|
I am from the Pacific Northwest, and as I read about the election season in the US, I find myself still a little startled by what I read about the political proclivities of the US. Not only in the weird alliance that Donald Trump has brought together, but just facts about the American electorate that political commentators take for granted. One of the biggest is that "college educated whites" were a traditionally Republican group. As far as I can tell, for the East Coast and Midwest, politics was kind of traditionally divided between the Republican managerial elite, the workers, who were conservative if they were evangelical Christians, or economically liberal if they were union workers, and then minorities, who were all poor and lived in inner cities. Coming from Portland, Oregon, there were a couple of groups, that didn't really fit these categories: 1. Urban, college educated or professional whites, who were even 20 years ago pretty routinely liberal, and who are now very liberal. There is a gamut of beliefs within that, with some being crunchy and some being technocratic, but all being pretty liberal. Most service workers or non-professional workers are going to have similar political and cultural beliefs. 2. Suburban professionals, who were a bit more of the stereotypically "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" type, and whose politics ran from centrist Democrat to libertarian, but who, on the whole, were not Republican. 3. Suburban non-professional, rural middle and upper classes, Evangelical Christians, etc. : all of these might fall under the traditional conservative umbrella, with the major difference being that they are not going to be a "country club" set, the way they would be in the South or midwest, and that if they aren't clearly Evangelical, they are going to be more open about lifestyle issues than conservatives in other parts of the country. You can be a good old boy in the West and still smoke lots of weed. 4. Latino, black and native minorities: While present, this isn't as big of a voting block as it is in other places, and in general isn't kind of the nexus of "otherness" it might be acorss most of the country. 5. Blue collar, unionized manufacturing workers: there are more of these across the Pacific Northwest than most people think (the only industries here aren't really microbrews and zines), but its still less than other parts of the country. Many of these workers are either in high tech industries (aerospace) or more specialty manufacturing. But there was never "steel towns" here. That is my brief run down. There is obviously so many different groups within that, and I could try to explain Mormonism or loggers or Russian immigrants or one of the many wrinkles in this at great length, but that is how my area differs from the general American stereotypical class and race structure. What about your area?
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2016 23:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 15:14 |
|
|
TheImmigrant posted:I live in Capitol Hill, Washington DC. It's thirtysomething professionals and twentysomething interns, leveraged to the eyeballs on student loans. Extremely diverse in a superficial (race, orientation, national origin) sense; extremely archetypical in a substantive sense. Everyone has a master's degree or higher, it seems like half the local population are lawyers, very few children around. No Poors in the immediate neighborhood, as they were gentrified across the Anacostia years ago. No one around here would admit to being socially conservative. Fewer would admit to supporting Donald Trump - locally his supporters are known as "varmints." Do people also act like 80,000 dollars a year is lower middle class, and that more than 25 miles from the city is the wilderness?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2016 05:28
|
|
|
Lawman 0 posted:Upper middle class lily white professionals, welfare queens (aka farmers), trump voters who actually like living here and a token amount of (((property value lowering))) minorities who tricked my precious angel Jimmy into doing a line of coke at Seaside. ...where is this?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2016 01:11
|
|
|
KiteAuraan posted:Phoenix Metro, so it basically divides into a few major blocks. This is the type of information I was looking for? I imagine that Joe Arpaio gets elected around a core group of old retirees and resentful working class white people, and then manages to keep enough somewhat moderate middle-class people on with a "Think of the Children" shpiel? And that low numbers and low turnout by blacks, Latinos and Natives are never enough to threaten his reelection?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2016 16:01
|
|
|
TheImmigrant posted:Sounds like Floribama. Its more that people take for granted that whatever socioeconomic groups are around them are universal. Definitions of what "moderate" "middle class" "suburban" or any other class of voters is vary across the country so much, but people think they are talking about the same thing. In Ohio, a "moderate, middle-class, suburban voter" is a Republican with a high school education who lives in a city of 100,000 people and works as the manager of an autoparts store, and considers that while Trump might go too far, he is still better than Hillary. In Colorado, a "moderate, middle-class, suburban voter" is a Democrat with strong environmental leanings who practices yoga, has a Master's degree, and lives in a town of 10,000 where he telecommutes as a software developer. The problem is that many people, especially in the old, parochial East Coast, kind of just assume that the definitions they are used to are true everywhere.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2016 16:56
|
|
|
TheImmigrant posted:I certainly don't take for granted my surroundings. I grew up in a boring and frozen corner of the Midwest, and blew the place the day I graduated high school. I love living in the obnoxiously wealthy and well-educated bubble that is yuppie DC. New York is the only other place I can imagine living. I don't want to live around uneducated varmint Trump voters or poors - I like my ethnic restaurants and expensive apartment and public transit. But that is still kind of a binary scale: poor equals rural and conservative. There are places in the Western states, mostly college or resort towns, where you could be living in a town of 50,000, and people are going to be well educated, and there are going to be lots of ethnic restaurants. Not that it is a paradise in the Western states, but the entire paradigm of "the East Coast versus the poor hinterlands of Ohio" doesn't hold for the entire country.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2016 18:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 15:14 |
|
|
Y-Hat posted:I'm going to make my post hyper local, because generalizing New York City (a city of 8 million) and even all of Brooklyn (it's far more diverse than the media and pop culture would have you believe) is a fool's errand. Its fair to treat Brooklyn by neighborhood, because there are areas of Brooklyn that have the same population as entire states. Like, Brooklyn has as many congressional representatives as the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana combined. The one thing that is different from me, growing up on the West Coast, is that differences are so specific. By the time people had migrated to the West Coast in the 60s and 70s, most of our ethnic identities were gone, behind obviously racial distances. Like, I've read about people living in New York, and it was very important whether you came from the Polish neighborhood or the Italian neighborhood, a quarter mile apart. Being Catholic or Protestant actually made a big difference! By the time you got to suburban Portland in the 1980s, all of those distinctions had kind of been lost in the shuffle. They were maybe a slight curiosity, but its not like your Polish dad had Polish friends he went bowling with. This is also true for my experience with Jewish people. Like, up until my 20s, all of the Jews I knew were secular or maybe reform, and they all had jobs as either organic farmers or librarians or something. I didn't even know about very religious, insular Jews, or about the the other entire stereotypes of Jewish-American Princesses, or any of that. Jews didn't really make up a demographic when I grew up, as much as they were just Portland intellectuals with this added spin.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2016 17:54
|
|