I suppose we could hypothesize that SLC’s devotion to the GOP has a religious, rather than economic or demographic or geographic, explanation . . .

I suppose what I had in mind was that the Dems maintain a majority in the major metropolitan areas of the west coast (San Diego, LA, San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Seattle-Tacoma) and the east (NYC, Boston, Philly, etc.) while the GOP majorities are everyplace in between, except other major metropolitan areas such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, etc.

It’s hard to fit SLC into this model. Unless we say that SLC is metropolitan but not “major metropolitan.” Still SLC’s commitment to the GOP does seem remarkable.

Perhaps SLC is like Fresno. Fresno is the 6th largest city in Cal & there are 1 M people in larger Fresno. Yet it remains conservative compared with the other Calif. cities I’ve named. Maybe it’s its agricultural roots, no pun intended.

There’s a lot to be said about the history of the two major parties and their bases, but I think you have to look at the Red extractive colonial economy states vs. Blue Industrial states–and the resulting different distances from global capital within the global and national economy and city system– and the psychologies created within these two different political economies.

Rob Briggs: The problem with the rural v. urban explanation is that Utah is the second most urban state (as measured by percentage of the population living in urban areas) in the Union. (The most urban state is Neveda.) A moments reflection should make this obvious. Someplace like upstate New York or Pennsylvania is more or less evenly populated outside of its main urban centers (NYC and Philly). There are lots of small towns and lots of farm land. In contrast Utah is mainly empty. The vast majority of the population lives in a relatively narrow corridor of land at the base of the Wasatch Mountains and most of those on the Wasatch front live between Provo and Ogden. Comparatively few Utahns live in small towns or rural areas. In other words, Utah gets classified as rural because of its politics, however, at this point the concept of “rural” ceases to do much analytic work and is little more than another label for “conservative.”

I’m not as ready as you are to chalk it up to the urban/rural divide, though that is obviously part of it. Rural people are a demographic majority in just five states: Maine, Mississippi, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia. Two of these states, of course, are heavily Democratic, and West Virginia is much closer to parity than Utah/Idaho/Wyoming. So it seems it is not ruralness, per se, which accounts for the Utah/Idaho/Wyoming distinctiveness.

I did see Bush and Kerry ads but only on cable.