It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama.
Then why does it have a Republican mayor? Urban + Educated should equal Democrat, right?
The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
I would argue that it isn't simply rural areas that trend Republican but mineral rich areas with exceptionally large wealth gaps that tend to have powerful GOP fundraising operations.
People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state
That's as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old "Blueberries in the Tomato Soup" effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.
If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That's one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.
If they can, I've never seen it. No Threads content in any Lemmy instance I'm aware of and no way to use the Threads app as a client for lemmy.world or any of the others.
Look up the definition of the word “outlier”
Is it an outlier or a counterfactual?
I could also point at the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation. No shortage of conservative intellectuals in these circle. Plenty of conservatives in business schools, law schools, and medical colleges. And as red states try to purge their academic institutions of "marxist" liberals, we're seeing a rising tide of conservatives as university faculty, staff, and senior administrators - virtually all with graduate level degrees.
On the flip side, the SEIU is full of liberal democrats despite their members rarely having more than a high school diploma. The service sector is flush with low-education liberal voters. The vocational trades are flush with liberal voters. As are agricultural workers, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.
This isn't a good litmus test for determining ideological bias.
rural areas correlate with less educated populations
Huntsville, Alabama is one of the reddest corners of the reddest states in the country. It has the highest per capita populations of rocket scientists in the world.
The line I've heard is
best in the world for those who can afford it
But medicine is still an industry that benefits from economy of scale. It still benefits from public sector R&D. It still benefits from robust safety regulations and enforcement of best practices.
We've been chipping away at all of that. Hell, we're straight up closing hospitals and clinics all over the country, purely because so few of them are economically viable when pitted against a ruthless private insurance market.
If they instead ranked the results by which system generated the most private profits
There are sectors that bring in big profits, but they're extracting those profits from the sectors that deliver the medicine.
The snake is eating it's own tail. This isn't a long term strategy for profit. Every quarterly cycle leans harder on Medicaid and Medicare as the private systems fail.
But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States.
Only in the last forty years. These used to be staunchly Dixiecrat territories prior to the Southern Strategy.
But I might point you to a different map.
A huge part of the D/R switch under Nixon/Reagan came through Gulf Coast O&G tycoons. That's what gets us Wyoming and W. Virginia as bright red. It's why Pennsylvania - home of the Gettysburg address along with some of the fiercest abolitionist activists and civil rights organizations - into the purple category.
The degree to which the country has become a Petro-State has revolutionized politics domestically.
So long as that industry endures, the GOP-aligned land barons are going to have all the money they need for revanchist political projects.
The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.
The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
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