Monday, December 31, 2012

The Real Political Split In This Country Isn't Between Democrats And Republicans:
urban rural divide
The major news media don’t report it correctly, but this isn’t really a nation that is split between big-government Democrats and small-government conservatives; it’s instead a nation that is split between urban and rural dwellers, and also between single and married people.
See this in the nationwide 2012 exit-poll data: Voters in cities with populations of 50-to-500 thousand went for Obama by 58% to 40%; voters in cities of 500,000+ went for Obama by a huge 69% to 29%.
By contrast, voters in towns 10,000-50,000 went for Romney by 56% to 42%; and voters in rural areas (under 10,000) went for Romney by 61% to 37%. (“Suburban” voters were split evenly, 47%/46%, with Obama getting the 1% edge.)
Similarly, unmarried voters went for Obama 62%/40%, whereas married voters went for Romney 56%/42%.
To a lesser extent, this nation is also split between female and male voters, but most of the 2012 electorate (72%) still were Whites, and most white women voted for Romney (by 56%/42%, quite a big margin).
Moreover, most married women (of all races) also voted for Romney (by a modest 53%/46%). So, there were lots of female Republican voters, especially among women who were white and married.
Nonetheless, there was an overall gender-split, women going for Obama by 11%, men going for Romney by 7%, diverging perhaps because most women recognized the Republican war against women, while most men did not (or else didn’t much care about it). 
Furthermore, as virtually everyone knows, this nation is politically split between young and old; and the 18-24 year-old voters went for Obama by a massive 60%/36% margin, whereas the 65+ year-old voters went for Romney by 56%/44%.
On the other hand, given the fact that unmarried voters went 62%/40% for Obama, and that married voters went 56%/42% for Romney, the two factors of age and marital status can be treated as virtual substitutes for each other.
(For anyone who wants to know more about them, the only way to separate out those two variables would be by means of the full “crosstabs” from the exit-pollsters, edisonresearch.com, but the “news” media decline to publish that crucial information, and the price of independently obtaining it from the exit-pollster, Edison Research, is $33,000, which apparently no academic researcher has done; so, this information just isn’t publicly available – at least, not yet.)
Additionally, born-again evangelical Protestants went massively, 79%/20%, for Romney, but almost all of them live in Dixie and in Appalacia, according to the Carsey Institute, and both of those regions are predominantly rural.
Still, this 4-to-1 ratio was even more enormous than the rural 61%/37% Romney win in rural areas, so it might possibly indicate a separate religious factor, but not if the most rural of voting districts were likewise breaking 4-to-1 for Romney, which likely was the case in Republican states. Consequently, we don’t yet know whether perhaps even the evangelical vote is politically just a proxy for extremely rural voters.
The U.S. House of Representatives itself is majority-Republican because the Republican Party gerrymandered the nation in 2010 to enable rural voters to retain control of the House: most voters in 2012 actually voted for Democratic U.S. House candidates over Republican ones, but this Republican rigging was successful in retaining Republican control of that body, regardless.
Electoral maps show that most of the square miles of surface-area in this nation are Republican, but the tiny remaining “blue” or Democratic areas are where urban voters predominate. The large “red” areas are where most of the guns are (think “guns=”blood”=”red”), but the few guns that kill people instead of other prey (and there aren’t many deer to be found in the cities) are generally located in the cities.
Consequently, the National Rifle Association holds an iron control over the House of Representatives, which is the sole remaining rural-dominated governmental body in our increasingly urban nation. For as long as that situation continues to be the case, the United States will continue to be far-and-away more violent than any other industrialized nation. Gangsters can easily get guns from the adjoining rural areas.
The gun lobby has perfected the exploitation of the biggest remaining blunder of America’s Founding Fathers (after slavery was abolished in 1865), and so the gun makers will continue to thrive. Apparently, rural voters don’t care more about their voting for urban murderers than male voters care about their voting for rapists and against their victims who want to purchase over-the-counter contraception after having been raped. Those rural voters are instead “traditional values” folks, not such as to be bothered to think about “city slickers” being murdered or raped.
Furthermore, whereas people inside the big cities know too well the importance of protecting their clean air and water, people in rural areas are far likelier to esteem the importance of the fracking rights they might happen to own, or of other possible ways they might have to “make a living off the land.”
How is it possible that legislation to avert catastrophic global warming will ever pass in a political body such as the U.S. House of Representatives?
The source of America’s “political breakdown,” the urban-rural split, is built into our Constitution; and the gun companies, the oil companies, and the other big donors to the Republican Party, have merely mastered it, and they milk it for every red cent.
They don’t care about the world that today’s young will inherit. But, if any hope is to exist at all, it can only be because today’s young people will recognize whom their enemies are, and will act accordingly. Voting Democratic simply won’t be enough to salvage their future.
NOTE: Vermont is the leading exception to the U.S., not an example of the U.S. It’s almost a different nation. It has no city larger than 40,000, and yet is arguably the most progressive of all the states. (It voted for Obama 67%/31%, the highest ratio other than in Obama’s home state of Hawaii.) The analysis that has been presented here does not apply to Vermont, almost all of which is small towns or even more rural than that. Vermont’s culture is strikingly alien even to that of the state’s four adjoining areas: NH, NY, MA, and Canada. Nobody has explained Vermont, and I don’t claim to understand it.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.


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