In America how did the east, and west coasts tend to vote Democrat, and the mainland tend to vote Republican?

Urban centers vote blue, and rural areas vote red. There are larger concentrations of cities near the coasts. In the past, this was from competing priorities between what is good for the city and outlying areas like our flyover states. To be fair, their needs are just different so their politics are different. I have lived roughly half my life out in the sticks and half in the city. Both have their merits. There is one massive difference though. Rural living is one of much more self-sufficiency and self-reliance without much use of infrastructure. City life is the opposite, People have to cooperate more and are completely dependent on infrastructure. There is a natural rift between these two lifestyles and people vote accordingly.

This is a very broad explanation, and I’m leaving outside lots of detail.

Definition #1 – when you talk about the East coast, don’t include the southern US (Virginia on down) because the South is much more like the middle of the country than it is either the east or west coasts.

Explanation:

The east, in particular, was settled by Europeans (primarily British), and they landed in New England and spread out from there. Because New England has short growing seasons, population spread further west (what became Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana) and then further south (Maryland, Virginia, all the way down to Georgia – the thirteen colonies, basically.

New Englanders largely became businessmen, merchants, etc. because they couldn’t earn a living from agriculture, because of the short growing season. So they started universities (Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and so on) that educated their sons (not daughters at that point). Some families became manufacturers (furniture,, buggy whips, early iron work, milling, etc.).

Meanwhile the South had a LONG growing season, and landowners bought slaves and the South became a huge agricultural center, Cotton, peanuts, corn, anything that they wanted to grow. The South had the advantage of warm weather, as I said, so it could be productive almost all year.

Then gold was discovered in California (which was previously unsettled by whites) in 1849. San Francisco became a mercantile and financial city overnight, practically. It became, in some ways, the New York of the western US. Los Angeles followed a little later. But at that point – 1850s – California was barely settled and populated; business was down in San Francisco but comparatively little agriculture. That started seriously after the civil war.

Meanwhile, the midwest and central plains areas grew as the population grew and looked for opportunities outside of New England. Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, later Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, etc., helped along by the railroad, became major merchant cities of their own.

Because of the huge expanses of land throughout the US, the whole central area because a massive agriculture heaven – crops of all types were grown, and cattle, pork, and poultry leveraged the land to feed the rest of the country.

So back to your question:

1) first, the republicans during the civil war era (1850–1865) were considered the liberals and free thinkers, and the democrats were considered the conservative party. Keep in mind that Abe Lincoln was a republican. That all changed in the last 150 years.

2) Agriculture is by nature a conservative function – it takes advantage of the land and is comparatively a slow process (it takes 4 months to raise corn). You didn’t need much of an education to be a successful farmer. (And until about 40 years ago, that remained true). Advances in growing have taken place, but nowhere near at the rate of manufacturing or commerce.

3) Manufacturing: cars, tractors, trains, bulldozers, and a zillion other things – took advantage of creative and educated people that largely lived in (or had come from) either New England / NY or from California (Stanford University, for example, trained a lot of technologies 100 years ago).

Business and mercantilism by nature is a faster process than agriculture. Products are invented in weeks, not the two years it takes to raise a calf.

conclusion: The east and west coast attracted people who were (are) liberal and aggressive thinkers. Problem solvers. That aggressiveness translate into aggressive and liberal politics.

The slower-paced agricultural antecedents of the midwest and south have generally led to a less aggressive, more conservative outlook.

It’s more big city vs rural. The big cities usually vote for Democrats. The big cities are more diverse, many escaped persecution, and so on social issues are especially empathetic to other minorities. Also, the expensive cities tended to have more higher educated people, but also the cities have impoverished ghetto areas. Both groups often vote with the Democrats.

If you compare the coasts and the interior of the US, it’s really more northeast coast and west coast, although Maryland is very blue now, you might or might not count that as northeast.

Within red states there can be big blue dots. Atlanta is huge and diverse and lots of Democrats, but the rest of the state is red. New York is very red outside of New York City.

As a big city grows more and more, the numbers push the state to purple and sometimes blue. One example of an exception is Miami, where the “minority” population in that large city tends to be Republican. Minority is in quotes, because Miami-Dade county is 69% Hispanic. This is a specific Florida problem. Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, those cities are heavily Democratic to fit the typical pattern across the US.

The unions traditionally sided with the Democrats. So the industrialized states that had more unions often were purple or blue. It’s tricky, because those union states also are heavily Catholic. The Catholic vote is a swing vote in my opinion.

The very religious usually sided with the Republicans the last 50 years, so the bible belt states tend to go Republican. The bible belt is huge across the South and parts of the Midwest.

I once heard that you should vote Republican nationally and Democrat locally. The reason is that Republicans tend to be better on things like budget and military and Dems tend to focus more on social welfare issues. Cities tend to have a lot of people. Even in red states you can often see blue patches around the cities. That is because many people want the huge safety nets the Dems promise.

The coasts have larger cities and therefore more Democrat support. The center of the country doesn’t have a lot of large cities and so they don’t see the need for the freebies so they vote Repub more often.

@seawulf575 that may have been true in the past, but the last twenty years have flipped the script.

Dems have been much better on budget balancing than republicans since Clinton’s time.

@elbanditoroso I know you had tongue-in-cheek as you typed that. NEITHER party has been good and the Dems have been the party of spend, spend, spend since time began. They create ways to spend money. And yet our lives are not enriched, the economy sucks, things get worse and worse. And just a point of contention, Clinton was brilliant in that he knew to do nothing to the economy. He rode the wave that started from Reagan and through Bush I. Bush I recognized the cyclic nature of the economy and saw it was turning around. He, too, knew enough to keep his hands off it, but he was a horrible politician. He didn’t know how to sell that understanding to the people that were hurt by the economy that had been bad. The only things Clinton did for the economy ended up hurting it. NAFTA for example, allowed jobs to be outsourced to Mexico primarily where the wealthy elite could avoid environmental restrictions and wage limitations. Sending jobs to other countries does not help the USA.

Don’t put words in my mouth, @seawulf575 – you have done it before and it is a dishonest thing for you to do.

@elbanditoroso Sorry, but not really. I’m not putting words in your mouth. I’m finding your comment ridiculous. And if you believe putting words into someone’s mouth is wrong, then why do so many on these pages do it to me, yourself included? You don’t seem to have a problem with it any other time. Get over yourself.