"30 minutes outside Rochester" is very rural Upstate New York. It is very rural, and also very red.
Well, no, Walter.
Amy Christa Ernano
Lives in Hudson Valley, New YorkAuthor has 6K answers and 203.1M answer views
2y
“Upstate New York” is an area roughly the size of England and is largely rural, so there is no one answer. I can tell you that I just moved from the outer NYC metro area about 80 miles north to rural farm country — the population of my village is 1,200, and of the town as a whole about 8,000 — and it's considerably more liberal here than it is down there, 50 miles from the city.
In the 5 short days since I've moved, I've seen Pride flags flying from several porches, BLM banners (in a town that is 98% white), and also several “I Stand with Planned Parenthood” signs on lawns. Among registered voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans, and the gap is widening every year. There are 3 churches in the village — one Reformed, one Episcopalian, one Baptist. The next village over has a Lutheran and a Catholic church as well as a synagogue.
My very rural county has voted blue in the last 7 presidential elections; the last time it went red was in 1992. The semirural, metro area county I previously lived in is solid red and has been since the 1960s.
What I'm trying to say is, it's a bad idea to make blanket assumptions like, “rural equals conservative”. That's not always the case, and in my corner of upstate New York, it's definitely not the case. I saw more religion and much more conservatism where I came from
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