When his best friend in Austin quips, “It’s great living in a blue city in a red state,” Bryan Caplan is tempted to reply, “ We really don’t know what it would be like to live in a red city in a red state — or even a red city in a blue state.”
Why? Because they barely exist. Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors.
From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t.
One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible.
The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing policies; they want left-wing policies delivered by the Democrats.
As expected of someone such as Bryan Caplan.
He travels by plane and his worldview is from a screen and numbers.
Or maybe there is an even simpler explanation.
For example… the voters “want” what their preachers tell them to “want”. And when they don’t, their dead ancestors come from the graves to guide them, so 102% of them want it anyway.
The needs of urban dwellers differ from those of rural dwellers in obvious ways. That’s why the division got started.
As to why it continues, when the Democrats no longer serve their constituency well: it’s simply brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is a mindless normie tribal thing, and you can’t reason with stupidity.
Much of what goes on in the world becomes far less puzzling when you keep in mind that most people are stupid.