The urban electorate

The United States is 82% Urban. The Democrat Party is increasingly becoming the party of the City. The Republican Party must reach out to people living in the cities or face extinction. Barack Obama is part of a new wave. He is a modern city raised adult. He appeals to urban voters. If the Democrats continue to field candidates like him, the Republicans will go a long time before a return to the White House.

"The math of assuming cities will go to Democrats and thus not bothering to craft a message aimed at the people who live there is just a losing game going forward for Republicans. And it's only going to get worse as urban populations increase and become more concentrated." - Somer Mathis, The Atlantic Cities, 7 Nov 2012



Loving your neighbors
"If politics mean anything to you, where you live might just be an important consideration. People by nature prefer to interact with those most like themselves. Unless you enjoy arguing with neighbors, or living "behind enemy lines," you might want to examine the politics of a city before moving there. If nothing else, it will lower your blood pressure by not making you yell at the TV or shred the local newspaper. A 2005 study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranked the political leanings of every city in the US. The study used the voting patterns in cities with populations over 100,000. Below are the top 25 liberal and conservative cities in descending order."

Does density cause liberalism?
"Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. As they grew, their borders were constrained by those of the smaller cities and towns that surrounded them. That’s not the case with many Southern and Western cities. Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, for instance, are vast in terms of land area, encompassing suburban and even semi-rural neighborhoods as well as urban ones.

That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. I see four possible categories of explanations. 1) Liberals build denser, more walkable cities (e.g., Portlanders supporting public transit and policies that limit sprawl). 2) Liberals are drawn to cities that are already dense and walkable (think college grads migrating to Minneapolis rather than San Antonio, or young families settling down in Lowell, Mass., with a walk score of 64.1, rather than Fort Wayne, Ind., with a walk score of 39. 3) Walkable cities make people more liberal (by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors and to rely on highly visible city services such as parks and subways). 4) The same factors that make cities dense and walkable also make them liberal."