Posted on 08/31/2011 4:58:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
Conservatives yearn for a big, clarifying electoral victory in November of 2012, but theyre already winning decisively whenever Americans vote with their feet--or their moving vans.
New Census numbers show citizens fleeing by the millions from liberal states and flocking in comparable numbers to bastions of rightwing sentiment. Call it the Great Political Migration.
Between 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of residents lost to other states were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as red states in which Republicans generally dominate local politics: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. Expanding the review to a 10-year span, the biggest population gainers (in percentage terms) have been even more conservative than last years winners: Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Texas, in that order.
The shift in national demographics has already rearranged the playing field for the upcoming presidential election. States that Barack Obama carried were the biggest losers in the reapportionment that followed the 2010 Census, with New York and Ohio dropping two electoral votes each. Texas, meanwhile, gained a whopping four votes all by its Lone Star lonesome self. Even in the unlikely event that Obama carried exactly the same states he carried in 2008, hed still win six fewer electoral votes in 2012. Even more tellingly, if the epic Bush-Gore battle of 2000 played out on the new Electoral College map, with the two candidates carrying precisely the states they each won 11 years ago, the result would have been a far more clear-cut GOP victory margin of 33 electoral votes (instead of the five-vote nail-biter recorded in history books).
Fifty years ago, the United States saw a mass migration from East to West. Today were witnessing a comparable migration from left to right.
This significant shift in population not only presents progressives with significant problems in terms of practical politics, but also confronts them with profound ideological challenges.
If liberal approaches work so well, why are so many people choosing to pack their bags and desert some of the most progressive, pro-labor, big-government states in the union?
And if uncompromising conservatism is a cruel, fraudulent disaster, why do small government, pro-business, low tax, gun-toting and church-going states draw such a disproportionate number of Americas internal immigrants?
In the emerging presidential campaign, its easy to see a version of these questions dominating the debate. Why should anyone choose to endorse liberal, Democratic policies when a single year (2009-10) saw 880,000 residents packing up their belongings to place Barack Obamas Illinois in their rear-view mirror, while 782,000 new arrivals helped drive the robust economy in Rick Perrys Texas?
During the bad-old-days of the Cold War so many people tried to leave East Germany that the Communists built a wall to keep them in. The world rightly took that gesture as evidence of failure and corruption in the Stalinist system.
California cant raise a wall to prevent people from abandoning the Not-So-Golden State, or somehow deter or return the 2,000,000 who decamped between 2009 and 2010. Doesnt this overwhelming outflow of residents count as powerful evidence of the failure, corruption and bankruptcy of the states leadership long-dominated by legislative leftists, even under the moderate GOP governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger? For the first time since statehood in 1850, a new Census brought no increase in Californias representation in Congress (or the Electoral College).
California has become a sad symbol of dysfunctional government at its shabbiest, shadiest, most sclerotic and irresponsiblean exquisitely painful irony for those of us who recall the Golden States onetime position in the national imagination. Not so long ago, the whole nation (or at least its most enterprising and adventurous elements) seemed to envy the state and to embrace the notion of California Dreamin.
My late parents cherished that dream and made the trek from Philadelphia to my dads first job (after graduate school on the GI Bill) in San Diego. They loaded a battered, gray 53 Plymouth with their possessions and their five-year-old son (me) and drove across the country for a thrilling new life. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, nearly everyone we knew seemed recently arrived from somewhere else, thrilled to experience the electric atmosphere of a place that seemed to define Americas bright future.
After my parents divorce, my father eventually decided to leave California for a corner of the earth that promised even more excitement and significanceIsrael and he spent the last 19 years of his life in Jerusalem. As for me, I finally persuaded my wife Diane (a fifth-generation Californian whose ancestors arrived in Gold Rush days) to move our family to Washington State in 1996, and theres never been a day when I regretted that decision.
To some, this move from one center for liberal lunacy to another progressive outpost made no sense: Seattle offered the lefty politics as California, with considerably less sunshine. But there is one striking difference between these two Pacific Coast states: when it comes to state income taxes, Californias top rate recently crested to an appalling 10.3 percent (on top of federal tax burdens, sales tax, property tax, and much more). Washington, on the other hand, imposes no income tax at all, and ongoing growth makes Washington the only blue state (thats right, the only one) that added a congressional seat in the recent Census.
The impact of state income taxes helps explain the flow of business and families to those states with more hospitable, less intrusive attitudes toward enterprise. The dollars involved are hardly trivial. California punishes the stinking, selfish, filthy rich by imposing the second highest rate9.3 percenton every dollar an individual earns beyond the obscenely lavish sum of $46,766. New York takes similar aim at privileged plutocrats, with individual tax rates of at least 6.75 percent for any earnings above $20,000. But if those hard-pressed wage-earners make their way to Nevada, theyll pay nothing in state income tax, and revel in their residence in one of nine states that avoid punishing earning and effort. Even in left-tilting Washington, voters in 2010 rejected (by nearly two-to-one) a state income tax placed on the ballot by Bill Gates Sr.
There are no real political refugees within the United States, and few families move from one state to another to search for more congenial political leadership. Climate, family concerns and job opportunities are all factors. But the contrasting cultures that state politics help to shape make a big difference in determining which parts of the nation seem more or less promising to potential migrants. With the Gallup Poll showing self-described conservatives outnumbering self-proclaimed liberals by nearly 2 to 1 (41 percent to 21 percent) its not surprising that states with pro-business, pro-family attitudes draw disproportionate numbers of new arrivals. At the same time, it makes sense that those states with aggressive, intrusive bureaucracies, high taxes and relentless experiments in multiculturalism will encourage mass departures.
The millions of re-settlers who move their families to more sympathetic venues surely feel motivated by personal considerations more than ideology, but they still play a role in reshaping the nations political future. For generations, conservatives tried to convince doubters that their ideas were right in some ultimate, philosophical sense. Now, with countless frustrated families making fresh starts in right-leaning states, theyve obviously made the case that in the real world, its the conservative approach that works.
Lots of liberals are voting conservative with moving vans too.
The problem is when liberals follow and keep voting Democrat, that happened in certain counties in Maryland.
My experience is that lots of liberals fleeing the messed nest they created, now come here and bring their liberal values and liberal solutions.
They’re like the plague. And they’re ignorant to boot. Absolutely see no correlation between their “social justice” mania and the collapsed economies they left behind.
The liberal states are quickly becoming welfare housing and bath house states. The conservative states are getting all the normal, productive people, and will do very well.
If there ever was a good time to push for state rights, it would be now, so the conservative states don't end up supporting all the failed liberal states forever, or having their neighborhoods littered with vile.
Let them sink, or learn from their experience.
Its why I’m staying put in Michigan. We’ve seized control of the state government and things are going to turn around. Small entrepreneurs will come out on top if we work hard.
This would prevent what happened to northern New England in the late 50s and 60s as those who had completely screwed up where they lived and then started to screw unscrewed areas
Now we are all screwed
It's like the Mexicans fleeing Mexico. They escape - only to come here and demand America be more like Mexico!
They’re bringing their messed up liberal views with them.
Then they want all the services that they left behind, creating another messed up liberal bureaucracy.
I live in a county in NJ that is predominantly Republican, I see it every day. They come here from “the city” and try to change their new town into the swamp that they left.
Come on down to the Missouri Ozarks.
Bring your Yankee money...
Since the election in Michigan we’ve destroyed one union, cut some 30,000 college kids off food stamps, imposed limits on welfare and a whole lot of other things.
While I didn’t love our new governor he appears to be pragmatic and willing to make some tough choices.
--saw a Montana vehicle some years ago with the perfect bumper sticker--"we don't care how you did it in California"---
Unfortunately, the first thing these folks do when they get to their new homes is try to make it more like the place they left. The start lobbying for “tax and spend” programs and wanting to pass a lot of new laws because “that’s the way we did it in New York”. Ask the folks from California’s neighboring states.
The do that even within states. I live 30 miles from Ann Arbor and we’re bible belt conservative here (My congressman is a Baptist minister)
The Ann Arbor yuppies move here and either find their conservative side or move on. We’re pretty aggressive about helping them choose.
Interesting. But considering the back lash many in the South have against “Foreigners”, I wonder how long this will last.
“The problem is when liberals follow and keep voting Democrat, that happened in certain counties in Maryland.”
Myrtle Beach, SC has been taken over by Northern Fascists since I left 25 years ago. We have neighbors ratting out neighbors over license plates not being changed in a timely manner(and everything else under the sun), citations issued for everything from boats parked in driveways(of course, everyone has a boat here!)to trees being trimmed without permits. Everything that a home owner does to his or her house that exceeds $100.00 in cost has a fifty dollar permit fee attached, or a very hefty fine, and this is not an HOA neighborhood.
We have another couple of years here, and then either Montana or Alaska to finish.
“I am outta here” Shania Twain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhNl3UUipGo
Casey Donahue Band, “Moving On”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3QGnFgCDM&feature=artist
“Heartland”
George Strait
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtszCZQaLKE&feature=related
“I live in a county in NJ that is predominantly Republican, I see it every day. They come here from the city and try to change their new town into the swamp that they left.”
Hello fellow Jerseyian. I like the conservative area where I live (Sussex County), but you are right — too many liberals moving into the area and trying to ruin it.
Virginia is showing the effects of rat migration
we used to be a conservative state, but now large voting blocks of demonrats from northern part of the state, are swinging the policies to the left.
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