What’s a state that you thought was conservative/liberal based on how they usually vote, but actually surprised you when you went?

28 comments

1. Maine is a lot more “purple” than most people realize.

   People often think it’s really liberal because they know hippies from Maine or really conservative because they know rural traditional Mainers.

   People always seem shocked to find out it is kind of a swing state.

2. New York State is pretty Red once you leave the immediate NY Metro area; we just had a viral story about a Woman being denied medications for her chronic health condition because they *may* cause her imaginary, never going to exist unborn fetus harm… so many people view New York as this liberal Mecca while there’s people flying Confederate Flags, having Punisher stickers on their cars, Let’s Go Brandon flags and plenty of Trump 2024 flags

3. I’m honestly surprised at how deep blue California is.

   I spent the last 10 years in a position where I helped people with their homes. Usually i’d spend a couple hours there, so during the chit chat politics would sometimes come up. Putting aside the out-and-out Republicans, most of the interactions were overwhelmingly positive, where we agreed on a lot of topics even though we were on opposite sides of the fence.

4. California is significantly more Red than led to believe, and Arizona is significantly more Blue than led to believe.

5. West Virginia.

   Hear me out- West Virginia has a reputation in recent years for being a deeply red state. That is true BUT what surprises people is they voted blue pretty consistently up until 2000.

   WV has a long history with unions and labor organizing, plus with poverty in Apppalachia. Then around 2000 Democrats decided to become opposed to coal, WV’s main source of income. And Democrats also began abandoning rural america. So the state became deeply red.

   I mean, would you vote for a party that deeply opposes the only source of solid income for most of your state? They will still vote for a democrat that supports coal (Manchin).

6. There is a saying in America, “There is no such thing as a blue state, only blue cities in red states”. My job gets me in contact with people from all over the nation many of them talk about the major political divide between the rural and urban populations. Its uselly urban people complaining that they are at the mercy of red neck elected governors in red states or that rural folk complaining how a governor elected by naive city slickers is trying to up end thier life in blue states.

   The only reason why alot of the blue staters don’t leave is because they refuse to leave the mountains they were raised in.

7. Massachusetts is full of Conservative Democrats.

8. “blue states” and “red states” only exist on Reddit and for the purpose of electoral forecasting. Other than that, it gives you a little information about state-level politics, but that’s about it.

9. “How they vote” is a better measure of a state’s political climate than your subjective impressions of it when you visited, so this question seems to be kind of backwards.

10. Kansas actually. It’s as red as Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Sorry couldn’t resist it.

    They have a Democratic governor but she’s basically the type of Democrat who’d be considered a moderate Republican in a blue area.

    When they had the referendum on abortion I thought they would vote to ban it. They didn’t and they won by such a margin that the Republican areas voted for it in a majority.

    Millions of Republican women voted to keep abortion legal. I guess it shows that people don’t always conform to the stereotype of their party and that makes sense.

    I think that the press portrays the two parties as the same nation wide but in such a big country that’s not realistic.

11. Ooh I have one. I just spent the weekend in Connecticut, which I usually think of as very “liberal”, only to discover you can not buy alcohol there after 10 pm! None! And on a Saturday! And they don’t sell wine in grocery stores, just beer. I even went to a restaurant at 11pm and they told me they don’t serve beer after 10pm. Alcohol laws are weird from state to state and often reflect interesting historical attitudes. I wonder if this is a hold over from when all of New England was more “puritanical” and culturally conservative.

12. There are deep red areas in every blue state and deep blue areas in every red state. Austin, Texas is as blue as any major city in California. Rural areas of California are as red as the reddest areas of Texas.

    I think I saw a statistic once that there are more Republicans in California than there are in any other state (including Texas).

13. New Hampshire has a reputation as a swing state, but Republicans in New Hampshire aren’t really like Republican in the rest of the country. Abortion polls better in NH than California.

14. If you look at a county map of recent presidential elections, the Republicans have more counties, by a *very* large margin. However, you’ll find oddities out there. Kentucky has had a Democratic governor for most of the past 50 years, but our state Congress is largely dominated by Republicans. This basically shows that the Republicans are more spread out around the state while Democrats tend to flock to the bigger towns.

    A lot of people are saying the same thing, cities tend to largely vote Democrat and rural areas tend to vote Republican, but even within cities, you can normally find breakdowns. Some parts of cities will be heavily Republican while other parts will be heavily Democratic.

    However, I think we’re in for an interesting time moving forward. We’re going to see a lot of changes in the parties, and I think we’ll see the parties become more diverse in policies. Hopefully that leads to a few new parties so that we arent stuck with the two we have.

15. I feel like the conservative/liberal split is more of a rural/urban split. States w/ a high rural population tend to look conservative while states w/ a high urban population look liberal.

16. Portland makes Oregon seem heavily Liberal, but it’s a heavily red state with a few pockets leaning heavily liberal

17. Vermont. One of the most secular, liberal, Democratic states in the country, yet as soon as you get outside of the more gentrified towns (Burlington metro, Montpelier, Stowe, etc) it’s a lot more conservative/libertarian. I like to explain Vermont (outside of the super liberal towns) as rural Americans if you removed all the Jesus stuff. Imagine rural America without Christianity playing a noticeable role in daily life. That’s what most of Vermont is like. You end up with more people with libertarian-conservative ideals.

18. Illinois is very red except for Shitcago

19. Some people are surprised to hear that Montana had a Democratic governor for 14 years (2005 to 2020) and we’ve also had a Democratic Senator for the past 15 years. We are usually thought of as being solid red.

20. Washington State. Yes Seattle and the west are very very left leaning. But outside the big cities its pretty conservative. Honestly, that’s very common in the US where the cities are usually very “blue” but everything else is “Red”.

21. New York State.

22. West Virginia and Kentucky. I lived in London, KY, for a year. They love their Obamacare (as long as you don’t refer to it as such) and union protections. The hospital I worked at had rather successful drives to get people enrolled, but we were specifically instructed to avoid the term “Obamacare.” A lot of the folks there have gotten so wrapped up in the culture wars. In part because Democrats have moved left, but mostly because Republicans are creating phantoms (e.g., CRT, drag queen story hour, etc.).

    As someone from a fairly rural town, I don’t buy the notion that Democrats have “abandoned” rural areas. They haven’t in terms of policy. They’ve always been the pro-choice party. And Clinton healthily carried Appalachia even after signing an assault weapons ban. The coalition had long been rural union people and urbanites. Those interests can, and naturally should, co-exist. But it’s hard when you have rural folks thinking BLM is coming to loot their towns, and urban elite thinking the poor white yokels have some sort of cake walk in life on account of their race.

    New Hampshire takes the cake as far as blue(ish) states that are more conservative than one might think. But it’s more of a libertarian streak rather than textbook conservative.

23. Most midwest states are the typical large rural to large city divide, and tend to be a lot more conservative as a whole.

    Illinois is quite conservative outside of Chicagoland.

    Wisconsin is mostly a conservative state, we just have Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay that usually vote liberal these days in federal elections. State elections are sometimes a toss up.

24. Southern politics as a whole are often much less about conservative/liberal and more about apathy. Most southerners are some breed of libertarian, but many are too apathetic to vote for anyone other than who is currently in charge. There’s a sort of “better the evil we know, than the evil we don’t” attitude. It’s why guys like Trump are so popular in the South. He’s different, populistic, and he convinced people anything new can happen as a result. Coincidentally, all of the southerners I’ve met who are farther to the left tend to really like Bernie. Similar thing, populism and idealism

25. >What’s a state that you thought was conservative/liberal based on how they usually vote, but actually surprised you when you went?

    I think most people would be surprised to learn that almost no state is as liberal or conservative as voting results make it appear. The reason is because of our winner-take-all voting system. States like blue California and red Texas are actually both quite purple, in the sense that both states contain a huge, sizeable minority of members of the “other” party. It’s just that in a winner-take-all system, winning 49% of the vote is essentially no different than getting 0% of the vote.

26. Driving across northern Wisconsin before the 2020 election, I was very surprised at the even mix of Trump and Biden signs even in the remote rural parts of the state.

27. Most of Minnesota outside the Twin Cities is fairly conservative. I live in the 7th district, where we had the only Democrat who voted not to impeach Trump the first time, but stayed a Democrat. He still lost to a Trump republican in the next election.

28. Turns out, in most states, the cities are blue and the farther you get from those cities, the more red it gets.

    I lived in California for 5 years, which you would think is the bluest of blues, but travel north of LA or east of San Diego and it starts getting real red.

    Grew up in MA, same there with the cities.

    Live in rural PA now. Philly? Blue. My town an hour north, dark red.