Don't buy into this. Libs don't leave their beliefs behind.Also, don't forget the mushrooming immigrant population along the border states---they'll tend to vote dem.
Bush had 44% of the Hispanic vote in the last election though...and illegal immigrants cannot vote (obviously)...so that is not as much of an issue as you think.
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.)