B-O-N-A-N-Z-A!
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.
I could care less about Republicans, how about conservatives?
If I remember New Hampshire isn't big enough to get away from the broadcasts and influence of its huge surrounding neighbors, despite the Union Leader.
Then there's the combination of all those media I mentioned + the cultural impact.
That large landmass, the overarching conservative culture, and the conservative media will have them eatin' moonpies, sippin' a big RC, and watching Nascar faster 'n' you can say, "fixin' ta change my way of thinkin'!"
B-O-N-A-N-Z-A!
That is a fairly naive assumption...
No, his new neighbors just think he's an )*( !
:-)
I agree. These stories always leave me wondering who writes them. The best outcome for this population shift will be when the 'rats leave a close or swing state, say Wisconsin, and bury themselves in a red stronghold like Texas or Georgia.
But they could also pollute a state which is now only marginally red, like Colorado or Nevada.
And unfortunately the blue states whence they came probably won't turn red since they'll be enough liberals remaining there to keep it democrat.
EXACTLY.
"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."
Two words--'moving out'--are not harbingers of positive change, but negative effect upon the red states.
But I think the big growth will be because the blue states simply don't reproduce, and most of the blue staters moving red will be family oriented.
"Who knows what will happen in the next 30 years?"
Bump to that.
bookmark
There's a lot of sneering at the big tent thing, but trying to get rid of us detested moderates is not smart politics.
So we cannot sit on our hands and rejoice about all the Northerners moving to the Sun Belt. There is much work to be done to keep the red states red.
They already have. Plus, they think the same way the DIMs do in one regard. Where else are we going to go?
Will the Pubs begin to act like a majority party in power? Questionable.
Will the Pubs become a status quo party with a primary interest of holding power, not moving forward on their [so called] principles? Fair possibility.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
That is a fairly naive assumption...
Extremely naive. Hey Heartofsong83, come to California, where the poll workers ARE FORBIDDEN to ask for your ID. If illegal immigrants really were not voting, the liberal legislators in my state would not be so adamant about preventing a voter ID act from passing.
But demographics does have an impact, including the one thing the above article doesn't mention - the demographic bomb that comes from blue-staters embracing abortion and euthanasia.
They also have less kids, and at later ages (blue-state women must have that "career" thing first, don't you know?...), or no kids because they're "too expensive" (especially in higher tax-rate/cost-of-living blue state cities).
It's looking good for us real 'Mehrkins' - and for my part, it can't happen soon enough. I'm sick of these POS leftists and all their b/s. 50 years of the Gramscian march through the institutions is enough.
Bump to everything you said.
In fact, in much of the South, that 'possibility' has already happened, with the shift of the old time fat cats from the Rats to the GOP. They know where the power lies.
"Things are not going fine when Hitlery is doing as well in the polls as she is, or when a geek like Kerry gets 48 percent of the vote."
HIllary will get the same 48% This of course depends on how many criminals can vote and what we will see in Ohio in 08. Hillary and the DNC need one state like Ohio and thats it. Well that is 137,000 votes. They are going to need an Arizona and Missouri to make up the balance. Or they can hit Florida again.
My bet is if we can pick up PA and WI or WI and MN, it all becomes irrelevant.
Yes, but it's not the liberals fleeing the blue states. New Hampshire is a poor comparison for two reasons:
1. The Republicans of New Hampshire were always more the libertarian-isolationist types (yankees) and WASPy aristocrats (blue bloods), the types who elected politicians like Olympia Snowe, James Jeffords, Warren Rudman, Sue Collins, Lowell Weicker, Lincoln Chafee and Bill Weld. Some of the blueing of NH is simply a political realignment of the natives: The Northern district is also blue, not just the mass-hole packed Southeast district.
2. The Massachusetts residents of New Hampshire are culturally blue-staters, who still work and party in Boston. The people moving to the deep south are leaving the blue-state culture.
Now, like the New Yorkers who moved to Arizona to get away from Hay Fever, then planted irrigated grass and trees everywhere, these transplants into the South do pose an ideological risk. When they are conservatives, they are "neo-cons*," and therefore more prone to raising liberal kids, or lapsing into liberalism when unfamiliar issues emerge.
(* By neo-con, I don't mean it in the sense of the media slurs. I mean people who were brought up amidst liberalism, and made an intellectual or experiential decision to "convert" to conservativism. Compared to paleocons, they tend to be better at promoting their reasons for being conservative, but also tend towards the default liberalism of their upbringing in subjects that they lack personal experience or intellectual persuasion in.)
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