Muncie among the most moderate cities in country

Muncie is one of the most moderate towns in the U.S., despite the liberal lean of most college towns, a new report shows.

Livability.com named Muncie its seventh best town to live in for people at the center of the political spectrum. The website looked at political and nonpolitical factors to determine four areas that help quantify what makes cities like Muncie best for people in the center.

“We already have the best places to live, but we wanted to talk about the political life and the consumer aspects of some of those places,” said Matt Carmichael, vice president and editor for Livability.com.

The point of the list is to give potential future residents an idea of the kind of community they will be joining based on shopping and political habits, he added.

The four areas the website evaluated to determine its most moderate cities were ideology of the representation, voting of the residents, political leanings of the residents and how shopping habits of the residents relate to political affiliations.

“If we were a political site, we would do a straight up most liberal or conservative cities,” Carmichael said. “Since we are a best place to live site, we want to get at some of the lifestyle choices as well.”

Gene Frankland, a professor of political science, said a conventional political analysis of the locations of moderates would mainly involve polling or looking at where the swing states are, not the consumer habits of an area, which Livability did.

The website examined buying habits by asking Experian Marketing Services to create a list of goods to determine which sides of the political aisle prefer what products and services.

They took this standard of measure and looked at the highest concentration of these goods – periodicals, cars and TV shows – in cities.

For instance, because liberals were found to prefer Subaru cars, Livability determined which areas had a large number of Subaru owners.

Muncie’s placement comes as a surprise to Erica Walsh, a senior economics and logistics and supply chain management major and president of the College Democrats of Indiana. The College Republicans were unavailable for comment.

“I can’t believe we got called a centrist, because campus is fairly liberal and the city is mostly poor people when you look at the median income,” Walsh said. “Typically, poor people vote democrat.”

The presence of a variety of food venues in Delaware County, in terms of affordability, puts the placement in perspective, she said.

“We have a pretty solid mix here,” she said. “Since we have such a variety, that shows it a little bit."

From a political science standpoint, the website’s methodology is a little strange, Frankland said.

“We probably wouldn’t look at buying habits – probably swing states and polling,” Frankland said. “It sounds like an unusual approach, but that doesn’t mean it's bad, just different.”

To determine an area’s ideology, Livability looked at city, county and congressional districts and how they sit on the political spectrum by examining GovTrack’s analysis of members of the House of Representatives.

For figuring out what people believe on a personal level, the website looked at self-reported political leanings from Esri and country voting records from the 2012 presidential election, specifically the Mitt Romney and Barack Obama split.

Muncie’s split in 2012 was 50 percent for Obama and 47 percent for Romney.

“There was one paid person here in Indiana [campaigning for Obama], and there were so many more in 2008,” Walsh said. “So I think that would have been a better measure.”

The top 10 liberal towns include a number of college towns like Berkeley, but the conservative towns are mostly located in the rural south, according to other lists by Livability.

However, none of the top 10 moderate cities have any causal trend between them, Carmichael said.

“You start seeing no commonalities. It’s kind of spreading the geographic maps in many ways,” Carmichael said. “There wasn’t a lot in common between and Muncie or Boise. There were no commonalities or a trend.

“As people are moving and relocating, politics isn’t the first thing they are thinking of, but since political and consumer choices have become so closely correlated, they tend to move to like-minded folks"

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