Location, Location, Location

The Bay Area Center for Voting Research published the results of a study of the 237 US cities with populations over 100,000, ranking them from most liberal to most conservative. Yours truly has boiled this data down to the cities which are somewhat nearby to Harris (and Callaway!) bloggers. (For some reason, the people doing this work seem to think Microsoft Word is an acceptable form for web browsing. If they were so damned liberal, you'd think they'd have figured out how to put together a web site. But, I digress.) For your viewing pleasure, and to stimulate your extensive cocktail party conversations, here is what I did:

• Normalized across the original 237 cities, with zero being the most liberal, 100 being the most conservative.
  
• Eliminated those pesky southern California and central valley cities. I only kept SF Bay Area cities.
• Kept Baltimore and Philadelphia for Missy. Sorry Miss, Cecil County wasn't on the radar screen.
  
• Kept all the Florida ones for Mom and Dad, although only a few are on the lower west end of the peninsula.
• Kept all the Virginia ones for Keith, although it's really only Alexandria, Richmond, and a bunch of cruft around Norfolk as far as I can see.
• Kept the Wisconsin ones for Al. I'm not sure where he's, as he put it, marooned in Wisconsin.
• Kept the only Hawaiian data point, Honolulu, for AJ and Ursula.
• Kept New Haven in just for Kyla.
  
• Color coded them to group them together (CA is blue, FL is red, VA is light green, MD/PA is light blue, WI is yellow, New Haven is purple, Honolulu is some funky color).
  

There is a strong correlation to large minority populations and whatever the heck these people decided constituted liberal vs. conservative. Other than that, I'm not sure what you're supposed to conclude other than the obvious that the SF Bay Area is exceedingly liberal. I thought this comment by the guy who heads the organization was pretty amusing, though:

“While there are a few liberal cities without large African American populations, these wind up being the exceptions. College towns like Berkeley and Cambridge have modest black populations but remain bastions of upper middle-class, white, intellectual liberalism. These liberal white communities, however, are more reminiscent of penguins clustering together around a shrinking iceberg than of a vibrant and growing political movement”

Time to stop spreadsheeting and do yard work!