Posted on 07/14/2005 2:49:38 PM PDT by rhema
Anyone who wants to know where American politics is headed should look at the U.S. Census Bureau's eye-popping population shift projections for the next three decades.
In a nutshell, it forecasts that Americans will continue moving out of the liberal bastions of the Northeast and Midwest and into the Sun Belt states in the South and West. That, in turn, will boost Republican congressional and electoral clout and further erode the Democrats' strength in its political base.
Republicans have refastened their electoral lock on the South and the Western plains and mountain states, while Democrats have lost electoral strength in Northeastern and Midwestern states. The reason: many more Americans are moving to places like Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and Nevada -- conservative-leaning states the GOP has been carrying with increasing regularity over the last several decades.
The Census Bureau's Interim Population Projections, its first in eight years, shows that this political migration is not only going to continue, it is going to accelerate over the next 30 years.
So much so that heavily Democratic Michigan and New Jersey will be replaced on the list of the 10 most populated states by heavily Republican and fast-growing Arizona and North Carolina. Ohio, a pivotal swing state in presidential races, will fall from seventh to 10th place in population, and Republican-rich Georgia will move from 10th to eighth.
A bigger seismic shift: heavily Republican Florida will become the third-largest state in population, surpassing Democratic New York, which will fall into fourth place perhaps as early as 2011.
"The net beneficiary of this will continue to be the Republican Party because the population shift is moving into an environment that is heavily dominated by the Republicans," says Merle Black, the Emory University professor of politics and government and co-author of seminal books on the South's political realignment.
This doesn't mean that Democrats cannot win states in the South with the right candidate -- Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton proved that. But absent an appealing southern Democrat, the political rise of the Sun Belt gives the GOP "a long-term structural advantage and assuming they nominate credible candidates, they start with a strong base," Black says.
The census forecasts reinforce his belief that "the Republicans will continue to be the dominant party in the South for the foreseeable future."
The migration from the Snow Belt industrial north to the South and West has been going on for several decades now, but the political effects reached a new milestone in just the last three years.
"In the 2002 and 2004 exit polls, we saw for the first time a majority of Southern white voters identifying themselves as Republicans and Democratic identification falling to a low 20 (percent) to 25 percent," Black says.
It didn't happen all at once, but the two driving forces for this change were Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. "Southern whites (who identified themselves as Republicans) began to be a plurality in the 1980s during the Reagan years," Black says. What we're seeing now "is a Bush surge because Bush has been a very popular president in the South."
This political erosion has cut the Democrats' once-mighty dominance in the South to the bone and it's only going to get worse, the latest census forecasts suggest.
The share of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest will plunge from 42 percent to 35 percent, while the percentage living in the South and West will rise from 58 percent to 65 percent.
There are some who doubt that this migration is going to strengthen the GOP electoral lock in the Sun Belt. Instead, they see this migration further diversifying the South and West, both socially and politically.
"The people moving to the Carolinas are from the blue (Democratic) states to a large degree," says William H. Frey, a political demographer at the Brookings Institution. "They are coming from the Midwest, from New Jersey and New York, and they are going to bring with them certainly Southern fiscal values but also maybe Northern social values," he told me.
Florida, a state of regional transplants, in particular will turn into much more socially diverse battleground, Frey says. "They are getting younger, more mainstream suburbanites from the Northeast in Orlando and Tampa, but also more diverse minority immigrant populations, all of which are different from the Florida we've seen in the past," he says.
But Black says this will not diminish the generational values of the South's native population, which is more hardcore conservative than ever.
"If you look at younger white voters in the South, they are even more Republican than the older white voters. As these younger white voters age, they are going to be even more cohesively Republican than their predecessors," he says. That, he thinks, will block any political liberalization of the South in the foreseeable future.
In American politics, of course, hope springs eternal. But these Census forecasts suggest that the red states are only going to get redder.
When a virus moves into a healthy host, it spreads and either takes over, potentially killing the host, or the host fights back and defeats the virus.
This article is total crap. It means that BLUE State people move into red states and take them over. Look at Arizona with a governor like Napolitano. Look at Nevada with a Senator like Reid.
BTW, the reference to swamps and river valleys in the above post was meant in the most charming and respectful way.
At the same time, if enough liberals leave the Northeast and Midwest behind, those states could turn red...
Very good! LOL
Population moving from a Blue states to a Red states does not mean more "Red" votes...
If a "Blue" voting "Blue" state'r moves to your "Red" and still votes "Blue"...then you have got a Red State turning Blue....
California was not alway a bastion of the Left...
The vast majority of the leftest in California are not native... the moved here... we were a Reagan "Red" state turned wacko left "Blue" by population moving from other Blue states
I agree. New Yawkers moving to Florida turns the Sunshine State more purple.
Future generations of Americans will consider the present-day Leftists a bad joke.
My parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were all Democrats. My children are ALL Republicans.
Assume? You presume.
Ain't gonna happen.
Ahhhhh being a Texan...the only way this state would go blue is if the Republican party changed it's color to blue.
The Future is hard to predict but...citing a major shift in DNC ideaology, namely that get one that's no bonkers, this state is in the red for the next mellinia. thirty to forty years...man, I doubt that...
The history of the South has been immigrants from the North settling down and becoming Southerners.
Welcome to the dawning of the second half of the Glorious "16 year era of Conservative rule!"
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeee haw!
This is not necessarily a bonanza for conservatives and Republicans. If a liberal moves from Boston to Pheonix, that doesn't turn him or her into a conservative Republican.
EXACTLY! And many of these transplants are folks from Blue States who have Red State values. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and fled to the Red counties of inland California. Now I'm thinking about getting even redder by moving my young family to a more business and family friendly (i.e. Red) state.
The outcome depends on the nature of who's doing the moving. San Diego used to be a conservative bastion and now it's increasingly infested with the same kind of liberal nutballs who inhabit the North. The influx of enough Blues can turn the color of any Red area.
The Democrats are not really a national party. There is a DNC but the DNC chairman, congressional leadership, and Presidential candidates are barely welcome in vast swaths of the country (remember how the Democratic Senate candidates in the South didn't want Kerry to campaign for them?) And note as well that no Democratic candidate for President has gotten more than 49% of the popular vote since 1964.
Nope.
I live in New Hampshire, where we have one of the most conservative newspapers in the country, the Manchester Union Leader. Last I saw, the Union Leader had more circulation in New Hampshire than all the competition put together.
But the flood of tax refugees from Taxachussetts DID NOT leave their liberal worldview behind. In fact, many of them are "activist" for this that or the other social program.
Case in point, the "public" school tax disaster that is looming over our heads.
At times I don't believe these people were tax refugees at all, but rather that they were "plants" sent here by their communist bosses to spread the seeds of socialism all over our state.
Migration of liberals is a BAD thing.
I prefer they stay put and wallow in their own mire, rather than polluting the few conservative states that remain.
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