What politically slant is your hometown?
Please, no political commentary...this is just a fun little internet thing that you can type in your hometown (or really any city that you want to see how politically slanted it is). They determine it by how many donations go to specific parties.
The rating goes from 10L (most liberal) to 10C (most conservative).
If you want to do cool comments, simply list your city and it's rating.
For example
Redmond, WA 0.9C
Not as liberal as much of the rest of Washington, for example Vashon Island is a 9.9C in rating.
It's actually closer to Salt Lake City (which you'd think was far more conservative in comparison) which is 0.2L in its rating.
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It's actually closer to Salt Lake City (which you'd think was far more conservative in comparison) which is 0.2L in its rating.
That's not really that surprising; SLC is an isolated technopolis, and it's managed to price itself out of the market for most of the locals (so almost everyone who lives there now is a transplanted Californian). By contrast, I think Provo, UT, one of the bedroom communities and home to Brigham Young University, is a 5.0C. Bountiful, UT, is a 4.0C.
Grew up in Hartland, WI: 5.2C.
Now live in Madison, WI: 4.9L.
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Fort Oglethorpe, GA: 6.2C
The last cities I lived in are Chattanooga, TN (4.3C) and Phoenix, AZ (1.0C), and the town I grew up in - Yoakum, TX is ... not available (probably too small) but the nearest cities are Victoria (5.3C), Cuero (6.9C), Gonzalez (5.6C), and New Braunfels (5.2C).
Ocala, FL: 3.0C
EDIT: Formerly... (in no particular order)
Miami, FL (0.8L); Chattanooga, TN (4.3C); Cocoa, FL (2.2C); <no entry on Deland, FL>; Greenville, NC (1.1C); Louisville, KY (0.2C); Raleigh, NC (0.1L); <no entry on Vilnius, Lithuania>
What politically slant is your hometown?
Please, no political commentary...this is just a fun little internet thing that you can type in your hometown (or really any city that you want to see how politically slanted it is). They determine it by how many donations go to specific parties.
The rating goes from 10L (most liberal) to 10C (most conservative).
If you want to do cool comments, simply list your city and it's rating.
For example
Redmond, WA 0.9C
Not as liberal as much of the rest of Washington, for example Vashon Island is a 9.9C in rating.
It's actually closer to Salt Lake City (which you'd think was far more conservative in comparison) which is 0.2L in its rating.
Somehow my letters got mixed up in my posting, just noticed...
Redmond, WA is 0.9L and Vashon Island is 9.9L in their rating.
Another interesting city, Roseville, MN which I think is the home of FFG...3.1L
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Corvallis, OR is 4.3L. I think that might be lower than I was expecting. Portland, OR is 4.4L.
The obvious flaw with this is that it only tests political donations, which means people who can't afford to pay don't get counted regardless of how fervently they hold their beliefs, but that's hard to eliminate as a factor.
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Liberal, KS (6.6C)
Yes. I know.
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My hometown isn't on the list (no surprise there, it has a population of under 1000 people. Probably less now that they razed half of it and put a highway through).
So next best thing: Tallahassee, FL, .3C. No real surprise, given it's a college town, even if it is a Republican state.
Current town of Odenton, MD is 1.4L...which I actually AM surprised about, since Fort Meade is right across the street, and generally the main draw for this town (military and their families. And people taking the train). I've never met a liberal military man who stayed that way for long, especially Army.
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I have lived in Tucson, AZ (0.3 L), Salt Lake City (0.2 L), and Spokane, WA (0.5 C).
Since SLC was mentioned upthread, I would like to add that because Salt Lake City is a bastion of urban secular liberalism which it is surrounded by Mormon conservatism*, it makes for interesting politics.
It is interesting to me that I have always lived in places where the local political majority is in the state-wide political minority. I'm not sure which I prefer—living in a liberal city in a conservative state, or a conservative city in a liberal state.
I used to read Noam Chomsky when I was in the Navy. I didn't really grow less liberal, I just got bored with Chomsky.
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It only has American cities. No idea what mine is.
Let's just keep it to the cities and ratings.
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Raleigh NC. 0.1L.
Like much of the state, it's a very mixed bag politically speaking, which has both its positives and negatives on every given issue. We've often had solidly Democratic state leaders and solidly Republican national representatives.
Very much a solidly purple state.
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Grand Rapids, Mi ; 3.0 C
Not surprising
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Brooklyn, NY is...
5.4L
Woooooooooooo
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Hagerstown, MD; 1.8 C
Hagerstown is weird. While much of the city itself is more liberal, way more liberal, the area around it is not, being more conservative. Of course then you get into the terrible way O'Malley treated the Western (and Eastern Peninsula) side of his state.
And then you have Frederick, MD; 0.0L .......
No info on mine. Considering it's a village, that's not surprising.
Nearby though, and where I spend my free time, is Oberlin.
5.8L
72nd most liberal
out of 4994
Only surprised it's not higher.
Madison is a solid, but not too terribly impressive 4.9 L (whatever that means) to finish with a mediocre rank of 157.
It's nice being liberal enough to get credit for it, but not so much as to get noticed.
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San Jose, CA, where I grew up and would return to in a hummingbird's heartbeat: 3.7L - while I could think of a few excuses for this, lower than I expected. San, I am disappoint.
Santa Barbara, CA, my birthplace and still my parents' favorite place in the whole wide world: 2.5L - lowish, but bear in mind the country-club paleo-Republican set that contributed a great deal in their time to making it what it is. Fun Fact: There is a big tree in the city park that serves as the official residential address of the city's homeless, thereby making it possible for them to vote.
Socorro, NM, where I live now and hate nearly every minute of it: 1.1L - this is, I assure you, only because it's a university town. The 'townies' are a xenophobic, inbred people out of time and out of touch. I had to spend 2 years at the local high school. I'd have been better off home-schooled. What a dystopia.
Albuquerque, NM, closest thing to what passes for civilization nearest where I live: 2.0L - honestly, I could easily have pegged it for lower. It's kind of cute in a not-actually-cute-at-all way; it's a small town that's growing up and learning how to be a real city - and you can be sure that the cops are NOT contributing anything to these 2 'Ls.' Seriously, I grew up taking it for granted that the police were nice, trustworthy, and civilized people, and dammit, you SHOULD be able to take that for granted! The APD taught me to be more appreciative of the "f#*% the pigs" set, though. Not good.
Las Cruces, NM, one of the larger population nodes in my current Congressional district - 1.0L. This is surprising. Las Cruces is who I usually get blamed for the repeat reelection of our local George W. Bush Mini-Me Stephen Pearce.
Santa Fe, NM, where I haven't been very often but is well known as a different ball of wax: 5.1L - sounds about right. Did you know Tim Curry lives there now? I literally "squee'd" when I was informed of that (if my friend's characterization of my reaction is any judge). Vincent Price's daughter-and-still-Hollywood-bigshot Victoria lives there, too - I've met her, was later informed I'd made a good impression!
San Fransisco, CA, the other side of my beloved Bay Area: 6.4L - 33rd most liberal. Now that's more like it. The Bay Area is like nowhere else in America, possibly the world - though by no means perfect, it's like a parallel universe where the hippies WON the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. And yes, it's a better America for it.
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Houston is about a 5.9 I guess. It goes to eleven in hipster dbagness, though, so I had to bail to the far exurbs.Per the actual site, Houston is 2.2 Conservative.
It's liberal for Texas, but it's still Texas.
Yeah, voting Dem for almost fifty years and electing the first openly gay mayor of a major city is sooooo "conservative".
Living there is a little better indicator than some web site.
Well since the whole thing is about measuring campaign contributions rather than actual voting, it's naturally going to sway toward the politics of the wealthiest people in the region.
A highly-conservative, low-income area surrounding a highly-liberal, high-income area is going to sway more liberal in this measuring system, and vice-versa. Even if the majority of people vote one way, if they're not actually/can't afford to be shelling out large volumes of cash toward the people they vote for, this measuring stick will go toward the party of the people who are/can.
Nope, we're truly forgettably liberal.
The only time anyone notices us is when Bruce Springsteen camps out in front of the capital.
From the two examples given, my knee-jerk guess is "less government involvement = more conservative; more government involvement = more liberal" ranking base. Trump may be saying the things a lot of conservative-party pundits have hinted at for years, but he wants to use large-scale sweeping governmental control and power to do it, which if that's the metric you're using would move him closer to the liberal side. Meanwhile the Pauls have made no secret of their desire to reduce the federal government's powers and reach as much as possible.
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To paraphrase Tim Curry and Leslie Ann Warren, government is just a red herring. The Pauls just want to scuttle the federal government so that it can't be used to counter big corporations (which are just governments by different names) or override the petty feudal tyrannies that many state and local governments have historically functioned as.
There's no question it's counterintuitive from an "on paper" standpoint, but if you look at American history, all our greatest successes with expanding our rights and freedoms have gone hand-in-hand with the increasing consolidation of power at the federal level, and sometimes with shows of federal force like how Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson desegregated the South whether conservative Southerners liked it or not (the Bush Junta being the first major exception to that rule, and policy-wise, they were batting for the same team that normally tried to achieve its ends by keeping the feds weak, and even they continued that policy when it came to federal departments whose sole purpose was doing stuff they didn't want done, like the EPA).
"Government" is really just a skeleton, like a giant Japanese robot; it has no will or personality of its own. Our precious Constitution, as a certain someone once so wisely said, is "just a piece of paper." How it functions depends entirely on the intangibles that are THE CULTURE, which is the real Law. By circumventing this sort of greasy animal Law, "Big Government" can actually be a powerful force for Chaos and freedom, which is the real reason conservatives hate it.
Pueblo, Colorado comes in at 0.7L
Well since the whole thing is about measuring campaign contributions rather than actual voting, it's naturally going to sway toward the politics of the wealthiest people in the region.
A highly-conservative, low-income area surrounding a highly-liberal, high-income area is going to sway more liberal in this measuring system, and vice-versa. Even if the majority of people vote one way, if they're not actually/can't afford to be shelling out large volumes of cash toward the people they vote for, this measuring stick will go toward the party of the people who are/can.
I don't think this holds up looking at the ranking for Oberlin. Oberlin is home to an internationally known ultra-liberal private college, which is one of the more expensive colleges in the United States (used to be in the top three, pretty sure it's still in the top ten). The wealthiest people in the town are all college staff, and extremely liberal, but the website rating doesn't reflect that, merely being on the upper side of liberal.
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Yeah, it's an objective measurement, but that doesn't mean it's a perfect one.
Having looked a little closer, I'm even less sure of the metrics. They're using donations to determine how conservative/liberal a district is, but they're also rating the candidates and they rank Rand Paul as the most Conservative (10+, he's off the scale) and Trump as only 1.5C. I'm not sure where they get that from or how they're defining "conservative".
Which is funny, because Paul is pretty much the poster child for libertarian thinking. He probably loses all of those points for being a religious pro-life OB/GYN. Being anti-drug prohibition doesn't balance that, I guess.
Trump is a life-long Dem playing Republican to run interference for his long time buddy, Hillary. That might have something to do with it.
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Yeah, it's an objective measurement, but that doesn't mean it's a perfect one.
Having looked a little closer, I'm even less sure of the metrics. They're using donations to determine how conservative/liberal a district is, but they're also rating the candidates and they rank Rand Paul as the most Conservative (10+, he's off the scale) and Trump as only 1.5C. I'm not sure where they get that from or how they're defining "conservative".
Which is funny, because Paul is pretty much the poster child for libertarian thinking. He probably loses all of those points for being a religious pro-life OB/GYN. Being anti-drug prohibition doesn't balance that, I guess.
Trump is a life-long Dem playing Republican to run interference for his long time buddy, Hillary. That might have something to do with it.
It all depends on how you define "conservative" and which conspiracy theories you buy into. If you define "conservative" as "libertarian", then it makes sense to have Rand Paul as the most conservative.
And if Trump is a Democratic ringer, that sure says something about the Republican base, cause they're eating up his racist bull like it's candy.
The people backing Trump are mostly independents. The religious right and the "base" (establishment) aren't really digging Trump. But, you know, keep thinking MSNBC and CNN aren't in on it.
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Welp, this thread took a predictable turn. Time to hide.
I was amazed it took this long.
Steam doesn't go away just because you close the vent, it merely seeks a new escape point.
Merrimack, NH.
2.3 C
When I was a teenager, there were three communists in the high school, which meant that, at the time, we gave Berkeley and Cambridge a run for its money on reds per capita.
If I substitute the nearest city, Nashua, .7 C.
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Did not have my hometown so I went with where I live now.
Brockton 3.7 L it being MA not surprising.
What I found interesting was no representation of the state of Rhode Island sad poor little Rhoadie never gets any love.
They even have Providence UT but no Providence RI.
Fun little exercise but I would definitely take it with a grain of salt.
Meh, politically I'd guess midddle of road leaning toward independence. It was founded as an outpost for a war.
Jersey City is listed as 4.1 Liberal, but the mayoralty flips between both parties like a tennis ball at the U.S. Open. Then again Tea Party candidates don't bother to run here for the most part.
Troy, NY 2.0L
I grew up in Atlanta, GA (0.3C) but since 1980 have lived in San Antonio, TX (2.7 C.)
Cities right around San Antonio include Helotes (3.0 C), Schertz (4.3 C), Boerne (5.0 C), Hondo (5.4 C), Fredericksburg (5.6 C), Seguin (5.8 C), and San Marcos (2.5 C.)
Austin, TX about 70 miles away is 0.9C, which I would find more palatable since I personally lean liberal.