That’s also a good point. I’m not sure I can quite as easily do the math on that for California, since a lot of the individual cities that are part of the LA/SF/SD metro areas are going to also be included in that list of 75, so I cheated and Googled it instead… Looks like California is almost 90% urban, and Georgia is almost 60%, so there’s still a significant difference in the population distribution, but it’s more like 1.5:1, not 5:1.
That said, a 90/10 distribution still looks a lot different that a 60/40 one.
That sounds about right. The cities don’t go 100% Democrat and the rural areas don’t go 100% Republican (and suburbs can go either way), so it ends up being pretty neck and neck in states like Georgia. Then you have states like Louisiana, where cities like New Orleans, even with the urban area included, just aren’t enough to make up for the rural areas.
If it weren’t for gerrymandering, Congress would look a lot differently too.
Okay, but I’m not seeing how there’s any connection between Greene’s success in the primary and the fact that she ran unopposed in the general election. Her Democratic opponent resigned and couldn’t be replaced. How likely is it that voters will turn out for him when they know he can’t and won’t serve the term, especially in the middle of a pandemic? Given that atypical one-party election, how confidently can we say that Greene was truly representative of that district’s views?
The contrast between conservative rural vs. progressive urban politics is known to happen in quite a few states, not just Georgia. Every state is mixed to one degree or another. And even if a state is
…then what? Write them off? Abandon all the blue voters in that state as insignificant? I don’t think so. If anything, Georgia proves that red states aren’t always as red as they appear, due to systematic gerrymandering and voter suppression. It’s going to take a lot of voting reform before we can get a more accurate picture of any state’s political leanings… so maybe we shouldn’t be that quick to judge.
I guess the thing I’m feeling is the same feeling I get when I hear “liberals” praise someone like James Comey, because he had the minimum of human decency to speak out against Trump. Sure, he’s doing a thing that could reasonably be called “the right thing” but that doesn’t mean that we can count on him to do it regularly.
Am I saying we shouldn’t try to turn Georgia more and more blue? Of course not. But I’m reasonably concerned that, even if they manage to elect more Democrats to office, we’re likely to end up with more folks like Doug Jones and Joe Manchin, which, you know, has questionable Overton Window repercussions.
If we drag the Democrats further right in order to capture the folks who can no longer stomach the Republican party, that makes us even more of a center-right nation than we already are.
It’s a reasonable worry, but I take some comfort from Senator Ossoff’s support for a variety of progressive issues, like a New Civil Rights Act and the $15 minimum wage. I’m not as familiar with Warnock’s stances, but what I’ve seen looks pretty positive as well.
The best thing we can do to fight the rightward swing of the Democratic party is to actively support progressive candidates wherever possible. The more of them we can get elected, the more likely the party will shift back towards the left. And with that, hopefully, we’ll get more opposition to Republican stonewalling of the government (like the failed Impeachment.)
Just FYI, California has more Trump supporters than any other state. And Georgia has a long-ass history of brutal voter suppression. Things are not always black and white, even black and white.
I’d rather try to drag Dems left in order to actually deliver on some of the extremely popular shit they campaign on (day one $2,000 checks? $15 minimum wage? Canceling student loan debt? All of that has either already been whittled away or is in the process of being so) and give people something to vote for, rather than being the default option available to those who want or need to vote against the Republicans.
Seriously, so much of the Democratic platform is wildly popular, but Dems spend more time trying to make Republicans feel better after they lose than they do actually delivering on anything for the people who put them in power, and they’ve been doing it for so long that a lot of people have given up waiting for even the most centrist of incrementalism to happen. That’s why they keep losing what should be no-contest elections.
I think (and truly hope) that demographic changes currently under way are really going to make states like Georgia and (dare I say it…) even Texas more reliably blue moving forward. A more diverse (not to mention more urbanized) country overall might even undo some of the damage done over the past few decades in terms of the Overton Window.
Oh, and since you mentioned James Comey, every single time he criticized Trump, I just wanted to grab him by the shoulders and scream in his face, “YOU MADE HIM PRESIDENT!”
Just FYI, California has more Trump supporters than any other state. And Georgia has a long-ass history of brutal voter suppression. Things are not always black and white, even black and white.
Yeeeeees, but only because they are the largest state by a significant margin. Both Texas and Florida have nearly the same number of Trump voters, from populations that are 10 and 16 million smaller.
Nope. You’re missing the blue swath across the central run of the state.
Once again, GA saved the bacon this year, so, maybe don’t count us out yet. The conservative areas are there, and are a major problem, but ya know, this is true in EVERY OTHER STATE, especially the OTHER STATES that he tried to overturn, like PA and AZ.
The rural black belt also leans blue, if you look at that map. Hancock county is hardly an “urban” county and it went blue.
Of course, write us off. I mean, the states been red since the beginning of time, not like we’ll change, right? Not like we don’t have a large, changing population, even in the rural areas?
It’s so far right at this point, that you can’t pull it further.
The most recent senators elected are much further to the left of Manchin and Jones.
I mean, that’s cool and all, but it’s really a parlor trick of statistics.
First of all, those supposedly surprising figures are entirely a function of the overall population of those states - there’s an extra 300K Trump voters in California over Texas, but there’s 10 million more people in California, and B) the electoral college means that those Trump voters in California, New York and Massachusetts and the Biden voters in Texas, Ohio and Mississippi, well, their votes didn’t effect the outcome of the election one whit.
The sources I checked before I posted mainly cited “personal reasons” for the candidate dropping out of the race, including a divorce and a move out of state. I don’t doubt he got death threats, and I’m sure they were part of his decision to quit, but from what I could (quickly) find, they weren’t the only factor involved.
I’m sure all the Warnock and Ossoff signs I saw in Macon were an illusion and that I was imagining the party atmosphere at the hospital there when the results were announced.
The Cretaceous coastline, which is still fascinating to me.
And should maybe remind people that when you try to write off the South, well, that’s where most of the black people in the US live too. They aren’t exactly all Republicans, they’re some of the people who most need our support against them.
, we’ll get more opposition to Republican stonewalling of the government (like the failed Impeachment.)
