mark, and because of the arch, the brewery, and the Cardinals (the ABC's of St Louis as I'd like to call it), people don't look at the city outside of those three features, but would rather focus on those three than what people really see about STL.
Also Cleveland suffers the same problem as it never hit the million mark, and the reason why Baltimore gets so much flak is because it's the closest city to DC, the nations capital, and it's on the East coast, so while Baltimore never hit the million mark as well, it gets the most flak as still being a violent city while Detroit is the poster child of population decline and deindustrialization!
Last edited by wanderer34; 08-29-2022 at 02:02 PM..
Never said the debate wasn't over! I just said that it's not the strongest issue these midterms, there's a difference. If it was, then it would've been either number one or at least top 3 and according to the NBC News poll I just posted on the video, it's number 7.
But clearly there is a group of voters (almost totally female) for whom this has suddenly become an issue that will both motivate them to vote and influence their vote. Recall what the signs the Democrat who won that NY-19 special election read at the outset: "Choice is on the ballot." I suspect those staunchly anti-abortion Republicans in states where the public as a whole is less than staunchly anti-abortion walked back their statements on the basis of that squeaker.
I don't think that abortion will make that big a difference here in Pennsylvania, though. There are Republicans here who would like to ban it outright, too, but they remain a minority even within their own party.
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A lot of people don't look at KS, IA, NE, or even MN as huge manufacturing states the way IL, IN, OH, and MI are seen.
True, and not even I look at them as manufacturing states the way I look at the states bordering a Great Lake (well, Minnesota is one of those too, thanks to Lake Superior) as manufacturing states. I do call the West North Central states "the agricultural Midwest" to distinguish it from "the industrial Midwest" — and while we're at it, let's not forget that most of Illinois and Indiana are covered in amber waves of grain as well, to further cloud things.
I didn't bother crunching the gross state product figures on that site to determine what percentage of the state economy is manufacturing-based, but I do suspect that the percentage is higher in the states east of the Mississippi than of those west of i=r.
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I'd be curious to know what type of manufacturing KS, IA, NE, and MN has. I'm well aware that MN has iron ore nearby Lake Superior and still mills around Duluth while around the Twin Cities, flour milling was the preferred industry around that area. As a result of the flour milling in the Twin Cities, I'm assuming that's the reason why the Twin Cities (until recently) didn't have such a large black (African American) population the way Detroit, Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee have large populations, where the strength of the black migrants was needed in those steel mills and auto factories
I'd still like to know what type of manufacturing KS, IA, NE, and MN has other than steel mills, glass factories, rubber and auto plants.
Well, for starters, yes, grain milling, grain processing, and meatpacking are all classed as industrial activities, even though all of them require agriculture for their raw materials. (BTW, Kansas City ranks second to Minneapolis as a grain-processing and -milling center, but it doesn't show up on most people's radar screens because the two titans in the industry, General Mills and Pillsbury (now one), are both based in Minneapolis. If you've ever seen Heckers flour ("Unbleached Forever!") on your supermarket shelf, however, you've seen a grain product made in Kansas City.)
And the stockyards have disappeared from Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago and St. Louis (yes, St. Louis had them too) because the meatpacking now takes place next to the feedlot. That means that industry has shifted to the rural parts of Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Iowa Beef Processors is one of the largest producers of boxed beef for restaruants and supermarkets; another industry leader is Excel Fresh Meats (Cargill Meat Solutions), a Wichita-based subsidiary of Wayzata, Minn. (Minneapolis suburb)-based Cargill Corporation, one of the biggest grain processors whose name you rarely see. (The next time you buy a chub of ground beef at your supermaket, read the label to see who produced it; it's probably this company).
Another major industry in Kansas that I will bet you don't associate with that state is aviation. Wichita is the center of the general-aviation airplane industry. The city, which calls itself the "Air Capital of the World," is home to Textron Aviation, which owns the two general-airplane manufacturers founded there, Beechcraft and Cessna and also has facilities of (Canadian) Bombardier and (Anglo-French) Airbus (which I didn't know was even involved in general aviation). Note the figures on that page I linked. The state also has a GM auto assembly plant in Kansas City, Kan. (where it has operated since the 1930s), and (back to grain processing for a bit) Sunshine Biscuits, founded in Kansas City, Mo., as the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company and now part of Kellogg Co., has a large bakery in KCK's Fairfax Industrial District — which, I see from its website, was established the year after work on the Country Club Plaza began and is the first planned industrial district in the country. You can read about some of the other things manufactured there on that webpage.
As for Nebraska and Iowa, I don't have time to look up stuff right now, but regarding Minnesota: You do know what the three M's in 3M Corporation's name originally stood for, right?
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KC is a Midwestern city, but because of it's physical position, it's the least likely city to be Midwestern, and I can blame sports as to why I have trouble thinking of KC as not a midwestern city, but more of a western city like Denver (Chiefs and Broncos play in the same division, the AFC West, while the KC Royals used to play in the old AL West before being reshuffled into the AL Central Division)
I once wrote an essay for Phillymag in which I argued that KC(MO) finally became cool and self-confident when it decided to embrace rather than run away from its cowtown heritage, so I hear you there. But as the city is also the closest big city to the geographic center of the Lower 48, and it's located in the only slave state in the Louisiana Territory north of 36º 30' north latitude (Missouri's southern border save for the Bootheel), I also consider it (and Missouri) the nation in microcosm. But I also call St. Louis "the last great city of the East" and its cross-state rival "the first great city of the West".
(snippage; historically, KC has been a branch-plant town. The best-known companies based there were TWA [Howard Hughes moved its HQ to New York after he bought it, but KC remained its base of operations until its demise], Hallmark Cards and Russell Stover Candies [Sunshine Biscuits HQ had moved out of the city where it was born by the time I was born]. Only family-held Hallmark remains as a standalone company; the family who owned Russell Stover, one of whose sons was a high school classmate of mine, sold it to Swiss chocolte-maker Lindt about 10 years ago. It was also the home of Sprint before T-Mobile swallowed it up. One of the biggest companies headquartered there now is a medical-records-technology company you've never heard of; like Target does with Minneapolis, this company uses Kansas City as a selling point to attract talent to its HQ)
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If you doubled St Louis in land area (currently 61.72 sq. mi.) and had the same density today as it has today (let's pretend STL has 123.44 sq. mi), and you had the same socioeconomic issue that's going on in STL, since STL had a population of 856K back in 1950, double that and you would've had a city of 1.714 M people, making it the 6th largest city if that happened behind only NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, and Detroit and surpassing Baltimore and Cleveland from it's original position. Now, with the same density and socioeconomic issue that it's facing, it wouldn't be a city of 1.5 M liked you said, but rather a similar declining industrial city like Detroit of 596K, a far cry from the 1.5 M you fantasize about.
You need not engage in such mental gymnastics. All you need to do is undo the Great Divorce and make St. Louis City and St. Louis County one (and also extinguish the scores of cities in the latter). That combined jurisdiction would right now have a population of about 1.3 million. The figures I gave in my prior post were very gross approximations but not wildly off the mark in either case.
(rest snipped) Greater Kansas City will likely remain smaller than Metro St. Louis for decades, but it has been growing less slowly than Metro St. Louis since the 1990s.
Now, we've strayed quite far afield from Pennsylvania. Let's get this back on track. The two states have similarities, but yes, they also have some big differences, as both you and I acknowledge, and those differences go a long way towards explaining why Missouri is red and Pennsylvania purple. But once again, the urban counties in both (Jackson, St. Louis County, St. Louis City, Boone, Buchanan but not Greene in Missouri) are blue while the much larger rural territory isn't. However, a greater share of Missouri's population (including suburban Kansas Citians, who are to the right of suburban St. Louisans) than Pennsylvania's lives in the red territory. And the only suburbanites in Pennsylvania who have gone solid red are those in the Land of the Forgotten around Allegheny County.
But clearly there is a group of voters (almost totally female) for whom this has suddenly become an issue that will both motivate them to vote and influence their vote. Recall what the signs the Democrat who won that NY-19 special election read at the outset: "Choice is on the ballot." I suspect those staunchly anti-abortion Republicans in states where the public as a whole is less than staunchly anti-abortion walked back their statements on the basis of that squeaker.
The new NY-19 will change from the current map ([url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%27s_19th_congressional_district#/map/1"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%27s_19th_congressional_district#/map/1[/URL)] to the new one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Yo...istrict#/map/3), meaning that while it will still hold on to Columbia County, a Democrat stronghold inside a more competitive Upstate NY, it will pick up more counties further west such as Broome County, which went for Trump back in 2016, but backed Biden in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broome...t_and_politics). The only other solidly NYS Dem county the new NY-19 will pick up, is Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, NY, the base of Cornell University, an Ivy League university (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tompki...t_and_politics).
Pat Ryan will run inside the new NY-18 district and he's going to face Colin Schmitt in the general election and I've talked about this before in one of my last posts that Schmitt, being from Orange County, NY has a numerical advantage, considering that Orange County, NY is a Republican ran county in comparison to Ulster County, which is Democrat ran, and if it comes down to counties and Ryan solely relies on Ulster County to boost his changes, he'll more than likely lose because in the new NY-18, Orange County makes up about 56% of the new NY-18, and Ulster County constitutes 25%, so Ryan will have to work even harder to make it a close election, and it will be a close election, but Schmitt has the numerical advantage because of Orange County and who's running Orange as opposed to Ulster.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
I don't think that abortion will make that big a difference here in Pennsylvania, though. There are Republicans here who would like to ban it outright, too, but they remain a minority even within their own party.
That's because in SE PA, most of the Reps are basically either center or sometimes left-of-center as opposed the Western PA Reps, who tend to be right or sometimes far right (Santorum anybody?)
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
True, and not even I look at them as manufacturing states the way I look at the states bordering a Great Lake (well, Minnesota is one of those too, thanks to Lake Superior) as manufacturing states. I do call the West North Central states "the agricultural Midwest" to distinguish it from "the industrial Midwest" — and while we're at it, let's not forget that most of Illinois and Indiana are covered in amber waves of grain as well, to further cloud things.
I didn't bother crunching the gross state product figures on that site to determine what percentage of the state economy is manufacturing-based, but I do suspect that the percentage is higher in the states east of the Mississippi than of those west of i=r.
The Duluth-Superior is known for iron and steel products and both cities at the western end of Lake Superior are major ports of the iron and steel trade. Most of the steel that was used to build Chicago's skyscraper and automobiles for Detroit's auto factories came from that region via boats.
You're right when it comes to the manufacturing plants, everything east of the Mississippi is either heavy machinery, iron and steel, or automobiles (Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland, etc.)!
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
Well, for starters, yes, grain milling, grain processing, and meatpacking are all classed as industrial activities, even though all of them require agriculture for their raw materials. (BTW, Kansas City ranks second to Minneapolis as a grain-processing and -milling center, but it doesn't show up on most people's radar screens because the two titans in the industry, General Mills and Pillsbury (now one), are both based in Minneapolis. If you've ever seen Heckers flour ("Unbleached Forever!") on your supermarket shelf, however, you've seen a grain product made in Kansas City.)
And the stockyards have disappeared from Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago and St. Louis (yes, St. Louis had them too) because the meatpacking now takes place next to the feedlot. That means that industry has shifted to the rural parts of Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Iowa Beef Processors is one of the largest producers of boxed beef for restaruants and supermarkets; another industry leader is Excel Fresh Meats (Cargill Meat Solutions), a Wichita-based subsidiary of Wayzata, Minn. (Minneapolis suburb)-based Cargill Corporation, one of the biggest grain processors whose name you rarely see. (The next time you buy a chub of ground beef at your supermaket, read the label to see who produced it; it's probably this company).
I'm well aware that the stockyards in Chicago are a distant memory and there used to be an el branch which used to take people from the Loop all the way to the Stockyards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Yards_branch). It would've been pretty cool has the CTA saved the Stock Yards Branch as well as the Kenwood Branch, but like other branches in Chicago, as well as the old Myrtle Ave line and the 5th Ave line in Brooklyn, as well as the Third Ave line in the Bronx, many of those old train lines met the wrecking ball due to "progress". Go figure!
And let's not forget the legacy of the Stock Yards. The Chicago Bulls were named after the Chicago Stock Yards biggest product: cattle! Plus the Bulls were the third NBA team in Chicago after the Stags folded and the Zephyrs moved to Baltimore and became the Bullets, only to move once more to nearby DC and won their only NBA title in 1978.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
Another major industry in Kansas that I will bet you don't associate with that state is aviation. Wichita is the center of the general-aviation airplane industry. The city, which calls itself the "Air Capital of the World," is home to Textron Aviation, which owns the two general-airplane manufacturers founded there, Beechcraft and Cessna and also has facilities of (Canadian) Bombardier and (Anglo-French) Airbus (which I didn't know was even involved in general aviation). Note the figures on that page I linked. The state also has a GM auto assembly plant in Kansas City, Kan. (where it has operated since the 1930s), and (back to grain processing for a bit) Sunshine Biscuits, founded in Kansas City, Mo., as the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company and now part of Kellogg Co., has a large bakery in KCK's Fairfax Industrial District — which, I see from its website, was established the year after work on the Country Club Plaza began and is the first planned industrial district in the country. You can read about some of the other things manufactured there on that webpage.
As for Nebraska and Iowa, I don't have time to look up stuff right now, but regarding Minnesota: You do know what the three M's in 3M Corporation's name originally stood for, right?
Im well aware that 3M is based out of MN (St Paul, actually). I've always felt that Dayton, OH was dubbed "the Air Capital of the World" since the Wright Brothers had their first flight back in 1903, but never really associated Wichita so strongly with aviation the way I've associated the Gem City with aviation. I guess that's the East Coast (or shall I say the Mid-East bias).
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
I once wrote an essay for Phillymag in which I argued that KC(MO) finally became cool and self-confident when it decided to embrace rather than run away from its cowtown heritage, so I hear you there. But as the city is also the closest big city to the geographic center of the Lower 48, and it's located in the only slave state in the Louisiana Territory north of 36º 30' north latitude (Missouri's southern border save for the Bootheel), I also consider it (and Missouri) the nation in microcosm. But I also call St. Louis "the last great city of the East" and its cross-state rival "the first great city of the West".
Politically, OH is considered the major bellwether as to how major presidential elections will turn out and with the exception of 2020 (allegedly), it's said that whoever wins OH, wins the presidency. That fact used to rankle me, considering that OH had major cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, as well as industrial cities like Akron, Youngstown, and Toledo. I recalled seeing a map during my younger years back in the 2000s and seeing practically all of the American South with MO and surprisingly enough OH on it, and I recalled that I could somewhat understand why MO was added (Nelly and Chingy had what I presumed to be southern-sounding accents and both rappers carried themselves the same way as any southern rapper would with the gold teeth and the grills), I was surprised why OH would be added on that map, as it was a part of the Union during the Civil War and black slaves seeking freedom would swim across the Ohio River into Cincinnati and declare freedom over there, but what's not surprising is that especially in southern and even southeastern OH across from WV and PA, there are regions where confederate sympathizers do inhabit and some of the poorest regions are based in that portion of OH, as well as WV and parts of the southern tier of PA. That region is called Appalachia.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
(snippage; historically, KC has been a branch-plant town. The best-known companies based there were TWA [Howard Hughes moved its HQ to New York after he bought it, but KC remained its base of operations until its demise], Hallmark Cards and Russell Stover Candies [Sunshine Biscuits HQ had moved out of the city where it was born by the time I was born]. Only family-held Hallmark remains as a standalone company; the family who owned Russell Stover, one of whose sons was a high school classmate of mine, sold it to Swiss chocolte-maker Lindt about 10 years ago. It was also the home of Sprint before T-Mobile swallowed it up. One of the biggest companies headquartered there now is a medical-records-technology company you've never heard of; like Target does with Minneapolis, this company uses Kansas City as a selling point to attract talent to its HQ)
KC was also the home to AMC Theatres, which moved across the state line to Overland Park, KS. Also, Sprint was associated with KC (also a Overland Park, KS company), and I'm not completely sure if KC and MO are suffering an issue with their companies but I can understand why companies in KC move to KS and it has something to do with the taxation system in MO and yet another reason why St Louis isn't as strong economically as it was in it's heyday.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
You need not engage in such mental gymnastics. All you need to do is undo the Great Divorce and make St. Louis City and St. Louis County one (and also extinguish the scores of cities in the latter). That combined jurisdiction would right now have a population of about 1.3 million. The figures I gave in my prior post were very gross approximations but not wildly off the mark in either case.
If you're thinking of amalgamation of the city and county, it's not going to happen anytime soon, especially considering of combining a 61.7 sq. mi. city like St Louis with a 508 sq. mi. county like St Louis County to produce a "city" of 1.3 million is far fetched, considering that while there have been cities that have expanded their boundaries with most of the county such as Charlotte with Mecklenburg County, NC and Jacksonville with Duval County, FL.
Charlotte is rapidly growing because of it's ties with the banking industry, and next to Atlanta, will be a world-class city for years to come since it's the essential, not an actual capital of the Carolinas, while Jacksonville, which has more land than Charlotte, is a Navy town as well and it also has robust growth, but Duval County isn't even the biggest county when it comes to population (honors go to Miami-Dade County, second place to Broward County, and third place to Palm Beach County). Jacksonville may be the "biggest city in FL" but county wise, Miami-Dade is the top dog in FL and Miami will be alongside LA and Chicago as an Alpha city according to GaWC when the new rankings come up later this year after getting shafted to Beta + due to COVID.
Nashville, after incorporating all of Davidson County is the "it" city in TN after Memphis laid claim to being the biggest city in TN for so long, and being the capital of TN helps Nashville as well as being in the middle of the state and the capital of country music is fitting for Nashville. Plus having two of the three sports teams does help Nashville achieve some fame in the sporting world.
If St Louis were to amalgamate all of St Louis County into one giant city of St Louis, with 569.7 sq. mi., then you'd have a "city" which had declined by 2.5% if you added St Louis city and St Louis County, since St Louis city declined by 5.5% and St Louis county only grew sparingly by 0.5%, and while it would be nice to finally have Monsanto, Centene, and Panera inside your "city limits" and contributing to the expanded city's coffers, nonetheless, the city would still decline , albeit not as quickly as St Louis city, it will still decline because the local economy is not as strong as Charlotte, Jacksonville, and Nashville. Columbus and Indianapolis are also growing, but it remains to be seen whether those two cities will be even more relevant in the future.
DC, Atlanta, and Miami are much smaller cities that the former cities I've mentioned but the latter cities are the anchors of the sixth (DC), eighth (Atlanta), and ninth (Miami) largest MSAs and the third (DC), tenth (Atlanta), and eleventh (Miami) largest CSAs in the nation. THey're smaller cities, but I see the metro areas as much more significant nowadays as opposed to just the population and land areas of the cities alone, much the reason why Duval County, FL, Davidson County, TN, Franklin County, OH, Marion County, IN, and Mecklenburg County, NC wanted to amalgamate with much of their cities because they wanted to seem bigger than what their metro areas dictated and also it was a pissing and phallic contest on who's bigger, when in actually DC, Atlanta, and Miami and much more relevant cities than Charlotte, Nashville, and Jacksonville.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
[(rest snipped) Greater Kansas City will likely remain smaller than Metro St. Louis for decades, but it has been growing less slowly than Metro St. Louis since the 1990s.
It remains to be seen whether KC becomes the biggest metro area over St Louis. All I can say is that KC has a stronger local economy than St Louis. Over 60 to 70 years ago, one would say St Louis was stronger because of such companies such as Buster Brown, Purina, McDonnell-Douglas, and many other companies based in that city. Now, McD-D doesn't exist anymore, Purina was acquired by Nestlé, a Swiss food conglomerate, Buster Brown went the way of the dinosaur and even the most famous St Louis company, Anheuser-Busch was victim to the infamous corporate takeover from Belgian conglomerate InBev back in 2008. Nowadays, economically and physically speaking, St Louis is a shell of it's old self while KC is steadily growing to the point where it may grow as the largest metro area in MO as KC is already the largest city in MO and the metro area will follow.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
Now, we've strayed quite far afield from Pennsylvania. Let's get this back on track. The two states have similarities, but yes, they also have some big differences, as both you and I acknowledge, and those differences go a long way towards explaining why Missouri is red and Pennsylvania purple. But once again, the urban counties in both (Jackson, St. Louis County, St. Louis City, Boone, Buchanan but not Greene in Missouri) are blue while the much larger rural territory isn't. However, a greater share of Missouri's population (including suburban Kansas Citians, who are to the right of suburban St. Louisans) than Pennsylvania's lives in the red territory. And the only suburbanites in Pennsylvania who have gone solid red are those in the Land of the Forgotten around Allegheny County.
Ike won the rest of the western states including his home state of KS twice, as well as the Northeast from ME to VA and even the state of FL twice, while Adlai couldn't win his home state of IL. I believe the reason why Stevenson overall didn't really gain as much support as Ike was because of his 1952 running mate for veep John Spankman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sparkman), of AL and Estes Kefauver of TN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estes_Kefauver), who was less racist than Sparkman and arguable more liberal than his 1952 contemporary , but even he had difficulty accepting racial integration and wasn't a strong running mate to Adlai, and as a result, Adlai got spanked by Eisenhower twice including in his home state of IL twice. Prior to the 1952 and 1956 elections, Adlai Stevenson was known as an anti-corruption governor, and although he was a Democrat, and many in the Chicago political machine were Democrats, both Stevenson and Chicago never gotten along and the 1952 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_U...on_in_Illinois) election came within winning Cook County by 16,519 votes and the 1956 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_U...on_in_Illinois) literally spanked Adlai 56.8% to 42.95% in Cook County and therefore winning the rest of the state of IL.
And as for the black vote, while Ike never really won a majority of the black vote, he did manage to get the highest percentage of the black vote in modern American history as a Republican, especially considering that blacks in the South didn't have voting rights after 1965 and blacks in the Northern cities of Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit may have voted more for the Dems because of the political machines in those cities at the time.
Here's two charts station how blacks were registered:
And here's how blacks voted in each election starting from 1936 to 2004:
Out of all the political figures that ran for president since 1936, although it seems like an equal number of blacks were registered Dem and Rep in the 1930's and 1940's, many voted for FRD's policies in the 1930's and 1940's because of the Great Depression and it was Eleanor, not FDR, who drove the black votes into the Democrats. Truman won the black vote in 1948, but didn't want to run a third term and Ike won in 1952 and in 1956 won the highest share that any Republican presidential candidate has won in modern history with 39%:
It wasn't until 1960 when JFK and his running mate LBJ won the black vote in 1960, and LBJ would win the highest share in the 20th Century with 94% (thanks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act) until Obama beat him with the highest share of the black vote in American history with 95%. Biden won the black vote in 2020 with 90% (https://en.as.com/en/2020/11/10/late...58_639997.html), but one wonders whether he'll win it with the same percentage in 2024, considering that Biden has been sluggish in the favorability polls by most demographics.
This entire thread wouldn't exist if David McCormick had won the GOP primary. Trump is wrecking the GOP to satisfy his own wounded ego.
It will be seen whether Trump fortifies the GOP or wrecks it, but with a 95% success rate of congressional and senatorial candidates, it's not the party of Reagan no more, the GOP is officially the party of Trump!!!
And here's another tidbit about Biden's first year and black voters courtesy of Cornel West:
More Republicans abandoning Mastriano, including the PA House Speaker.
Good. Hopefully the point (Mastriano is a far-right looney) is driving home.
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