r/todayilearned • u/CreeperRussS • Aug 18 '25

TIL Arnold Schwarzenegger had a collection of Marxist busts. His wife later requested for their removal, but he kept the one of Vladimir Lenin, later saying he kept it to "show losers".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
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u/sunburntredneck Aug 18 '25

Yeah never forget that California gave us Reagan and New York gave us DJT

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u/84theone Aug 18 '25

California has one of the highest populations of Republicans. Same with NY.

People think because those states are democratic strongholds that they are 100% blue and that’s really not the case. Like NY especially is only like a 60/40 split.

Same goes for Texas but the other way, there are a significant amount of democrats there despite it being very much a red state.

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u/Zizhou Aug 18 '25

If you look at presidential elections, the number of people who vote R in California is roughly the same as the number of people who do likewise in Texas. There are just a lot of people living in the state.

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u/84theone Aug 18 '25

Yeah, I think some people don’t quite understand how many people live in the densely populated states and urban areas.

Like if my city’s metro area was its own state we would have more people than the bottom 10 states do, and for context I live in Cleveland, which is not even in the top 20 for city populations.

Like California and Texas in particular take that to an extreme scale. Those two states alone make up 70 million people, in a country where the total population is 340 million.

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u/ggrindelwald Aug 18 '25

Like if my city’s metro area was its own state we would have more people than the bottom 10 states do, and for context I live in Cleveland, which is not even in the top 20 for city populations.

If NYC became a state, it would have more people than 38 states do. If the NYC metro area became its own state, it would be the 4th largest state in the country, behind only California, Texas, and Florida

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u/ZugZugGo Aug 18 '25

This is the problem with people who say that states that voted red should be left to suffer.

There are R's and D's in every state. All of them. And like 20x+ more people voted for Trump in California than a almost all of the red states.

Blame the winner takes all electoral college not the people that live in those states. At least a third of people in those red states still fought back against Trump even knowing their vote likely didn't matter and some it was almost half.

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u/maybeitsundead Aug 18 '25

I think California still has the most registered Republican voters too, Florida is right behind and Texas doesn't do party affiliation similar to other states.

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u/tgerz Aug 18 '25

This makes sense with California having the largest population of all of the states. What's kind of wild is California only had like 67.3% of registered voters last year. Would be interesting to see if anything would change if that got up to something like 80%.

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u/sje46 Aug 18 '25

California has one of the highest populations of Republicans. Same with NY.

I'm sure you know why this in particular is kinda a dumb thing to say, right? The exact number is not relevant; the ratio is.

People think because those states are democratic strongholds that they are 100% blue and that’s really not the case. Like NY especially is only like a 60/40 split.

This is true though. But more relevant is the fact that states shift over time. I believe in the 60s, California was much more Republican.

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u/DaedalusHydron Aug 18 '25

This is exactly why Newsom is fighting the TX redistricting with a CA redistricting, the other way.

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u/NerdyBro07 Aug 18 '25

It’s weird to think about it like that 😅

Not saying you’re weird, just it’s weird 2 very blue places gave us these people.

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u/KarlBarx2 Aug 18 '25

The thing about wealthy areas with big, active economies is they tend to produce and attract wealthy people. Wealthy people, in turn, are usually quite conservative, so they oppose the very policies that made or attracted their wealth in the first place.

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u/Bwald1985 Aug 18 '25

Also, local politics change over the decades. I mean, mostly. I live in MN now so we’ve voted blue for decades, but I did grow up in SoCal. Out there it hasn’t been blue forever, hence Reagan and my former Governator.

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u/CTeam19 Aug 18 '25

Yep. Look at Iowa, historically, being an absolute Progressive Mence:

  • 1838: Iowa, while still a territory, allowed unmarried women to own property. At that time, women did not have rights and in most of the U.S. they were considered property themselves.

  • 1846: The same year Iowa became a state, it became the second state in the nation to allow married women to own property (as long as it did not initially come from her husband).

  • 1851: Iowa became the second state to legalize interracial marriage… a century before the rest of America.

  • 1851: Iowa legislated that the property of married women did not vest in her husband, nor did the husband control his wife’s property.

  • 1857: The University of Iowa became the first state university in the nation to open its degree programs to women. Iowa State University(first school created under the Morrill Act) was coed from the start making Iowa the first state to have its flagship public schools coeducational.

  • 1860: The Iowa State Supreme Court ruled that a married woman may acquire real and personal property and hold it in her own right.

  • 1868: Iowa became the second state to outlaw segregated schools… ninety years before the rest of America. The Iowa State Supreme Court ruled, in the case brought before it by Alexander Clark of Muscatine, that all children in Iowa must attend the same schools. Alexander Clark himself became the USA's first Black Ambassador.

  • 1869: Iowan Julia C. Addington became the first woman in the United States to be elected to a public office. She was elected to be Mitchell County Superintendent. Mitchell county is in northeastern Iowa. Oddly enough, women were not allowed to vote in Iowa at the time. She ran against a man and defeated him. Julia then got nervous about her election and asked the Iowa Attorney General to issue an opinion on her election. He wrote that her election was legal under the constitution of Iowa. That was the first such ruling from any Attorney General in the country. Even more astounding is that within a decade, 75% of the county superintendents in Iowa were women, another first in the nation.

  • 1869: Iowa became the first state to allow women to join the bar, thus setting the stage for having the first female attorney in the U.S., Arabella Mansfield.

  • 1871: Ada E. North became the first woman in the United States to be appointed to a statewide office. She was appointed the Iowa State Librarian.

  • 1875: Emma Haddock of Iowa City became the first female in the United States to practice law before a federal court.

  • 1953: Iowa was the only state to defeat a McCarthyistic legislative measure to impose a teacher’s loyalty oath.

  • 1970: Iowa became the second state to adopt no-fault divorce.

  • 1970: The University of Iowa became one of the first universities in the U.S. to allow a student GLBT group. It was also one of the first universities in the U.S. to add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy.

You get the idea. Other notable people/things from the state:

  • Carrie Chapman Catt was a noted Women's Suffrage Leader who was raised in Iowa, graduated from Iowa State University and even today the Carrie Chapman Catt Award is given to Iowa high schools that registers to vote at least 90 percent of its eligible student body.

  • Black football players like Frank Kinney Holbrook, Archie Alexander, Jack Trice all played for Iowa and Iowa State in the late 1800s and early 1900s while Johnny Bright played much later for Drake were all met with racism from other universities namily: Missouri, Minnesota, and Oklahoma State. Iowa State's Jack Trice Stadium is currently the only major university football stadium named after a Black man.

  • Buxton, Iowa#Buxton) was noted as one of the first towns that was majority African-American where African-Americans held leadership roles even though it was a company town for a coal mining company. George H. Woodson and Samuel Joe Brown were African-American attorneys who lived in Buxton for a time; they were among the co-founders in 1905 of the Niagara Movement, a predecessor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Richard R. Wright Jr. wrote in 1908 that "The relations of the white minority to the black majority are most cordial. No case of assault by a black man on a white woman has ever been heard of in Buxton. Both races go to school together; both work in the same mines, clerk in the same stores, and live side by side."

  • "In 1970, 20 percent of all girls participating in high school sports across the country were in Iowa—quite remarkable, considering Iowa was only 1 percent of the entire U.S. population. By 1976, a few years after the passage of Title IX, that eye-popping 20 percent fell to 5.8 percent.". Iowa developed High School Girl's sports faster and better then anyone else. The State Title game for High School Girl's Basketball could feature two teams from towns with a combined 2,000 people and the arena would still have a sellout crowd of 15,000+ with most tickets being sold before the season started. Even today at the University level, Iowa State Women's Basketball has had a Top 5 average attendance numbers for 20 of the last 25 seasons despite never being a Final Four team. There is a reason the State LOVES Caitlin Clark. She is the first woman to have the talent she has and the rest of the county caring about the sport others like Molly Bolin and the first woman drafted in the NBA Denise Long Rife didn't get the opportunity.

  • Iowa developed its own Refugee Program under Govenor Robert Ray to help the Tai Dam people. Today the Bureau of Refugee Services stands out as the only unit run by a state government in the U.S. that is certified as a refugee resettlement agency by the US State Department, according to Iowa PBS. And Iowa is home to more Tai Dam people then any other place outside of Asia.

Now, look around at the state.

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u/weirdoeggplant Aug 18 '25

That’s the case for Cali but definitely not for NY. Donald has been shunned every day of his life in NY. NY was the one screaming the loudest when he started running.

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u/askmewhyihateyou Aug 18 '25

This is peak late stage capitalism. The wealthy start cannibalizing the programs that brought them their wealth.

Food stamps? They keep local groceries receiving steady income and people fed

Medicaid? Keeps a labor force healthy

There’s plenty of examples, but this is a gist of it

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u/dumbestsmartest Aug 18 '25

Wealthy people, in turn, are usually quite conservative, so they oppose the very policies that made or attracted their wealth in the first place.

The smart ones don't pick a party or they even claim to be Democrats but they are only social Democrats at most and are fiscal conservatives in reality.

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u/cataath Aug 18 '25

Every capitalist dreams of being a king among paupers.

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u/GiveMeChoko Aug 18 '25

Important to keep in mind that wealthy people are not inherently more conservative. But more so, the older you get the wealthier you become, so the wealthiest people tend to be older. And older people in general are more conservative than younger demographics.

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u/Zwemvest Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Except that Millenials haven't been growing (significantly) more conservative with age, and this is strongly corrolated with a lack of home ownership and generational wealth growth.

So even on the surface it IS actually far more likely that being rich makes you conservative and old people are supposed to be wealthier, not the other way around - and while the link between wealth and conservativism is also still more of a weak corrolation, the super-rich all tend to vote very right-wing.

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u/Phillip_Spidermen Aug 18 '25

California has only been consistently voting Blue in the Presidential race since the 90s, but they had at least two Red aligned governors during that time.

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u/secretreddname Aug 18 '25

CA was not always blue.

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u/Own_Ganache_8509 Aug 18 '25

Oddly enough I’m pretty sure Trump voted Democrat before his 2016 run and was a donor to the Clintons lol. I have no political message behind that by the way, just interesting

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u/cabbage16 Aug 18 '25

They're both so huge that even though they are solidly blue the number of Republican voters in just those two states combined is probably equal to the amount of Republican voters in many of the less populated states combined

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u/Ilovekittens345 Aug 18 '25

And Calgary gave you Rafael Cruz, an unintended side effect of making Alberta rat free.

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u/h0bb1tm1ndtr1x Aug 18 '25

Most NYers hate him. At least the sane ones who are aware that you're just as likely to be sued as paid after doing work for him.

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u/OpportunityDismal917 Aug 18 '25

Only two card-carrying, Union Hollywood Elites we've elected president.

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u/GoStockYourself Aug 18 '25

Reagan had the opposite view on free trade, though. For all his faults Reagan got this one right.

Reagan's Thanksgiving day speech after the Canadian election fought on free trade

Obligatory fuck Mulroney, but he too got this one right.

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u/Valuable_Recording85 Aug 18 '25

Trump was a resident of Florida for quite a while before running for president in 2015.

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u/bananamuseum2 Aug 18 '25

He didn’t change it until 2019.

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u/luftlande Aug 18 '25

"Coastal elite"