I never saw a study on this, never gave it much thought either untill it popped into my head today. Has anyone else ever looked into this? When you look at a graphic depicting the geographic location of liberals vs conservatives. Why is it that liberals tend to be concentrated in urban areas and conservatives tend to be located in rural areas? Anyone?

Education levels for one thing. Percent of population with a bachelor's, percent of population with a master's. There tend to be more college educated folk in urban areas.

One other thought - it's like shooting fish in a barrel to convince someone in an urban area, say San Francisco that the liberal view of the world is correct because they're paying way too much for housing and food and living cheek-to-jowl with their fellow man. Overpopulation of the planet is a tough idea to sell in a rural area.

FDR was voted in 4 times by people who were not necessarily college educated (ie my grand-parents) , so the Great Depression had a lot to do with the liberal vote for New Deal back then. The first "middle class suburb" was Levittown , NY in the late '40's after WWII, and I'm not quite sure who voted for Truman and Ike back then , the city or country folk , or suburbanites?

What Ping said. Add the number of minorities and union workers in urban areas. College degrees were much less common in FDR's day and so less of a factor. The Dust Bowl and the Depression also made his position unique.

Minorities are concentrated in cities.
Gun owners are not.

First off, lets have a look at how the original question is framed.

The title of this thread is....





Does anyone see any issues with this statement?
Well, it implies that Liberals gravitate to Urban Areas. Wouild this then imply that a kid born on a farm in central Kansas, if he grew up having Liberal ideals, would he them be more inclined to move to the city, then say, his neighbor that just wants to get out of Hickville?


Conversly, would a kid that was born and raised in a city that grew up with a conservative bent, would he then be more likely to want a rural existance? I'm not making any assumptions, I'm asking questions. I consider it a mistake the way the question frames the question, as it tends to lead towards a conclusion.




Try this then.

Why is it that Large Urban areas tend to be more liberal,
while the vast urban areas tend to be more conservative?

Why then is it, that most southern states tend to be more Conservative
while the northern states are generally more Liberal?

Also, why is it that States in the middle of the country tend to be more Conservative,
while coastal states tend to be more Liberal?





I strongly suspect that these questions are all the same, and that the answers are not about location, and much as they are deep in the demographics, that inlude such things as average level of education, average GPA, accessability to healthcare and other social services, etc etc, as well as the basic social history of the area in question.

Perhaps more conservatives are in rural areas because farmers are in rural areas (farmers are business owners) . Small business business owners tend to be in suburbia , so do they lean left or right?