Red State, Blue City: What you are is very much about how dense is your place

This is an important background article. Those interested in America's growing urban rural divide may want to read this report in its entirety. Just a few points

1. The claim that "people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal" may be exaggerated but this is still an exaggeration worth making to drive home the point. There is a very strong correlation between population density and ideology. From our perspective what matters is the correlation since it's fundamental to the city/country clash. How exactly this correlation is produced is of secondary importance.

2. The divide has been steadily growing

3. He is generally dismissive about the separatist potential in America but this is because this article predates the last wave of new secessionist movements that played out precisely along the urban rural divide. I may expand on this subject later in comments.

BY JOSH KRON (Atlantic) {

Date = NOV 30, 2012

Source = Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America

The voting data suggest that people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal

Electoral cartograms by University of Michigan physics professor Mark Newman show the power of Democratic counties based on population density. Spreading each vote out, his illustrations portray the hidden truth of the conventional electoral map, and why the much smaller number of dedicated blue counties is outmatching the more geographically numerous red counties.

Meanwhile, the states with constitutional amendments banning gay marriage are often among the least densely populated in the country, such as South Dakota and Idaho.

[...]

Starting before the Civil War era, America's political dividing lines were drawn along state and regional borders. Cities and the then-extensive rural areas shared a worldview North and South of the Mason-Dixon line.

Today, that divide has vanished. The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.

The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election were Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, and Salt Lake City. With its dominant Mormon population, Mitt Romney was a lock in the Utah capital; Phoenix nearly voted for Obama. After that, the largest urban centers to tilt Republican included Wichita, Lincoln, Neb., and Boise.

The gap is so stark that some of America's bluest cities are located in its reddest states. Every one of Texas' major cities -- Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio -- voted Democratic in 2012, the second consecutive presidential election in which they've done so. Other red-state cities that tipped blue include Atlanta, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Tucson, Little Rock, and Charleston, S.C. -- ironically, the site of the first battle of the Civil War. In states like Nevada, the only blue districts are often also the only cities, like Reno and Las Vegas.

For years, this continues: Urban and rural counties jostling with a small pool of counties which go back and forth every couple of elections. There's no real realignment, just a constant tug of war as the nation grows further divided. }