States can’t enforce boundaries against interstate emigration
States can’t enforce boundaries against interstate migration. That’s been true my whole life, but until the last decade or so it was a thought that had zero significance for me.
For quite a while, though, it’s been apparent that this simple fact has been responsible for at least some of the leftward drift of our country. Over and over we seem to have the following phenomenon: people who are upset with something or many things the left has imposed or allowed in their own home states – high taxes, toleration of large numbers of street people, crime, release of prisoners, leftist ideology in school systems, crumbling infrastructure – leave for more pleasant environments where states and cities are well-managed and clean, housing is affordable, and taxes are relatively low.
And then they vote for people advocating policies that will turn their new states of abode in the direction of their old states.
I’m not sure to what extent this happens – surely, some of the refugees from blue states have become red-pilled as part of the process of disillusionment and will be voting more conservatively. But I’m convinced that it does happen that a lot of people keep voting Democrat, and that if it keeps happening it will cause more and more states to become reliably blue.
I have no idea what to do about this phenomenon, but nothing comes to mind. Any ideas? Glenn Reynolds has been suggesting the following for years:
Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to a typically perceptive column by Joel Kotkin about the explosive economic growth in regions dominated by red states, which are now attracting migrants from the failed blue states, and then offers this observation:
“The danger, of course, is that these immigrants will bring the same toxic blue-state politics with them that produced the disasters they’re fleeing. Someone should set up a sort of Welcome Wagon — an education program for these immigrants that will encourage them to appreciate the policy and cultural differences that led to the prosperity that’s attracted them.”
A good place to start might be by withholding the vote in state and local elections for a reasonable period — say, 50 years — until they get acclimated to their new environments.
That last sentence is a joke, of course. But the situation is no joke at all.
[ADDENDUM: Commenter “Ackler” has some additional thoughts:
…[I]t also happens intrastate. Liberal voters get frustrated with progressive policies in action in large cities, so they flee to the suburbs. The suburbs then become reliably blue and start down the same path of deterioration, so the liberal voters flee to exurbs. Then, to smaller cities and towns in the same state, but farther away from the major city they (or their parents) originally fled from.
Call it ‘Blue Flight’
And, unfortunately, I don’t think many of them get red-pilled…at least not sufficiently to change their voting habits.
While intrastate migration doesn’t affect the state’s Presidential preference, it certainly can as to congressional districts and, especially, state legislative districts.
True.]
All very true, Neo. But it also happens intrastate. Liberal voters get frustrated with progressive policies in action in large cities, so they flee to the suburbs. The suburbs then become reliably blue and start down the same path of deterioration, so the liberal voters flee to exurbs. Then, to smaller cities and towns in the same state, but farther away from the major city they (or their parents) originally fled from.
Call it ‘Blue Flight’
And, unfortunately, I don’t think many of them get red-pilled…at least not sufficiently to change their voting habits.
While intrastate migration doesn’t affect the state’s Presidential preference, it certainly can as to congressional districts and, especially, state legislative districts.
Example: I have a good friend from college who is from the Twin Cities. He originally moved back to Minneapolis proper, after grad school and a stint working in Arizona. Then he got married and moved to the suburbs; then…the exhurbs; and now lives in a rural township even further out.* He confessed to me (over a couple drinks) his guilt for doing so, but, he pointed out, he has school aged kids and has to consider their best interests.
He remains a passionate progressive (he was the head of our school’s College Democrats) and I doubt truly reflects on the logical consequences of what he espouses and votes for. Or if he does, he keeps such ‘seditious’ thoughts buried deep in his subconscious.
*All of this was before George Floyd and the ensuing riots. His confession to me was in the fall of 2019
Babylon Bee had a piece a while ago saying that Texas was going to require Californian newcomers to quarantine for 35 years. Sounds like a good idea to me.
How could Charlottesville (which elected the gifted poetess Nikuyah) and the rest of Virginia have been transformed from “red” to “blue” over such a short period, and why are Georgia and Texas now often regarded as “purple” or, at least, on the verge of becoming so? One of the many reasons for desiring a sane policy of immigration (ideally, limited, of the legal sort, and non-existent of the illegal sort) is that migrants (from within a country or from abroad) bring their values with them and are frequently a catalyst for cultural, not simply demographic, change. This is one of the many reasons to look back, with anger, on Hart-Celler of 1965 which, despite the assurances of the politicians of the time (including Ted Kennedy), truly did mark the beginning of what Obama called the fundamental transformation of America.
Ackler:
Good point. I’m going to include it in an addendum.
If federalism is allowed to operate, then it’s fine for like-minded people to sort geographically into United States of Canada and Jesusland. Ideally states would do something similar but they are not allowed to allocate legislators except by population, and they can’t always be trusted not to override the will and interests of rural voters through regionalism and such constructs.
The problem is that federalism is increasingly not allowed to operate; it’s being replaced with an EU-style bureaucratic oligarchy that removes as much of the will of the electorate as they can get away with.
And I don’t think the solution is not letting people move… it’s going to be tougher than that.
Well, yeah, just look close to home for Neo. New Hampshire has gone from skeptical and idiosyncratic conservatism to just another New England lefty state with a little occasional orneriness from time to time. Thirty years and completely transformed. Next door, Vermont was taken over by back-to-the-earth hippies and disaffected New Yorkers, moved further left, but it’s a smaller population to begin with.
Now, Northern Virginia has been transformed by the influx. Sleepy Loudoun County of the 1980’s is now filled with people from all over the world, it’s the most affluent county in terms of purchasing power in the country. Bay Area is nominally richer but unaffordable.
Ed:
I purposely didn’t discuss New Hampshire, because a few years ago I read a study that purports to show that, contrary to what is commonly thought, New Hampshire’s move in that direction was not due to flight from Massachusetts. I was surprised, but I recall the study as being fairly well done and fairly convincing. Looking for it again recently, I failed to locate it. I think one of the main reasons for NH’s turn, according to the study, was actually the decision to allow out-of-state students to vote as though they lived in NH. That’s what I remember, anyway.
Same thing happened here in CO. We were a Purple/Red state. We sent a mix to Congress and to our state house. A few activists started to gain some traction, then we had a big influx from CA. Took a good few years but we are now a BLUE state, with all the policies.
Shirehome, I was just going to comment on Colorado. I grew up there; Lakewood. Of course way back then Colorado was 100% red (50s-60s). Then things started to change in the late 70s onward.
I blame it first of all on uncontrolled growth. Denver was a decent sized, pleasant city. Now, it looks like LA stretching from Ft. Collins to south of Castle Rock. Second, speaking of LA, my brother who still lives there, says the growth has come mainly from Californians moving in and bringing their politics with them. It truly has become Californicated. Liberals are like locusts; destroy a place, then move on and proceed to to do the same all over again.
For quite a while, though, it’s been apparent that this simple fact has been responsible for at least some of the leftward drift of our country.
When the pool of portside voters is not expanding, why would migration generate ‘leftward drift’? It might if the migration were generating a more efficient distribution of leftoids over the landscape, but that’s not happening. If anything they’ve gotten more concentrated and thus less efficiently distributed.
Your real problem is cultural shifts among younger cohorts. And that is a puzzle.
Liberal flight to conservative environs, is like an alcoholic fleeing to the countryside to escape himself.
He just does the same damn thing there; crapping up the lives of those who have the misfortune of “welcoming” him.
Art Deco:
Yes, more leftists are being disseminated more efficiently over the landscape by entering red states and red parts of states, and useful idiots who will vote for them and enable them are being distributed more evenly (and in greater numbers) too. Plus, of course, there’s the Gramscian march through education, etc..
Thank you for the highlight, Neo. I’ve seen it happen personally a few times (beyond the friend I mentioned). I think it is endemic among middle class and upper middle class progressives: those not rich enough to completely wall themselves off (literally and figuratively) from the consequences of their trendy politics, but affluent enough to simply run away from those consequences. Alas, they leave many working class folks (of all races and political affiliations) to endure.
Yes, more leftists are being disseminated more efficiently over the landscape by entering red states and red parts of states,
Here’s a metric: the ratio of Democratic to Republican votes in balloting for state legislatures. There’s a median value. Is the standard deviation around the median increasing or decreasing?
I keep hearing about this ‘Gramscian march’. What’s interesting to me is that arts and sciences faculties have been dominated by liberals for some time – from personal accounts of which I’ve heard, since about 1940. As recently as 2000, young voters (between their 18th and 25th birthday) distributed their ballots between the political parties about evenly. By 2008, the young were breaking 2-1 in favor of the Democratic Party. I don’t think that’s the Gramscian march. It’s some sort of preference cascade, to be sure, but the causes are a puzzle. Also, the last seven years have seen a great deal of perverse behavior by the supply side and the demand side of our political life. What we are seeing (manifestations of stupefying hostility on the party of professional-managerial types to ordinary people and to the world of their parents and grandparents, and a willingness on the part of many ordinary people to countenance it) is very strange, very disquieting. I don’t understand it, and I’m seeing it among close relatives.
Art Deco:
The metric you offer isn’t about national politics rather than local politics. People sometimes are a lot more conservative locally than when electing a president or members of Congress, as opposed to a governor or a state legislature. And the latter can’t be as conservative as it would wish if federal directives set by the Democrats force it into more leftist policies (such as they are now trying to do with HR1). A state like NH in New England is a good example – pretty much a red state locally at the movement, overall (although sometimes going Democratic near past), it has a totally Democratic group in Congress. And even the local Republicans are much less conservative than they used to be, which affects the state policy in general. And then there are states like California which has become even more overwhelmingly blue than before. People in Idaho and Texas and other states are worried their states will be turning blue soon.
As for the Gramscian march, two things. The first is that it’s not just in education, it’s in other cultural areas that shape perceptions: the arts, TV, the MSM, the church, and social media, just to take some examples. In colleges there has been a majority of left-leaning professors for a long time, but these days the majority is almost a unanimity, they are further left in general, and they no longer allow free speech from the few who don’t agree.
You reject the Gramscian march as an explanation of what’s going on today, but I think it is the main explanation. It is pervasive and extreme and has gotten much worse since around the 1990s. So it has shaped the thoughts of people who are aged 50 and under.
What’s interesting to me is that arts and sciences faculties have been dominated by liberals for some time – from personal accounts of which I’ve heard, since about 1940.
I was an English major in college 1960 to 63. I had actually gone back to do pre-med (I was an Engineer) but could not get a student loan as the Financial Aid office said most didn’t get into medical school. Anyway, I became an English major to get a student loan. I could not detect the politics of my professors. I blame a lot of the leftward shift to the Vietnam War. Leftist students stayed in college to avoid the draft and became the Humanities PhDs that created the next generation.
You reject the Gramscian march as an explanation of what’s going on today, but I think it is the main explanation.
The numbnutz who’s CEO of CIGNA was born in 1966. A majority of the 1966 cohort voted Republican in their youth. Corporate upper management at this time is drawn from those cohorts more than any other. If I’m not mistaken, those cohorts are still voting Republican more often than not.
Leftist students stayed in college to avoid the draft and became the Humanities PhDs that created the next generation.
IIRC, deferments for graduate school were not offered after 1967 except for some job lots (e.g. seminarians). I’m sure there were people who played that game, but how many faculty do you suppose there were who were in graduate school during that five semester period who would not have been had there not been a war on?
Mike K; Art Deco:
Yes, back then liberals were somewhat in the majority and now they are almost all there is with just a few token conservatives (mostly old) hanging on here and there. But there is even a big difference in the liberals/leftists in academia now vs then. Back then they were not so much into the indoctrination business. Now they very much are.
Actually, at one point in my life, if you changed state of residence there was a waiting period before you could vote. Presumably, the motive was so you could vote knowledgeably. I think the wait was around a year.
Gone by the wayside of course.
When I lived out in the beautiful country west of DC there was significant influx from DC and its near suburbs (Loudon County, Va was the fastest growing county in the country at one point). The problem was not inconsequential. The newcomers made no secret of their disdain for the retro culture and the need to bring it up to the standards that they had fled–but, magically, with lower taxes, of course.
Neo, so glad I found you. This is the most enjoyable Interweb thingie that I have come upon. The discourse is wonderful and lacking all that seems to taint most other Interweb thingies.
Born and raised in NH a LONG time ago, I spent my primary working lifetime in NYC. I lived through the Guiliani/Bratton renaissance and am now so saddened by the completely predictable (big swing to the left) return of NYC to the tragic environment of the 70’s and 80’s.
My return to NH was serendipitous and I naively thought I would be returning to a place full of wonderfully independent and clear headed “country” thinkers. Boy, was I wrong. They are here, but the interlopers being reviewed in this discussion seem to dominate local and state political discourse.
Perhaps it is because those who take responsibility for themselves in fiercely independent ways are content and calmly go about living their lives, while the interlopers are never content, being very unhappy and unpleasant in spite of all of their expressions of virtue, those %^&*() yard signs. They become the activists as they try to gain some quiet in their noisy heads.
Sadly, they often crush the others.
Art Deco:
For starters, you’d have to break down the cohort into education, economic group, etc., to understand what’s happening because people who work in those industries are certainly not a random sample. But even if you are unable to get that breakdown (you can get each one separately but not all the characteristics together), if you look at this chart for the 2008 presidential election you can see that that cohort was voting for Obama, no matter what they may have been doing when they first became eligible to vote. In 2008 voters ages 30-44 voted for Obama vs. McCain 52 to 46, and voters ages 45-64 voted for Obama 50-49 (and I’m pretty sure it was the younger ones who went more heavily for Obama). Only in the 65 and up group did McCain win, 53 to 45.
In 2016 Trump lost the under-50 group (the cohort born in 1966 would have just turned 50) by large margins. It was only the over-50 group that handed Trump the victory. College grads of all age groups and all races went strongly for Clinton. Trump won only among people who hadn’t gone to college. And although some techies drop out of college because they are so good with computers that they are hired without a degree, I think we can safely say they probably don’t vote like non-college-educated Trump voters.
Data for 2020 is much more unreliable IMHO because of so much mail-in voting and so much non-compliance with polls, but if you look at the basic trends of increasing numbers of Trump voters vs. Biden voters as the group ages, you’ll see that the group born in 1966 (who would now be 54) fall into a spread that indicates they probably voted for Biden by a small margin.
At any rate, averages like that tell you very little about the particular population (corporate upper management and CEOs in particular). I see absolutely no reason to believe they are Republicans and I would be highly surprised if I were to learn that they are. Twenty or even ten years ago they may have been Republicans, but not now.
I see that this study, which looks at companies’ donations between 2000 and 2017, indicates much more money going from businesses to Republicans during those years. But the percentage of Republican donations declined over the years, and I very much doubt it is the case now although I’m not surprised it was true 20 years ago. I also wonder about the breakdown between bigger and smaller companies.
But I’m not sure why we’re talking about corporate heads. My point about the Gramscian March has to do with younger age cohorts, which clearly have leaned more and more to the left over time.
Oakland County Michigan when I moved here 25 years ago was solidly conservative except for Pontiac. It was well run under Republican executives. But the outflow from Detroit to south Oakland has turned it purple now blue. They brought their voting pathologies with them.
Why? Because conservatives never gave them a reason to change. Many conservatives now recognize this. I heard Maj Toure’s panel during CPAC and it made an impression on me. Then two other articles/podcast happened that reinforced the point.
So one of the action items I am working on is trying to get an outreach attempt going.
https://redstate.com/lenny_mcallister/2021/03/07/was-the-maj-toure-panel-too-much-blackness-for-the-folks-at-cpac-n338859
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2021/03/07/follow-up-if-candace-owens-had-done-this-blexit-would-have-been-more-than-a-fantasy-n338949
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2021/03/23/watch-sonnie-johnson-kira-davis-dish-on-black-conservatives-in-the-media-n349020
Before the civil war, the states controlled immigration.
Quite true. Its been as obvious as hell for ages.The voters of California fouled their own nest, and now they leave for Texas, Colorado and the like. They bring their politics with them and vote accordingly, completely unconcerned that this was what created the problem in the first place. There are enough lefties in California who want to leave to pollute and flip a dozen states with their radical positions. Hate to say it, but its only a matter of time.
The semi rural area where I live also attracts affluent city people who buy second homes. Many also switch their registration to influence local elections. One very nice lady told me she did that so her vote, and patronage, would educate the local rubes on correct modern opinions.
Feeling a little flabbergasted at such naked elitism, I asked her why she would want to change the town since we both agreed it was so nice. “Doesn’t that mean the locals know what they’re doing?” I asked. I think she harrumphed.
“Babylon Bee had a piece a while ago saying that Texas was going to require Californian newcomers to quarantine for 35 years. Sounds like a good idea to me.” – expat
Let’s make it 40. There’s precedent.
The great majority of liberal-leftists can’t change their political orientation because their emotional self-worth is directly invested in being a good, ‘woke’ person. They are the ones who virtue signal and they are 75-80% of those who vote democrat.
In order to change, they’d have to sacrifice their sense of self, which would leave their ‘ship’ bereft of an anchor. They have no principled foundation upon which to fall back on.
Those who do change based their liberalism upon principles and results are the validation that principles require.
Washington was a purple state when we moved here 28 years ago. Californians have been moving here in large numbers because of the lower taxes/cost of living along with many of the geographic attractions of California. (Ocean, coastline, mountains, agriculture, benign [though rainy] climate, lots of outdoor recreational opportunities, etc.) Most of the newcomers have moved to the Puget Sound area, which was always liberal, but has turned into a deep blue enclave that now dominates the entire state. A few Republicans can attain office if they run on the east side of the Cascades, otherwise, the state is now dominated by the Democrats.
When we moved here, the Seattle Times was the so-called conservative paper and the Seattle Post Intelligencer was the liberal paper. The Intelligencer ceased printing a newspaper in 2009. In the intervening years the Times has become a solidly left wing paper. There is no conservative paper of any size in the state now. The Seattle Fox channel is not as lefty as the other TV stations, but features many feel-good, social justice warrior type stories intended to attract the lefty viewers. If you got your news only from the MSM in this state, you would not know there were conservative points of view. It’s a bubble in which many of the people I know (that I classify as low information voters, not true believers) are blissfully unaware of, or dismissive of the conservative point of view. Until conservative views are more easily found and available to everyone, there will be little change.
I agree with Spartacus that the major Democrat controlled cities like Seattle and Tacoma could be open to a new message that focuses on improving schools and combating crime in these inner cities. The black residents want a better quality of life, but the Dems sure haven’t delivered. A hard policy to sell to voters and then implement, but that’s what needs to be done.
J.J.
“There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington,” Postmaster General James Farley 1936
The notion, that an unworkable system is unworkable because it has not been implemented correctly, is not unique to progressives — but a human condition.
“I agree with Spartacus that the major Democrat controlled cities like Seattle and Tacoma could be open to a new message that focuses on improving schools and combating crime in these inner cities. The black residents want a better quality of life, but the Dems sure haven’t delivered. A hard policy to sell to voters and then implement, but that’s what needs to be done.” – J J
“Conservative solutions” is a policy that’s hard to sell, and even harder to implement, because they won’t admit that the problems are caused by the policies they have been voting for and installing for decades.
They want someone to fix the bad consequences without themselves changing their “values” and actions that led to the situation.