"People often move for a reason that seems to have nothing to do with politics but then turns out to correlate to politics quite closely."

"According to a Pew survey, for instance, nearly eighty per cent of liberals like the idea of living in a dense neighborhood where you can walk to shops and schools, while seventy-five per cent of conservatives would rather live in a larger house with more space around it. After people move, the politics of the new place affect them. Those who move to a politically dissimilar place tend to become independents; those who move to a place where people vote the same way they do tend to become more extreme in their convictions. But there also seems to be something about the act of moving that disturbs people’s beliefs, regardless of where they end up. One woman left Orange City to attend college in a place that was, if anything, more conservative than her home town, but, even so, the experience changed her. 'Both of my parents are vocally conservative, so I thought I was a Republican all these years, but my views have changed,' she says. 'Living outside of a small rural town gives you a different perspective. When I think about taxes now, what comes to my mind is school funding coming from taxes, which perpetuates poverty, because schools in lower-income areas have lower graduation rates. When I think about immigration, I think, We all immigrated at some point—well, most of us—can we not remember that?...'"

From "Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On/As America’s rural communities stagnate, what can we learn from one that hasn’t?" by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.

Orange City is in Iowa, and I was listening to the audio version of the magazine as I took a walk in my neighborhood, over around by the stadium, where the home team is playing Iowa right now.