When you read up on U.S. political basics, you can’t help but come across the detail that many of the people in cities in the U.S. seem to lean left, yet what isn’t as clear is why and what influences their concentration in cities/urban areas.
Cities don’t exactly appear to be affordable, and left-leaning folks in the U.S. don’t seem to necessarily be much wealthier than right-leaning folks, so what’s contributed to this situation?
I don’t think so much that cities attract left-leaning individuals as much as the people who live there tend to be (or become) left leaning.
In rural communities you tend to get a lot of families who have lived in the area for a long time, and not much movement. So they tend to be more homogenous. Cities tend to attract lots of different people (and more tends to happen), so you’re gonna be exposed to a lot more and it will be harder to stay isolated.
Another factor is the white flight that occured after ww2. Lots of cheap housing was put up outside cities, and lots of white families moved out to live in them (in some cases they didn’t even let black people buy houses in these developments). So you get a lot of conservative, white people moving out in the suburbs, leaving a lot of minorities who tend to be more liberal.