Study deems the Twin Cities liberal

08/13/2005

Dane Smith,
Star Tribune
August 13, 2005

Minneapolis is the 23rd most liberal city in the nation and St. Paul isn’t far behind at 36th, among 237 municipalities with more than 100,000 people, according to a report by a West Coast research group.

The study identified race, namely the percentage of the black and white population in a city, as the most important predictor of whether a city is liberal or conservative. Detroit ranked most liberal and Provo, Utah, most conservative.

But a Minnesota expert on voting behavior said the study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research is limited by simplistic methodology. And its finding that race is the paramount factor may be flawed.

The report is “earnest,” said Larry Jacobs, director for the Center for the Study of Politics at the University of Minnesota. “But they’re not using the best data sources possible. ... There’s a kind of sloppiness in equating ideological labels with the parties.”

By other criteria, Minneapolis and St. Paul probably should place even higher on a ranking of degree of liberalism, Jacobs said.

The study based its rankings on the 2004 presidential vote, ranking liberalism according to the highest percentage of votes for Democrat John Kerry and liberal third-party candidates.

Conservatism was ranked according to the highest combined percentages compiled by Republican George Bush and conservative third parties.

Of the 25 cities ranked most liberal, 16 had black populations of 30 percent or more, and most were among the nation’s largest urban cores. Of the 25 most conservatives cities, almost all were overwhelmingly white and relatively small, close to the 100,000 threshold.

Minneapolis, with an 18 percent black population, and St. Paul, with 12 percent, were among the few largely white big cities that ranked high on liberalness.

Findings led the study’s authors to assert in a press release that “the great political divide in America today is not red vs. blue, north vs. south, coastal vs. interior or even rich vs. poor. It is now clearly black vs. white.”

But Jacobs said the report misses the point that only about 13 percent of the national population is black and yet Kerry got almost half the total vote. Moreover, focusing on the largest cities misses the action, he said. A large and growing portion of population now lives in suburban cities, many of them with populations less than 100,000.

Jason Alderman, director of the report, defended the findings, arguing that “voting for president is the best test.” Asking voters to define themselves produces too subjective a response,” he said.

The ranking feels about right for Bill Walsh, executive director of the Minnesota Republican Party, but he said that it overlooks the GOP success in cutting Democratic margins down in large urban centers in 2004.

“We’re not giving up on those cities,” Walsh said. “We’re taking our message there, recruiting and running candidates. Our technology improves every year and we’ve demonstrated our ability to find and target” Republican voters in the cities.

The DFL Party’s commuications director, Bill Amberg, said he found the results unsurprising “but they really seemed to be testing partisan affiliation. All Democrats aren’t liberal or progressive and all Republicans aren’t conservative. The story is that we’re reaching out and making inroads in the suburbs and small rural counties.”

The report can be found on the Internet at votingresearch.org.