Well, I haven't observed that. Research this century has tended to suggest that conservatism is associated with physiological hyper-fixation on negative stimuli. E.g. Carraro L, Castelli L, Macchiella C. The automatic conservative: ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information. PLoS One. 2011

It might be a correlation to city size. Big cities in the US skew overwhelmingly liberal/left, and big cities are the place where trust between strangers, neighbors etc. tends to be very low.

People probably feel safer to let their kids go outside if the local drug-and-homeless community is small or nonexistent.

I see it as less political, more "crunchy" vs standard- it's just that recently the crunchy crowd has shifted conservative as opposed to liberal.

Yep. It's the liberals who are taking over school boards to restrict book access because their precious little snowflakes might learn something outside the strict bounds of what they are allowed to know and understand. Could you imagine the absolute travesty it would be if little Billy knew that gay people existed and were actually just people?! Preposterous!