Political commentators have observed that Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into Red and Blue areas, with blue dominating the cities, red dominating rural areas, and the suburbs still being a mix sometimes referred to as purple. A new study takes a close look at this sort in Oregon.
As an Associated Press article notes in discussing this study, in 1966, the Democratic Party had a majority of voters in every region of Oregon, yet the state elected a Republican governor who won 33 out of 36 counties. By contrast, in 2018 ruralites were 30 percent more likely to be Republican than urbanites, and the winner of the governorship won only seven counties, namely those that were the most urbanized.
The study itself says changes resulted partly from the decline in federal land timber cutting. This left rural areas with high unemployment and resentment against the urban areas that supported the reduced cutting. Continue reading
