Jon Stewart describes Democratic Party’s midterm strategy as ‘D*ckless H. Chickensh*t’

[JonLP24]

16. Gilbert which is pretty much Mesa also received the same title

It’s enough to make one wonder: In the year 2014, can a major American city be—gasp—conservative? If you believe the results of a recent study from a couple of academic researchers at MIT and UCLA, you’d do well to look to the Southwest to find out. Mesa, Arizona, the researchers found, after analyzing more than a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys, is the most conservative American city of more than 250,000 residents, more conservative than such famously right-wing bastions as Oklahoma City and Colorado Springs. “On an overall basis,” says the boisterous Scott Smith, who was mayor of Mesa from 2008 until early this year, “there’s no doubt it’s extremely conservative.”

It might also be a glimpse of the GOP’s coming urban revival.

Squint, and you can see that Mesa is just one of several places where Republicans are creating a new model of conservatism for the post-Tea Party era, through an appealing blend of fiscal pragmatism and no-nonsense competence. Across the country, Republican cities are building new infrastructure and even embracing trendy liberal ideas like “new urbanism”—all while managing to keep costs in line and municipal workforces small and cost-effective. As the great, Democratic-run cities across the country—Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles—face fiscal calamity, America’s conservative cities are showing that there’s another way.

Most of Mesa, despite its growing population of more than 450,000 (making it more populous than Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Miami and Minneapolis) hardly feels like a city at all. Located some 20 miles east of Phoenix, Mesa sprawls in every direction; at nearly 140 square miles, it covers roughly twice the area of Washington, D.C.

Mesa’s sprawling layout owes much to its history. The area began its modern existence as a Mormon settlement in the late 19th century, and it remained a small frontier community for much of its early years. The town’s population only broke into five digits in the 1940s, when fighter pilots began training for World War II combat at Mesa’s Falcon Field and the Williams Air Force Base—and, equally crucial, when air conditioning became widely available. Because it only really began to grow quickly in the 1940s and ’50s, Mesa followed the classic postwar development pattern most famously embodied by Levittown, New York: miles of modest, single family homes in subdivisions, wide boulevards meant for speedy driving and shopping centers boasting ample parking. In sum, the bulk of Mesa is quintessentially suburban. As former mayor Smith puts it, Mesa attracts those who think “being boring is OK.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/mesa-arizona-are-conservative-cities-better-111069.html#ixzz3IOQAEqbw

Luckily redistricting helped the portion of Mesa I live in by represented by a Dem. The most common Mesa complaint is that it is boring.