<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2963" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Doug, what means:</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV>"And population density correlates with voting patterns: the thinner  <BR>the population, the more Republican" ?</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>What would the causal links be to explain this correlation? Is it that low density causes republicanism? That would seem to be a spatial determinism as crass as the genetic determinsm that causes Europeans to huddle together. (Maybe the cause is the other way around: voting republican makes you unpopular and people don't want to live near to you.) I believe there is a particular theory that white flight consolidates individuation and predisposes people to republicanism, but I did not think anyone here would be dozy enough to swallow that mechanistic view (which was first retailed by Kevin Philips in The Emerging Republican Majority, back when he was a Nixon advisor, but has since been given a left-wing twist by Danielson etc. etc. ).</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Would the explanation not be in the failure of the Democratic Party to relate to the aspirations that it originally served? Having helped to create the institutions that helped people out of the cities, like the FHA, it failed to create institutions that corresponded to their ambitions once they had moved to the suburbs. Pace Gore, the role of the - what... 'centre-left'? - is to promote austerity not aspiration. That they failed to win the majority of the country over, when the alternative is so gruesome is telling. Blame the Democrats, not the suburbanites.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>