Are there ideological differences between Rep voters in wealthy suburbs like Orange county and rural ones?

16 comments

1. Republicans in wealthy suburbs are usually more of the pro-business/low-tax/anti-welfare type Conservative; while poor Republicans tend to be more Conservative on social issues like abortion and immigration. It’s more a matter of focus though, they aren’t really different on a fundamental level.

2. Yes just like there’s ideological differences between democrats. This is why the two party system is dumb

3. I live in Orange County and I’d say the wealthy Republicans care less about the social issues, we still have those type of Republicans, hence Huntington Beach and their attempts to get books removed from libraries and schools. Those Huntington Republicans even though they are wealthier then many Republicans across the nation, they are still blue collar and still care about the social issues. I live in Newport, where people are extremely wealthy and the Republicans here don’t care as much about the social issues, we actually avoided voting a mom’s for liberty type person from being a school supervisor.

4. Yeah. [https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/biden-republican-voters-oakland-county-michigan-suburbs-494983](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/biden-republican-voters-oakland-county-michigan-suburbs-494983)

   In the county I live in there are lot of more capital L / “European” liberals. So kind of libertarian but not in an extreme way. Don’t care about the culture war stuff in either direction – let gays get married, let straights get married, don’t ban books whether it’s the religious or talks about racism in libraries, etc. Basically small government when it comes to social issues and smallish but comptetent government when it comes to fiscal issues and property.

5. Wealthy republicans are economically conservative while *poorer* or everyone else is socially conservative

   Wealthy democrats are socially liberal while *poorer* liberals are economically liberal with varying degree of socially liberal

6. Of course. Both US parties are pretty big tents with lots of people whose interests are not naturally aligned.

   Im the Democratic Party, there’s a lot of tension between the progressives, who skew young and educated and want large scale reforms, mostly moderate working class democrats, who mostly want quality of life improvements for workers and racial minorities, and liberals, who tend to be older than the progressives, and largely want to conserve the politics of the Obama Era.

   In the Republican Party, you basically have the religious right, the pro-business conservative, the libertarians, and the anti-immigration populists.

   Not all of these people are natural bedfellows.

   My dad, an atheist pro-business conservative, and my mom, a moderate liberal, have way more in common in how they see the world than either do with a labor-focused social democrat like me or a hardcore Trumpist member of the religious right.

7. Wall Street v. Main Street

8. We used to think so, yes. But not anymore. Now there is only Trump. The Republican Party didn’t even adopt a platform in the 2020 election, because they’re for whatever Trump is for, full stop.

   Whatever ideological differences there are between a poor rural Republican and a rich suburban Republican, they literally don’t matter. They all vote Trump, regardless of what they think they think.

9. Which Orange County? California?

   It’s a diverse area in itself. Stereotypically, the southern part is largely white and Asian, wealthier, and more conservative. The northern part is more Latino and Asian and working class.

   Some of the conservatives might be wealthier people who are economically conservative, then you have the more ideologically right wing people that congregate in places like Huntington Beach.

   They’re a spectrum of the right wing just like the left wing. And I don’t think rural areas are monolithic…a county like Orange County is definitely not monolithic.

10. In Australia we have a faction of our centre right party where it is socially progressive but fiscally conservative, usually in wealthy inner city suburbs. So these seats are the equivalent?

11. Just a casual observer. My perspective: White, 50’s, Southern California lifetime, college educated.

    My colleagues and friends that have been Republican haven’t changed their party preferences in the “Trump Era”. However, they have been continually disgusted with Trump and most Republicans since then, supporting things like “The Lincoln Project” and similar non-Trump conservative causes. If “Orange County” means California, there is a higher college educated population there, and I’m guessing that they would be less likely to be Trumpers, so to speak.

    My relatives and other folk in rural areas are much more Trumpers right now.

12. Yes. Wealthy suburban republicans want laws that favor the continued stability of big businesses. Poor, rural republicans want to repeal laws that discourage taking a chance on a small business startup.

13. Yes big time. Especially if you drill down to specifically OC (instead of just upper middle class suburban republicans nationwide) in general an OC GOPer is the sort to support having access to abortion, gays should get married etc. but also they want well paved roads, clean streets, good schools and they don’t want to pay more than they already do (40+ percent of their income.)

    Specific to OC They also are quite supportive of environmentalist activity (like shutting off all oil exploration off the coast, shuttering nuclear etc.)

14. Yes, there are differences. Rural GOP voters, especially in recent years, are more populist than conservative. Wealthy conservatives mingle with wealthy liberals and don’t seem to mind because everyone in their circle is wealthy.

    You can see the populism explicitly in people who said Bernie Sanders was their first choice in 2016 and Trump was their second. They weren’t huge in number, but they weren’t insignificant either.

15. Fun fact, back in the 20s nativists and immigrants both voted Democrat.

16. Orange County has a pretty big evangelical presence, and IIRC the megachurch phenomenon began there. Although my impression is that the ones in coastal SoCal were always politically more mellow than their counterparts elsewhere. Rick Warren inviting Obama down, and all that.

    Also, if you had anything to do with punk rock or any other underground/weirdo music subculture in SoCal in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you’d hear things about down there. Word had it that private psych facilities throughout the 1980s and into the 90s were chock full of kids from Orange County who’d been committed there by their parents. The movie ‘Suburbia’ (made by the same lady who did ‘The Decline of Western Civilization’) was very intentionally set there.

    They had their brand of cultural conservatism, is what I’m trying to say here. I couldn’t tell you how it really was, or how it is now, because I came from quite a ways up the freeway from down yonder. I also don’t like to sound like I’m badmouthing the place; I always had an awesome time the handful of times I went down that way.