Have you noticed that the liberals always take the big cities? while out in the country the conservatives win.I think that most of the ones in the big cities are on the goverment dole while the country people stand on their own two feet.
Do you have any actual evidence to support this? Numbers, studies, anything? What exactly
is the rate (per capita) of metro residents on public assistance compared to rural?
Because I'm looking at numbers right now that suggest that maybe rural residents don't stand on their own two feet quite as well as you're suggesting. For instance, give
this a skim. And I'll assume you were only referring to direct assistance to individuals, and not taking into account the various forms "the dole" can actually take on a larger scale: for instance, farm subsidies, taxes specifically to improve rural communications access, funding (federal and state) for roads disproportionate to how many people actually
use them, or the fact that in general predominantly "urban" states see less back from the federal coffers than they spend, where the opposite is true for largely "rural" states (suggesting that perhaps those folks out in the sticks are freeloading more than they'd like to think).
Of course, I have to be careful that I don't go trying to oversimplify things just as much as you were, merely in the opposite direction. So I'll simply move back to the question: on what do you base your assumption that rural residents are less reliant, in dollars per capita, on the government than their urban cousins? Just a preconceived notion?
They talk about Obama carrying Dallas, but out of the 6 million people in the DFW metro area Dallas only has about 1.5 million and the majority are minorities. It would be interesting to see a poll on the entire metro area that includes the 26 other cities.
I'm sure if you
really wanted that info it's available somewhere. I just don't think a majority of people are really too interested in breaking it down any farther than the county level. Though the fact that Obama's margins were lower in "outlying" counties (bordering Dallas County) of the metro area suggests that you're probably correct regarding the results in suburbs.
And yes, you can generally simply look at a by-county map of any state dring a presidential election and instantly spot the major metro areas. In a state like Massachusetts, they're the darker blue (assuming red=republican/blue=democratic). In Ohio, they're the blue areas. In Utah, they're simply the less red areas. But they're always easy to spot. Especially in states with smaller counties. There is a
strong rural/urban political divide in this country; having lived in both areas, I've become intimately familiar with it.
