Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸
independentTX
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Posts: 12,284
Political Matrix
E: 0.52, S: -3.48
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« on: November 30, 2019, 11:22:11 PM » |
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A few areas of contrast:
HISTORY:
The area that would become the DFW metroplex, including Collin County, was initially settled by people from the Upper South and some Yankees. Slaveholding wasn't a major institution in the area - it was mostly ranching and smallholder white farmers. Secessionist sentiment was relatively mild.
Montgomery County, along with most of southeast Texas, was settled by people from the Lower South. It's more culturally Southern. It was once a major hub for the timber industry, which tended to be very right-wing (this is also part of why the Tyler-Longview area went Republican before the rest of East Texas). In 1968, it was one of the few Texas counties carried by George Wallace - emblematic of the exurban white character of the county.
INDUSTRY:
DFW is, nowadays, basically a headquarters headquarters. It's a favorite area for multinational/national corporations to relocate to because it has low taxes but many of the benefits of higher tax states (a nice international airport, ample supply of educated workers, new roads). More and more people are corporate transplants from elsewhere.
Montgomery County is more blue-collar. The Woodlands, which is located at the very southern edge of the county, has mainly attracted oil and chemical company offices, which means your white collar workers may be more Republican-favorable than the white collar workers in Plano and Las Colinas.
GEOGRAPHY:
Collin County is much more built out and suburban in nature. Montgomery County still has wide swaths of mostly undeveloped areas that are a magnet for conservative white people who want to buy some cheap land and build a "homestead" where they can shoot their guns and ride their ATVs around. The eastern part of the county is basically poor white trash: they aren't voting Republican, but the people with a little bit more money who resent seeing the meth users buying groceries at Dollar General with an EBT card definitely are.
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