Why Most Democrats Have Never Killed a Deer

Ahead of this fall’s election, a Michigan Enjoyer poll conducted by Cygnal asked likely Michigan voters whether they or someone in their household had hunted in the past five years: 41% said yes, 57% said no.

If you break the results down by region, the state starts looking like two places. East Michigan with 60% yes, Central 55%, and West 48%. Detroit was, not surprisingly, only 28%.

The party results landed along the same line with 58% of Republicans and 42% percent of independents saying yes. Just 26% percent of Democrats agreed.

It is easy to stop there and call it a values chart. Conservatives like hunting, Democrats don’t. Shocker, right? But why?

This split is not new. In most of rural Michigan, hunting never left. There is still a ton of accessible public land within driving distance, places to hang and process deer, and nobody panics at the sight of a rifle. November deer season is essentially a holiday around these parts.

In Democratic Michigan, especially in Metro Detroit, ordinary life runs the other way.

Cities provide little access to enough public or private land to hunt. A gun in the house in Detroit is probably a pistol for self-protection instead of a family heirloom. Gutting a deer in the driveway would get the cops called on you and a lot of weird looks from your neighbors. So if their parents don't hunt, the kids who grow up there will only see hunting on a screen, if they see it at all. It would look like a barbaric practice from another century to them.

For example, my wife is from the Simi Valley-area in California, and she was slightly horrified when I told her I have processed my own deer and look forward to doing it again. She thought everyone stopped hunting over 100 years ago (insert typical Californian joke).

That's because her grandparent's moved to the West Coast a long time ago, and she never grew up around the tradition, or even with the awareness of the tradition.

So Democrats likely tend not to hunt for several reasons. Hunting requires access to land, time, gear, a comfort with taking a life, and a household that still knows and values how to do it. They also live in a world that made hunting look violent, unnecessary, and impossible.

It seems that people do not hunt because they are conservative, so much as they stay conservative in the places where hunting never stopped being normal. Where it started to feel archaic is in the cities, where a new politics moved in alongside the subdivisions and Doordash.

As cities and subdivisions expand, they erase one of the conditions hunting needs. Lose the land, lose the garage for processing deer, lose a generation, and the next one grows up thinking the whole business is barbaric.

That story has not finished most of Michigan yet. Outside the cities, the land and the hunting households are still there, which is why the hunting map and the voting map still look alike. Over the next few weeks as deer hunting season starts, the woods will be busy enough to prove it.