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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing

It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.

Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.

Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).

Curious if anyone has other explanations.

New Mexico/Colorado have always been kinda libertarian in a vaguely blue way(eg drugs and weird sex stuff and not too attached to guns). New Mexico is also super duper Hispanic.

Many of the government employees are military and fairly reddish, I don't think it's government employment.

All I know is back in the 2000s, people were complaining about all the Californians moving in. And the state moved from a Red, to a Purple, to a Blue state in the time following. I don't have any actual statistics on how many Californians moved to New Mexico, I just know that was a complaint people were making.

A lot of filming started to take place in New Mexico, the Albuquerque government began courting studios.

I mean instead of checking 1 by 1 you can plot and check for correlations

Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.

I think that sounds very compelling, I would also add a little to the government employment aspect (especially with respect to large # of very well compensated scientists working at sandia and Los Alamos), is substantial, but who knows, the hard sciences are usually split more evenly.

Urban is a bit underspecified, but some statistics about the urban population:

Arizona 89.3%

Colorado 86.0%

Nevada 94.1%

New Mexico 74.5%

Texas 83.7%

Utah 89.8%

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/mapping-us-urbanization-by-state/

NM is more urbanized than AK, OK, and WY though.

Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.

I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.

At least for Texas the vast majority of the population lives in definitely urban environments in a few major metros(DFW and Houston combined have just over half the state's population, add in San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso there's a supermajority), so I think the data is directionally correct.

How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?

Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.

From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities. So it's urban in that sense, but only a tiny sliver of the geography is actually urban.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities.

Or in other words, the state is just Australia in microcosm; political implications and all.

Interesting, because Oz is perhaps surprisingly more woke and lefty despite the "pioneer spirit" which would lean very much the opposite. But, I suppose, now that the vast majority are softies in the cities, it makes sense.

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