Premise:
Sane middle class people from the north and the west have been surging into Southern and Southwestern cities, shifting the political scene to the left, as they already did in Colorado, Nevada and Virginia.
You are a GOP strategist and you can see the same trend threatening to flip states like North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas.
Question:
How do you stop this migration keeping your state conservative and to reduce competition for jobs for your low skilled, undereducated constituents?
Answer:
You do everything you can with the conservative majorities that you still have (before you lose those majorities) to make your state as undesirable a place for educated or skilled, liberal or moderate leaning economic migrants to move to. You do this by adopting far right policies and making your state a bad place to live or do business.
You also oppose any policies that could bring a culture of prosperity to the state that could shift it to the left, by favoring policies that keep your constituents poor, sick, uneducated, and insecure.
You use these policies to bait liberals and big businesses into boycotting your state and into making personal decisions not to move there despite economic incentives to do so.
Result:
Your political party and ideology remains in power longer than they would if only demographics and economics were involved.
Too complicated.
ReplyDeleteBut, then, I would NEVER live in the former CSA.
Traitors. All of them.
Hi Dave, Howabout my German ancestors from the Fredericksburg TX area? They were staunchly pro-Union. When a group of them decided to join the Union cause they were massacred by the CSA troops at the Battle of Nueces. Also see "Great Hanging at Gainesville" where German dissidents were extrajudicially killed. Don't see any traitors here.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the other side of the family (following the paternal line) were living in Illinois and were, by family tradition, draft dodgers during the ACW.
ReplyDeleteI was born in the former CSA Atlanta and lived there until I was about six, when my carpetbagger parents decided we needed to move to a more congenial place. One of my earlier memories is going to Stone Mountain, a monument to Confederate leaders.
ReplyDelete@Guy
Anyone who wasn't a traitor was massacred, so they aren't there now.
My paternal ancestor came to the U.S. in 1847 from Prussia to dodge the draft. He moved to Northern Ohio. His brother (whose descendants we have long ago lost track of) moved to the South and became a slave holder. There were choices, and one made a good one and the other a bad one.
Have any liberal states lost enough population that Republicans are becoming competitive?
ReplyDeleteRe your thesis, so far there isn't any sign of a slowdown in migration to red states. Also, I suspect that more-conservative migrants are somewhat more likely to choose red states. I read something to that effect recently.
What is the force causing blue-state liberals to move to red states anyway? If blue policies were superior, wouldn't we see the opposite with conservatives flocking to blue cities for the opportunities there?
@TomBridgeland
ReplyDeleteYes. Ohio for one.
"What is the force causing blue-state liberals to move to red states anyway?"
High paying jobs requiring education and skills that can't be supplied from the local workforce.
"If blue policies were superior, wouldn't we see the opposite with conservatives flocking to blue cities for the opportunities there?"
There are few jobs that less educated and skilled conservative can fill in blue cities. And, the cost of living increases in blue cities more than compensation does for less skilled and less educated workers.
Okay. That implies that migrants are mostly the higher-educated, higher-compensated, left-wing people. Honestly have not seen a breakdown of which groups are more likely to migrate.
ReplyDeleteFor your thesis to work, migrants would have to meet all 3 criteria in numbers large enough to make a difference in state total voting. I'll see if I can find any info.
Selected relevant prior posts:
ReplyDeletehttps://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2022/06/housing-price-inflation-impacts.html
https://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2022/02/state-lines-matter.html
https://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2022/02/if-states-were-countries-how-many-of-us.html
Especially this post which directly looks at the issue:
ReplyDeletehttps://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2020/12/internal-migration-and-partisan.html
""The shift is driven by demographics—what demographers call "generational replacement," urbanization, and increasingly, the migration of blue state residents to red states." . . . . The source of the change appears to be apt and correct, although shifts in the character of the Republican party, which is shedding college educated whites and picking up whites without college educations, and the ongoing process of deindustrialization which drives both migration and changing political attitudes, also play a part."