Best Places to Live

2014 Best Cities for Liberals

Democrats should feel right at home in these liberal cities.


What makes a great city for a liberal or conservative, or a centrist for that matter?

Clearly the political landscape is important. Do the people around you share your beliefs and values? Are your elected officials in Washington D.C. representing your interests? Or is your town full of people openly carrying their firearms and trying to force their idea of morality on you?

UPDATED: The Best Cities for Liberals, Conservatives & Moderates 2016

Being a great place to live is about more than just politics. Do people around you also take part in the kinds of activities, watch the same shows, shop at the same stores and have similar interests to you? What are those goods and services, and how do they differ from party to party?, working with advisory board member Dr. Kevin Stolarick, took both the political and nonpolitical aspects into account when creating this Top 10 list. Here's how:



We then asked Experian Marketing Services to help us create a basket of goods - one restaurant, one automotive brand, one magazine, one retailer and one TV show – that are heavily favored by one end of the political spectrum or another. Then, we backtracked and found areas where people use those goods and services to a high degree. For example, we found that liberals like Suburu cars way more than conservatives do, so we looked for areas where lots of people drive Suburus.


What we found, partially due to the use of county-level data for some of the measures, that certain states had a sizable number of cities that skewed one way or another. Liberal cities were most often found in California, Maryland and Massachusetts. Conservatives concentrated in places like Texas and Tennessee. If you lean one way or another, you’ll find yourself among friends in those states. To make our list a little more geographically balanced, we took the most-skewed city in each state until we had our Top 10.

How’d we do? You can cast your vote in the comments.

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Ranking Criteria

2012 Presidential Vote
Ideology of congressional representative
Registered voters
Consumer habits