Same. I watch friends in red states reply to these comments and explain why moving often isn’t possible and why it’s wrong to expect other people to casually abandon their homes, sometimes of generations, and how hurtful it is to say this! And somehow OP never learns. It’s a heartbreaking exercise.
Upstate New York is every bit as rock-red as rural Texas and anyone that tells you any different is lying to themselves as much as anyone else. California is way more than its bustling liberal metros, not that you'd see it if you watched on the teevee, but the notion our fight is regional is absurd
'Red' States are those states where rural territory is more vast than the urban population, and 'Blue' states are those with more urban area than rural, but there aren't strong regional differences at play
there are weird local anomalies - and in states that are small enough to be local (like Vermont) that's not always true - but I have a suspicion they'll eventually revert to the mean.
I will say there's also the entrenched racial/class hierarchy of the South that functions differently from the rest of the Red states, and needs to be specifically dismantled. It's a feudal system that should have been put to the torch in 1865, but was allowed to persist.
Yeah as someone who grew up and lived in one of the reddest parts of Vermont, just because the state is "Blue" means very little when your on the ground
I'd revise the above slightly: "Red" states are those where rural population is more vast than urban population, and "Blue" states are those with more urban people than rural...
Source: a person who has been to Eastern Washington.
It freaks me out when I drive from my Philly-border neighborhood (now firm Blue) to visit a friend who had to move an hour out to afford a house.
Megachurches and Christofacist billboards. Gives me a wiggins.
As someone who's spent a lot of time in the rural midwest and some time in the rural northeast and southeast -- there are some pretty significant differences in how accepted bigotry is in the southeast.
This is true to some extent, but if rural whites in Alabama voted like rural whites in Wisconsin, it would be a solidly blue state. There are real regional differences.
The character of the suburbs plays a big role too. A place like Texas still has those 70-30 GOP ‘burbs, where in other states similar places economically and demographically are much closer to even. That’s the evangelical influence.
my personal favorite iteration on this is the pawn shop across the street from a civil war memorial in my central NY hometown with a confederate flag in the window
One of our roommates sophomore year (location below) who was local took us to a party at Tompkins County CC once. We all lived together in Class of '18 MCLLU (Multi-Culture Living & Learning Unit) the year before, so a number of them were *shocked* to see us go past barns painted w/ the rebel flag 👎
More people in Texas voted for Joe Biden than in any other state except for California or New York
More people in California voted for Donald Trump than in any other state except for Texas
Caveat:
Upstate cities are quite blue. It’s when you get out of the cities of o the rural areas that it’s red.
Signed: Grew up in southern Oswego County, New York, and went to college in Rochester
The were no Republican candidates for Rochester City Council last year. In a lot of the smaller towns 20 minutes away there were no Democratic candidates.
It’s been a little over a decade since I left the state, but I seem to remember Monroe and Onondaga County executive being where the elections got somewhat interesting
Long Island Republicans are the weirdest because they’re not Republicans for religious or even economic reasons really. They just love state-enforced racism.
I mean-- at least my LIGOP relatives-- there's a whole "why do I gotta pay taxes for that" vein where otherwise their attitudes on a lot of single points tend to be center-to-center-left? But yet, they don't want to pay taxes.
But on LI taxes are high and always going higher anyway, and on the county and local gov’t level it’s usually Republicans who are the ones raising them. They may grumble while paying, but limited government isn’t their voter’s highest priority.
Ugh. I remember having this argument in Obama’s second term. “he won upstate, it’s changed”. I grew up in an Albany suburb. There’s a lot of lines up there. Where the city turns into Baltimore. Where the rich burbs turn into poor Pennsyltucky
