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I'm not sure that it's simply that a city attracts left leaning people.
I grew up conservative, religious, and from the country, and had to move to the city because that's where my mom took us. My move to the left ocurred due to what the city offered: cultures. I was exposed to many other ways of thinking, to art, to music, to trends, to drugs. I came to see other types of people as just people like me, with different points of view but each deserving their own chance at the American dream. I also became atheist.
The city might attract the left, but it also creates the left.
Incidentally, I want to move to a more secluded part of the state, probably where you'd see the F**k Biden billboards. We can't all be pigeon holed so easily.
I'm trying to move to the sticks right now, and a high likelihood of having trumpers for neighbors is honestly one of the things that's bothering me the most.
I concur, cities are cosmopolitan in their nature. Being confronted to diversity brings socialist ideas more easily than living in a secluded countryside, where everyone is the same.
Though it can bring rejection and discrimination as easily.
Not even "Socialist ideas".
Just simply a better understanding that people are people, no matter what they look like.
Exactly where I was going to go with it. This question comes with a lot of assumptions about causation rather than just examining the correlation of political views and population density.
It's as weird as asking the question as "why are conservatives moving to the middle of nowhere?"
Tbh I was considering flipping the question and asking, "Why aren't leftists moving to rural areas?" but that seemed a similarly mucked up form of the question.
The question wasn't aiming to be academic, so wasn't carefully formed to account for causation and examining demographic details, but regardless, it could be better. I'm simply not sure how I might better ask the sort of question I'd like to ask to get the kind of info & responses that would satisfy my curiosity concerning this area.
Despite the malformed query, some of the responses here have given some useful insights, direct or indirect as they may be.
Edit:
Also, despite several of the anecdotes about moving to the city and city life influencing them to more left-leaning views, part of what influenced this question is experience in rural areas and developing as a leftist there among other left-leaning folks.
I think if you had asked " “Why aren’t leftists moving to rural areas?” " you'd get a lot of "because rural areas suck" answers. Because holy shit unless you're there specifically for nature and isolation they're inferior on every metric.
I’ve lived in both rural and urban areas. Rural areas do indeed suck. People there lead boring purposeless lives so they’re always up in your business. If you keep to yourself they’ll just make shit up. This is not a problem in the city.