This is a real problem, and a real concern IMO. People move from their home cities and states to nice areas with low tax, then continue voting for the same policies and ideologies that led to their home becoming awful in the first place. I live in a rather conservative area that sees an influx of New Yorkers every single year. They all seem to complain about two things: the high taxes they left, and Republicans. I'd laugh if it weren't so mindnumbingly sad.
Reminds me of the saying, something like "if it smells like sh*t everywhere you go, maybe it's time to check your own shoes."
There is a very pronounced trend of people migrating away from states that are controlled by Democrats for reasons that are potentially ideologically driven policy failures. This raises a a very real and material question for the new host community - do the migrants understand why the situation became so intolerable that they felt they should move?
Migrants bring new ideas so a certain amount of discomfort and change is expected. But judgements and assumptions need to be discussed to work out if there is any merit to them. There is a risk there that shouldn't be glibly ignored.
So I suppose I'd call on you to flesh that out with some alternatives that fit the facts or some challenges to the assumptions rather than just calling a spade a spade. We all know it is a spade. If the spade is inappropriate suggest a better tool instead.
Statistically, people are moving from rural areas and to urban areas. Rural areas tend to be conservative and economically depressed. Urban areas tend to have high paying jobs and be liberal or progressive.
Aside from a few state/city couplings(Omaha, NE comes to mind) a US "State" is a poor indicator of differentiated policy or ideology. People in Atlanta or Miami or LA or Seattle have a lot more in common with each other than some might think.
Moreover, it seems like you're attempting to paint the picture that a typically Democratic State is somehow worse off than a conservative one. I'm positive that a person born in Washington or California almost always has a better statistical and economic outcome than someone born in the Deep South, for example. So, it seems if I were correct(and I'm almost certain I am), the spade is doing something right.
After the 2016 election while my friends were freaking out and moping I went and drilled down into the fine grained election results. You are absolutely right. The difference is really between 'the city' and exurban. Notable the size of 'the city' doesn't matter. In thinly populated areas the city might only be 15-20,000 people. But they all voted for liberal/progressive/left leaning candidates.
I think there are a lot of issues where the republican/democrat divide is very directly influenced by rural/urban environments.
(please do not assume any of the following takes a stance on these issues. Also don't imagine I know what I'm talking about)
On gun control, rural areas can have more than one gun per person with virtually no impact on an already negligible violent crime rate, while urban areas have fewer guns that are all much more likely to be involved in a homicide. So rural people see the issue as taking away rights for no benefit and urban people see that resistance as tacit support of gun violence and an attack on human life.
On abortion, cities have a lot more opportunity for promiscuity and have more unwanted pregnancies as a result. In the country, abortions are a much rarer concern; eliminating them would have little impact and resistance seems like tacit support of an attack on human life.
On taxation, city wages are higher. This may, citation needed, also influence positions on immigration.
Pollution is a greater concern in the city. Law enforcement corruption is a greater concern in the city. Cost-of-living and therefore necessary minimum wage are higher in the city.
I could go on (I can't, but fun to say so anyway).
Except no one talks about guns that are used for hunting when talking about gun control policy (maybe the idiots who use massive powered automatic rifles for shooting deer may be slightly affected).
Politicians use gun control policy to create divisions in people, but the actual gun control policies being considered themselves almost always poll very well amongst all Americans including those in rural areas and hunters.
It’s like Obamacare, where the actual policies within are supported by overwhelming majorities, but obamacare barely breaks even.
> Except no one talks about guns that are used for hunting when talking about gun control
Not only is that untrue, it’s so untrue that a common trope among gun types is to display two pictures of the same gun, one with a wooden stock, and observe the disparity in reactions. Most people can’t define what a “hunting rifle” is, and certainly can’t define legislation that would ban one kind of gun without impacting the other. One of the biggest complaints about California‐ or 1994 AWB‐style gun laws is that they target cosmetic but “scary” features like barrel shrouds or pistol grips far out of proportion with their actual impact on safety (in contrast with the real elephant in the room, handguns).
> maybe the idiots who use massive powered automatic rifles for shooting deer may be slightly affected
The poster child for moral panic when it comes to guns is the AR-15, which is significantly less powerful than a typical deer hunting rifle, so much so that some states ban it specifically against large game; it’s more appropriate for smaller game like coyotes and hogs.
If you’re trying to get rid of black rifles, then at least say openly that you want to ban semi‐automatic rifles and magazines. Talking about an AR‐15’s “massive power” is nonsensical, especially if you’re claiming your gun control proposals won’t affect deer hunting rifles.
I don't know if you meant to reply to the other response to my comment, but my point is a little broader than that. Hunting be damned, you could fill up wyoming with automatic weapons granted with no background checks and not see a serious uptick in gun violence. It is just a non-issue. Proposals to increase gun laws appear, from that environment, to be a useless power grab by the government. Again, not an endorsement.
To address your main point though, even if a majority of republicans would be okay with the gun control on the table, republican politicians are incentivized to represent the minority that are opposed until an equally signifcant minority actively votes for those policies. That incentive structure is probably for the best given our lack of proportional representation.
Just of note, automatic weapons where ban in the early 80's those that are left in the US are tightly regulated and require a FFL class 3, have strict rules on transfer and the local sheriff must approve the transfer. Many sheriffs will not allow class 3's in their county. If they will not, the resident is out of luck on getting one of the few automatic weapons left. Those remaining weapons sell for upwards of 10 to 20K and not one has been used in a mass shooting in recent history. People buying automatic weapons are by and large collectors.
What you are referencing is semi-automatic weapons, which require you to pull the trigger each time you want a bullet to fire. Many hunting rifles are semi-automatic. The difference between a semi-automatic hunting rifle and a semi-automatic black rifle is the difference between a Corvette and a Corvette with a Ferrari body kit. It's all cosmetic they are at the core the exact same rifle. A Remington semi-auto .223 hunting rifle is in spirit the same gun as a AR-15.
Handguns and homemade explosives are a much greater public threat and that is the reason most gun rights advocates see no value in compromise. The issue is completely a emotional issue and the facts, which advocates are well versed in, weight out contrary to the arguments that gun control advocates are making. The reality is that other than the occasional mass shooting people are just not being killed by rifles of any kind. Handguns are used in orders of magnitude more than rifles to commit violent crimes. A sincere effort to remove guns from criminals would focus on handguns and not rifles. Therefore rights advocated jump to the conclusion that the effort is to disarm the legally owned, armed population as that is the majority of rifle owners. The simple fact is the majority of criminals use handguns, they are more easily concealed, easier to wield and easier to reload.
The only exception to this is mass shooters who want to LARP Call of Duty. Which is why they choose rifles if FPS's and movies used handguns, mass-shooters would use handguns because in their crazy minds they are role playing. That being said, you have a slightly higher chance of getting killed in a mass shooting than you have getting hit by lighting. By the number it's just a non-event. In saying that, I am not trying to minimize them, just stating the facts, they are horrible events and we should certainly do something about them. But disarming millions of law abiding citizens to prevent a lightning strike event punishes the masses for a statistically small problem.
Common sense gun control would have at it's core handgun controls as well as mental health protocols. If they don't then they are conceived via emotion rather than statistical fact.
As a "self proclaimed" centrist, this is well stated. There's nothing wrong with anyone's line of thought, they obviously hold it for a reason. Problems only arise in this arena when one group tries to force beliefs on the other. A hunter trying to convince say, Chicago, that guns are good is going to have a hard time. Same with the Chicagoan that tries to convince a hunter that guns are bad. Neither are wrong, in reality...
Up until recently Dallas / Ft. Worth and Miami where conservative. The Cubans that fled communism held Miami as a conservative metro up until about 15-20 years ago. Orlando and Tampa where the same. Orlando for different reasons but Tampa was largely due to the conservative Cubans as well.
Texas and Florida are two of the states that are experiencing meteoric growth and to imply that those moving in are not shifting the political climate to that in which they came from is to ignore the fact that both went from solidly conservative states, with conservative large metros. To toss up states where the metros became in flux. To ignore that those moving in are not voting in the same failed policies that they are fleeing ignores the fact that both states policies are in fact starting to trend towards taxation, lowering of property rights and large scale social programs. The spade is a spade.
The same happened to Denver over the past 20 or so year.
On a note related to the main topic, I live in FL in the Florida Keys, it is a paradise I spearfish on the weekends and am usually out on a boat. Prices have gone up here, but one can still purchase a home on the water for under 500k. I could barely get a decent apartment in the valley for what I paid for my 7 acres of oceanfront land and home. I mention this to make the point that I can certainly see the draw, you get so much more for your money if one sells out of a major CA metro and moves to one of the growth states.
The biggest thing in those states' favor is easily housing policy. They tend to permit much more sprawl, so housing prices in general, and especially the cost of a detached single family home stay more reasonable. Aside from Houston, they're still not great on allowing housing density though.
Meanwhile, blue states have a "worst of both worlds" kind of policy. They don't permit much sprawl, and also don't permit much density, thereby pushing people to states where they do permit sprawl. Then they tell you that this is good for the environment, somehow.
That said, while it makes for cheap single family homes, sprawl has a LOT of negatives. Strong Towns explains how it basically functions like a Ponzi scheme in the long term, and within older cities the sprawlier parts are usually subsidized by the denser ones. There's also more cost to the environment, to health, to noise, to safety, and for transportation costs for both the government and the user. There's a reason the US has an unusually high traffic fatality rate per 100k people for a developed country, and there's an impact on our collective national waistline as well.
> Meanwhile, blue states have a "worst of both worlds" kind of policy. They don't permit much sprawl
Many states smaller (and less populated) than the expanse of sprawl in the LA basin. The only parts of CA that has much limit to sprawl are places with hard natural geographic barriers, like SF and the Peninsula.
Driving on the east coast or west coast, I see hundreds upon thousands of miles of sprawl. Californian sprawl even extends across natural barriers, with houses clinging to steep hillsides, houses built on ridiculously unstable land, houses built in shrub forests that obviously have an annual fire season. If people want to live that way, it’s fine. But they leave, and they build more sprawl wherever they go...
Miami has never been conservative, at most they had some conservative Cubans, who hardly ever had a plurality in the area. Dallas has never been co see stove either, that is what Ft. Worth and it’s suburbs were for.
Texas really wants a tech industry, which is why it is importing lots of liberals. By that I mean these people don’t move to Texas to be in Texas, rather they were lured their by great job opportunities.
Can you cite a single source of Texas "importing" workers, vs people fleeing to Texas and pretending they did so for Texas's own good? Texas was a tech hub before most of us were born.
Uhm sure? All the people that I know who’ve moved to Austin have done so for the career opportunities...no one just picked Texas and said they were going to find a job later. They were pretty mercenary about where they were going. Some were even forced their (eg when IBM closed Boca and moved everyone who didn’t want to quit to Austin).
> Texas was a tech hub before most of us were born.
Sure, they’ve also been importing liberals since before most of us were born. I mean my dad lived near San Antonio sometime in the 60s for that reason, again it wasn’t his choice (even being in the Army wasn’t).
The last two mayors of Miami have been Cuban Republicans. The city manager is a Republican, several of the commissioner seats are occupied by republicans. One could argue that currently Miami leans conservative. Marco Rubio represents Miami, to claim that Miami does not, at times, swing conservative is to ignore the clear facts that it does and much of that is due to the conservative Cubans.
plenty of the most populous areas in the world are not liberal and progressive. There are at least 20 cities in China larger than NYC. I'm sure India has it's share. So does the middle East and south East Asia. Let's not make assumptions based only on majority populations of European descent.
It is on a relative spectrum what’s left and right in those countries . In Europe for example the U.S. left would be considered moderate or conservative and not really liberal.
Also the reason for urban areas being more liberal , is usually because closer you live to ton of people , better you need and appreciate collective/ liberal policies better
> There is a very pronounced trend of people migrating away from states that are controlled by Democrats for reasons that are potentially ideologically driven policy failures.
This observation may actually indicate the opposite, it is conservative policies that are failing. To see this, consider two potential reasons why people move away from urbanized progressive areas into more conservative areas:
1. Progressive policy failures (as you suggest)
2. The conservative areas are under-developed, and therefore have a greater potential for growth, which creates incentives to move there.
Under the first hypothesis, liberal policies ruin things. But under the second hypothesis, conservative policies ruin things. There is a pretty simple way to test out which is true: if the first is true, and progressive policies are at fault, then a conservative area would become more conservative as it becomes more popular and more people move there. If the second is true, then conservative areas would become more liberal as it becomes more developed.
Pretty much every originally conservative area that becomes developed later becomes more liberal (hello Texas). It's pretty clear that your hypothesis is false.
This feels like some bizarre version of 'white savior complex.'. The truth isn't 1 or 2, but somewhere in between. Conservative areas don't need you, and progressive policies aren't all failures.
> There is a very pronounced trend of people migrating away from states that are controlled by Democrats for reasons that are potentially ideologically driven policy failures
People who have worked in California until retirement taking advantage of it's strong economy to secure retirement income and then moving elsewhere to further maximize retirement dollars are a big part of the trend; to the extent that's about policy outcomes, it's policy success.
> do the migrants understand why the situation became so intolerable that they felt they should move?
For California, it's mostly having a very successful economy combined with terribly stupid housing policy.
Conservative areas are 'better' on the latter on some level because they permit more sprawl, which does provide for more supply, which means lower housing prices. Car-dominant sprawl is a disaster in other ways, though: environment, pollution, health, noise, danger, cost to government, cost to user, etc.
And conservative areas are usually even worse at allowing density, despite being ostensibly free market. I have a lot of conservative FB friends, and it's always amazing how quickly they're suddenly in favor of strict government regulation when it's for keeping housing density low; when it's their favored lifestyle at risk, free market principles are apparently no longer an issue.
There is no pronounced trend. In fact, this very article says so. The trend is for people to move from conservative rural areas to liberal urban areas. In fact, a deeper look at the data will actually prove the opposite. That Democratic controlled locations are thriving and people are moving to it. For example, within New York, NYC population is actually growing.
It isn't unreasonable to those of us that have lived over practically half of the country. Try moving every year or two, see what that does to your preconceptions and notions.
Atlanta was never a “nice area” until “liberals” moved into it.
Atlanta, the city, was a shithole ridden with crime until the “liberals” moved in.
Which is, for better or worse, the reality of all these cities that seem to complain about “liberals” moving in. They are shitholes because the “conservatives” are all cooped up in suburbs, and so no one pays any tax to maintain the city which ends up being somewhere that is just where the people come in to work and leave in the evening, until the “liberals” move in.
As someone who never mentioned Atlanta, I don't know what you are talking about. As someone who has been to Atlanta over the course of decades, I don't believe you.
Huh. I feel the same way in the opposite direction.
People move from their home states and rural areas to nice areas with civic services and permissive cultures, and then continue voting and advocating for the same policies and ideologies that led to their home being unwanted in the first place. I live in liberal areas that see a steady influx of people all the time, and distressingly large amount of them seem to complain about two things: The ineffectiveness of government (including the underfunded ones they left behind), and Liberals. I'd laugh if I wasn't so concerned about the displacement of my home cultures.
Makes me want to say something like, "if it smells like shit everywhere you go, stop shitting all over everything you find."
I would absolutely sympathize with you, if this were a true story. Believe it or not, I'm not a registered Republican, after all. To be fair, I've never heard of conservative folks overtaking a liberal city, only vice versa. If you have a true story to share, I'd love to hear it.
Instead, it feels like you're just reversing everything I said for argument's sake.
Reasonable. It's anecdotal, and no, none have been "taken over". What I'm predominantly responding to is this weird way people seem to look at these liberal cities and go "oh, they've succeeded in spite of their liberalness" instead of those being part of why they became desirable places to live in the first place.
The few examples that come the most to mind are what "Keep Venice Weird" is reacting to, and the lamenting of SF at the impact "tech bros" (vague, loaded term I know, but I don't have another) has had on the local culture. Which definitely don't fit cleanly onto the usual political spectrum, but AFAIK do roughly approximate it. And yeah, I wouldn't say these places are being taken over, and I would still say there's an influx of people complaining about things that went into making these places desirable in the first place.
I did deliberately match my phrasing to yours, and part of it is for argument's sake. There are both statistics and vibes, but there's not a great way to poke at anecdotes and vibes outside of reversals.
If the statistical reality is that liberalism takes over, but the emotional interpretation of that is... I don't know, that it shouldn't; that's weird to me. If one thing is taking over, it's generally because it's out competing the others. It's almost like when people believe in working together to make places better for everyone... they get better for everyone.
As an aside, sounds like you should be a registered republican. They need people with good heads and something like that set of views, and those sounds like what you have. In case it's in any way unclear, I do mean that as a compliment.
>What I'm predominantly responding to is this weird way people seem to look at these liberal cities and go "oh, they've succeeded in spite of their liberalness" instead of those being part of why they became desirable places to live in the first place.
Why would you think so? For example California used to be if not a Red State then a heavily leaning Republican: since 1880 until 2000 it has not voted for a Democratic president who has not also won the national election (and the 1880 election was extremely close). In the same time period it voted for a Republican candidate who lost the election multiple times (e.g. it voted against JFK and Carter).
Do you really believe that California had not been desirable before it started voting exclusively D (in 1992 the earliest)? I had not been living in the US at the time but judging by the popular culture it does not seem to be the case.
Well asked! I've been trying to understand why I do.
I think it comes to this: Good places to live come from encouraging and empowering people to make those places their own, as communities.
What it means to be a democrat or a republican changes from place and decade to decade. What is effective in actualizing that community participation then also changes as a place changes over time (ironically, that's also why it's important to have that community participation).
AFAIK, the Republican party _used_ to stand for small, decentralized government; now they stand for ineffective and centralized government (despite the talking points).
I'm less clear on what the Democrats "used to be" (except racist, way back in the day), except that in this era and in these places, community participation is hampered by unaffordable housing, unaffordable and/or inaccessible healthcare, and a lack of living wages.
I know I haven't fully answered your question, but I've been at this for far too long. Thanks for asking so effectively!
If you think it's just the parties that have changed, then how about actual policies? Prop 187 has been passed in 1994 with 59% majority, can you imagine anything like that happening in California nowadays? No matter how you see DNC and GOP of 1990s, you surely can see that the California's attitude towards illegal immigrants has completely reversed now.
It's definitely not just the parties that have changed.
I have no idea whether that law would've passed today; everyone hears "California" and thinks about SF/LA, forgetting about the large conservative areas. Look how long weed and gay marriage took.
Gay marriage was never passed by popular vote in California, it was a result of judicial activism both on the state level and on federal. In fact, CA voted against gay marriage in Prop 8.
However, the fact that party vote in California changed in 90s, when it's been already a prosperous and desirable state remains. So it does not seem plausible that liberal policies turned it into one. The opposite though, is completely believable - in a rich locale, with a lot of money, politicians who use the money to "buy" votes will eventually rise and will remain in power until the money's gone.
The issue is the lack of dimensionality on your axis. If the political spectrum recognized more dimensions, you would find it that high tax vs republican is only one small dimension, thus not necessarily a contradiction.
Reminds me of the saying, something like "if it smells like sh*t everywhere you go, maybe it's time to check your own shoes."