Why do urban areas vote democratic

However, there is a significant gap between men and women on views about the obstacles women face to get ahead. Women are far more likely than men to say significant obstacles still exist that make it harder for women to get ahead. And this gender gap is consistent across all types of communities. Even after controlling for party, the gender gap persists across community types.

In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.

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You note that Republicans in the US routinely vote against national transportation projects like high-speed rail or funding for urban mass transit in a way conservative parties in continental Europe rarely do. The whole nature of debate in the US has been structured by this urban-rural divide in the political process. What I think is so interesting about Europe is that this is not at all the case; this is not the way political battles are fought in Europe.

There are parties of the centre right that win in many urban neighbourhoods throughout the continent. What can be done to make this element of the US political system fairer? We are hearing ideas about getting rid of the Electoral College, reforming the Supreme Court, adding states to balance the Senate.

What about this issue? In the hierarchy of problems, this one has received a lot less attention. I think they will continue to work on redistricting reform. When a party comes to power on a big wave of support — even a party that has been very critical of the existing system — once they get into power using the existing rules, they become more supportive of those rules.

This is something that we have recent experience with in Canada. Then, once elected, they put together a royal commission, thought about some proposals and came to the conclusion that the existing system actually works fine. But it is worth noting that some of this problem is becoming less noticeable in recent elections. A lot of this gets papered over when you have a big blue wave.

Over time, they might be correct in that assessment. Or it might just be going into hibernation for a little while and then it shows up again a few years later.

Or is it a longer-term realignment? Consider the experience of the Labour Party in the UK, where for a long time they had a very pronounced problem of overconcentration in its core urban support districts. It was very difficult for the Labour Party to win in the suburbs. But it really only lasted a couple of election cycles, and then things went right back to where they were. Will Wilkinson finds urban and rural areas are becoming economically and psychologically distinct, with cities concentrating those open to new experience and working in the technology-driven economy and rural areas retaining those averse to social and economic change.

Election maps are showing stark divides between liberal cities and conservative countrysides, advantaging Republicans in our geographic electoral system.

Why are Democrats concentrating in cities and how do the US trends compare to the global patterns? He finds increasingly concentrated left parties around the world, disadvantaging liberal cities in political competition. They both find our geographic divide central to contemporary politics, including the election of Donald Trump. Wilkinson says urbanization and geographic polarization help explain where we are. So consequently, I think we may have overlooked the extent to which the current era of hyperpolarization and the rise of populist nationalism is partly a consequence of this self-selected spatial segregation on these attributes.

So what I call the density divide in the paper refers to the cultural and political polarization along the lines of population density. He shows an incredible relationship between population density and party vote shares. Just the more dense a place is, the more Democratic it is. The less dense it is, the more Republican it is. You see that pattern kind of cropping up more or less everywhere and at pretty much every scale. I was very much struck by the returns from last election, from the presidential election, to see just how few counties Hillary Clinton had won compared to Donald Trump, but how many more people that the Clinton counties contained and how much more of national economic output they produce.

So the linchpin of my argument is the hypothesis that the attributes that explain patterns of urbanizing migration also increasingly account for both party affiliation and growing regional economic divergence. These things are just pulling high-density cities and lower-density exurbs and rural areas further and further apart culturally and politically. But the trends have big implications. Jonathan Rodden: Sure. The book has, it has two components that are reflected in the title and the subtitle of the book, the big question of why cities lose is a second part of the book.

So the book has these two parts and the first one is trying to understand where did this urban- rural polarization that we see in American politics today come from? I argued that this urban-rural divide really started in the industrial era, and started in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, in a time of working-class mobilization when parties that became parties of the left started forming alliances with labor unions and with workers.

That activity was largely concentrated in cities. It really … just kind of where it begins. The Republicans become increasingly rural.

The second big part of the book tries to explain the implications of that for representation. So that makes it hard for them to transform their votes into seats.

Another thing it makes it hard for them to do is to come up with a good platform that helps them win in the pivotal districts. It also sows the seeds of a lot of internal division within left parties.

Matt Grossmann: They both started with an interest in economic patterns where cities are gaining. Jonathan Rodden: I think a lot of it started with an interest on my part with economic geography and reading things like Alfred Marshall and then the kind of new economic geography starting with Paul Krugman and others thinking about agglomeration effects.

I was really fascinated by the idea of agglomeration effects in economics and then thinking about that in the era of heavy industry and manufacturing, and then thinking about that in the current moment of agglomeration in the knowledge economy.

And it just seemed like there had to be some political implications of that. There has to be when … especially if those activities start to map onto the party system then the concentration of economic activity has to have some kind of a implication for politics and trying to figure out what that might be. It all needs to be … The suppliers of all the inputs need to be fairly close together. They need to be near routes of shipping and transit.

Manufacturing economies tend to strongly concentrate. And so our economy is more and more dominated by very highly skilled, highly educated workers and not a bunch of less skilled, less educated service workers. That has increased the concentration of economic production a little bit counterintuitively. I work most of the time from Iowa. They actually amplified the advantages of clustering people closer together.

But the productivity of those people is enhanced yet further by being near other people with similar skill sets. So you get efficiencies from clusters of specialized, educated workers. Economist call it agglomerative efficiencies. You get a higher rate of individual production, but you also get sort of spillovers from … Growth is driven more and more by just people coming up with new ideas, but through innovation, not just increasing the output of every worker per second, right?

You get those ideas faster when you have the smartest people all butting heads together day by day. Part of that story that he tells is a sorting story, a geographic sorting story, about educated workers, that as economic output and growth depends more and more on a educated workforce but the wage bonus for a higher level of education keeps going up and up in the agglomerations of specialized workers, it draws those better educated people to those clusters and out of the rest of the economy.

So you get this big separation of these different parts of the economy. Matt Grossmann: Rodden wanted to challenge traditional explanations for the divide that are built only on movers. In four of the five states that Biden flipped Pennsylvania being the exception , his aggregate support increase in the million-plus population metro areas exceeded the statewide margin.

In Arizona, strong support among Native Americans in the northern part of the state was critical to flipping it blue, while high-amenity resort towns in the Rockies fortified Democratic support in Denver to deliver Colorado for the party. Senate seats provide another opportunity to evaluate the partisan divergence between metro area Atlanta and the rest of Georgia.

To facilitate these comparisons, the data presented in Table 2 reports the margin of victory for the state, the Atlanta metropolitan area, and the rest of Georgia, as well as the share of the vote that was cast in metro area Atlanta and the rest of state for the November presidential and January Senate contests.

Akin to the midterm elections—when Democrats gained control of the U. House of Representatives, flipped two Senate seats, and picked up seven governorships—without Trump atop the ticket, some of his supporters stayed home.

For Republicans contemplating if the party should double down on Trumpian-style populism or work to win back voters who moved toward Democrats in the past four years, turnout patterns in and in the Georgia runoff elections should be front and center in these conversations. At the time, Republicans held all four Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia. Four years later, Biden won both states, and Democrats hold their Senate seats. Democrats also gained Senate seats in two other Sun Belt states—Nevada and Colorado —both of which have been carried by the party in the last four presidential elections.

As of , Democrats hold all U. Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, and Nevada. In contrast, among the three Rust Belt seats that flipped back to the Democrats in , only Michigan is represented by two Democratic senators. Biden would have won the presidency without taking Arizona and Georgia. As we argue in Blue Metros, Red States , the outcomes in Arizona and Georgia are consistent with the emergence of a pan-metro-area identity anchored by a single large, dense, and more politically cohesive metro space.

The same level of metro area cohesion does not exist in Florida or Texas each with four metro areas with populations over 1 million , or North Carolina, where the states metro areas—Charlotte, Raleigh, and the Piedmont Triad—are splintered across a nearly mile swath along I In fact, among the 13 states in our analysis, Biden won the five states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, and Minnesota—where a single metro area constitutes over half of the state population.