>Spoken like a true downtowner. (Were you a student there, perhaps?) Have you been to >Mattapan, or perhaps strolled Blue Hill Avenue late at night? Been to Charlestown lately? >These are all parts of Boston -- the parts you don't see while ordering pizza slices at >Quincy Market. Hey, I'll stroll around Fifth Avenue in New York anytime you like...if you'll do >the same about 100 blocks north.

Charlestown, sure, been there lots including at night. Mostly I saw a lot of yuppies moving into new condos. Mattapan and Blue Hill Ave during the day; several times I rode public transit in Mattapan where I was the only white person on the bus. Didn't feel unsafe. Haven't been out and about there at night, I concede. The only place I've ever been mugged was a white, GOP voting suburb of Portland, and by crime statistics, the town I'm in in Kansas has more murders, home invasions, drug dealing, etc. per capita than almost any neighborhood in Boston.

And I sure see a LOT more out of wedlock kids here than I ever did in New England. Outside of my professional circle, seems like every women I talk to had a couple of unplanned kids between 16 and 25, or at least married early and soon got divorced. Statisticts back that up: compare rural but "blue" voting counties in northern New England to rural "red" counties in the South or Midwest and you'll see much lower teen birth rates in New England (or the Pacific NW, too).

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that New England "still" votes Democratic, and that this is due to "tradition". New England used to be the most Republican part of the country. In 1936 FDR only lost Maine and Vermont, I believe. MA and RI have been Dem for a long time, but northern New England plus Conn. voted mostly Republican until the 1990s -- Dukkakis won Mass, but *lost* the rest of New England. You still see a number of Republican senators from the small New England states, though polls and trends suggest that when Chafee, Snowe, and Collins retire, their seats will switch to Dems.

The college student plus liberal elite suburbanites argument works in Massachusetts, but doesn't explain why small-town New England has switched colors in the last 20 years.