None of this disputes my point-- that lumping everyone in the suburbs in with the actual urban area, removes the distinctions in an imperfect way. My case is clearly an example of that. If I'm one of the reasons my suburb is "purple" rather than the "blue" of the urban center itself, that's just supporting my statement.
I'm also not sure Chicago/Illinois as a lone example is a representative sample. My suburb might be "blended" but while Austin districts went strongly to Biden (and Hillary before that), my district and most other major suburbs around Austin still went heavily to Trump.
I'll pause here to note that I did not vote for Trump. But my district did in 2016 and 2020 and it will again in 2024.
Right, but we're talking about statewide voting trends.
- OAM specifically speculated that Texas will turn blue. Quite frankly, I think that was the start of all of this. He didn't make it about specific "big cities" vs "suburbs".
- CD specifically talked about GA, a state that was blue in 2020. He called out both the Atlanta population and the greater metropolitan area population.
- CD said that rural areas are red, suburbs are more purple, and the urban centers blue.
- CD and/or Fearless talked about how as a state gets "more urban", it tends to shift more blue.
- It was Badge that then said he didn't understand because the "big cities" are poorly run, and pointing out that they were typically always run by "blue" elements, the D's.
I believe that you have to account for both the suburbs and the "big cities" when you talk about the subject. Yes, it's important to acknowledge the differences. But I'm not trying to lump them in together or calling them homogenous.
Looking at 2020 results, Travis County (Austin) went for Biden at 71.4%. Round Rock is in Williamson County, which actually narrowly went for Biden (49.6% which was a plurality). If I compare that to a West Texas county picked at random from a map, I look at Scurry County, which went for Trump 84.9%.
If I look at the vote totals as a proxy for population (hence rural vs suburban/urban), 19 of 20 of the the lowest-vote counties went Trump. Most of those went for Trump at a rate higher than 80%, with quite a few above 90%. 11 of the 20 most-vote counties went Biden. Of the remaining 9, the highest was 71% for Trump, with 4 of 9 over 60%, and 5 of the 9 between 50-59.9%.
If Texas continues to urbanize, it would be expected to slowly turn purple and possibly eventually blue, as OAM suggested. This is unlikely to be forestalled by Badge's confusion at how "big cities" are being [mis-]managed by Democrats.