We studied to what extent political affiliation affects listeners’ perception of native and non-native speech when controlling for participant location (urban vs. rural). A previous study conducted by the Acoustics, Phonetics, and Perception Lab at NYU showed that people who considered themselves more conservative were worse at speech intelligibility tasks than those who were more liberal. However, they did not control for location, which tends to predict exposure to accented speech. We therefore conducted our study in two different areas with Prolific: in urban NYC and in a handful of rural states (ND, SD, WY, ID, MT). Our results for the urban group showed that even when controlling for location, people who are more conservative are worse at completing speech intelligibility tasks, which suggests that political affiliation does have an impact on spoken language processing.