New York City is seen as the nation's coolest city, though it's only in tenth place among Republicans
Earlier last week YouGov asked an open-ended question: What is the coolest city in the country? We then compiled together the cities mentioned by 5 or more respondents (there were 17 of them) and asked people whether each city was 'very cool', 'somewhat cool', 'not very cool' or 'not cool at all' in a second, separate survey. Giving each response a value of 30, 20, 10 and 0, respectively, we were able to produce an average score of how cool people think each city is.
Based on these scores New York City comes out on top as the coolest city in the country. New York is not only the largest city in the United States with nearly 20 million inhabitants (including its suburbs), but is the center of the U.S. fashion and music industries. 42% of Americans say that New York City is 'very cool', another 34% say it is 'somewhat cool' while only 11% think it is not very cool and 13% think it is not cool at all. The next coolest cities are New Orleans, Las Vegas and San Francisco.
With a score of 14.4, D.C. is easily the least cool of the 17 coolest cities on the list. Our nation's capital may boast broad boulevards and iconic monuments but the seat of the federal bureaucracy is not regarded as a particularly cool place to be. Chicago, Dallas and Boston also do poorly overall, coming near the bottom of our coolest cities list. Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country and center of the film and television industries comes in at 7th place on our list, below Miami and above Seattle.
Republicans and Democrats give very different answers when asked how cool each city is. Like the country as a whole Democrats say that New York City is the coolest in the country, but among Republicans Nashville takes the top spot. In fact, among Republicans, New York City is seen as only the tenth coolest of the 17 cities on the list. Among Democrats Nashville comes in second to last place.
