Smash and Flyers, great replies!
I simply gave you New York and Philly's trends. Boston and Baltimore-Washington's trends are generally different from what I just described, but having been to some of their neighborhoods, there are a lot of similarities politically and "urban structure." I guess Baltimore would kinda be like what I described in regards to Philly-NYC. However, Washington is drastically different because you don't have somewhat socially conservative transition areas and you basically have "tax and spend" government worker liberals in Maryland and higher paid gov't workers plus lobbyists in Northern Virginia. Boston is very funny because the only area that's socially conservative is really South Boston, which reminds me of a classic 1950s-1960s white ethnic, VERY socially conservative yet heavily Democratic neighborhood called Kensington in Philadelphia where my dad's family's from. Of course the neighborhood is now mostly Latino. Anyway, the rest of the Boston area is very liberal.
Baltimore's suburbs are pretty conservative compared to the rest of the Northeast. I'm sure you've heard that many people consider Baltimore to be a "Southern" city in the North. Baltimore county (doesn't include the city) votes Democrat because of the inner Baltimore suburbs which are heavily Democrat (minorities moving out of the city), but the rest of the Baltimore suburbs are conservative Republican, and the exurbs are VERY conservative (Baltimore exurbs are spilling into York county, which is one of the reasons I think it trended Bush in '04).
Baltimore itself isn't very liberal, and much of Maryland is populist. The liberal areas are around D.C.
