This is way too simplistic. Remarkably so. Every red state has blue suburbs and bluer urban areas. In virtually every state, red or blue, it is the suburbs and urban areas growing in population relative to rural areas.
Does urbanization, which requires complex interactions between lots of people, create more liberal attitudes (tolerating other lifestyles, desire for big government)? If so, then this population shift will ultimately turn blue.
Bob poor people are less likely to vote.
LOL just watch all the red staters telling all the blues not to move to their state. All of those states are going to change because of the influx of Democrats.
Every state has its own patterns, but looking at Florida â its population it has grown by 45% since 2000 more than twice as fast as the US as a whole. Back in 2000 Florida was a swing state (anybody remember hanging chads?). By contrast, in the 2024 election there was a 13-point spread.
DB2
Yes. The Gov of that state brags about making it a destination for bigots.
Steve
Exceptions rarely make the rule. From 2000-2021 the Cuban origin population increased 92% with a big chunk of that increase occurring in Florida. Cubans tend to be more conservative than other Hispanics, with most registering as republicans. This demographic is pretty specific to Florida.
Here is my naive take on the political winds. The economy since 2009 has been performing well for the most part despite the press, which is why the electorate cares so much about tangential stuff like wokeness, pronouns, DEI, etc. Even stuff on the southern border is mostly symbolic. Ultimately, who gets in and how many will be determined by economics, always has been. And unless white folks want to go out an pick lettuce, thatâs not going to change.
The fastest growing demographics are latinos (who are mostly Catholic) and old folks, both of whom trend as socially conservative and patriotic, but they also want their big government safety nets. So the GOP will do well making their symbolic gestures to save women from pronouns/transgenders and white culture from globalism, but these have no real impact on the quality of life for most Americans.
The trump will hit the fan when they start trying to do significant stuff based on their ideology. We saw what happened when they tried to tackle health care and it is noteworthy that no republican is talking about Obamacare today. And if the goal is to lower the deficit without raising taxes, they are going to have to go after medicare and social security. Letâs see how that impacts poll numbers.
So my guess is that the current administration will either accomplish nothing of significance or make real change that will result in their becoming very unpopular. Either suggests a blue-tinted future.
This is a broad trend. The population of the United States has been moving westward since the country was founded, and has been trending southward for the last century.
Part of that is just unavoidable (the country started with a ton of population in the east, so there was nowhere else to go). And Iâm sure part of it is due to economic or cultural factors that might be affected by policies.
But a huge part of it is just due to technology, which isnât ever going to be unwound. In the last century, we have seen widespread adoption of: the telephone; refrigeration; the automobile; government public water systems and insect control; air conditioning; and in the last few decades improvements in communications technology.
All of these things made the southern states much more livable. Before all of those developments, it was easier to heat than cool buildings or perishable food, difficult to transport goods and people without access to canals and rivers and dense mass transit, difficult to avoid tropical diseases, and difficult to communicate easily with folks unless you were close to them. All those factors favored living in moderately dense urban environments close to railroads and canals in the northeast.
But since the 1920âs, weâve developed all those technologies - and so the population has been shifting away from the dense settlements in the Northeast and Midwest and towards the Sun Belt and the Southwest. At the broadest level of generality, it is now much easier to live somewhere thatâs warm than it was a century ago - and so people are doing that, especially since the land is cheaper and the built environment is better suited to cars.
Thereâs still a lot of path dependence. Settlement patterns before the early 20th century were affected heavily by the need for rail and canal transport, and how that was affected by geography, and that has a lot of inertia. The major metros of the northeast and midwest got very industrialized and rich and important because thatâs where east-west travel could happen easily (given the Appalachians), and that still echoes through history. But cars and planes and air conditioning and communications technology have been eroding that geographic advantage over the last 10-12 decades.
Which, again, is a big reason why population is shifting from the northeast (largely blue states) to the south and west (largely red states). Not solely, or even primarily, because of anything those states are doing on governance.
Governance is not inconsequential. Millions of Black-Americans moved from the south to the north in the first half the 20th century to at least in part escape Jim Crow. And if housing shortages are due to zoning laws and regulations, then governance plays a significant role for people moving to places with cheap housing. But overall I agree with you. There are larger forces moving populations between states than the political party in power.
When it comes to politics, I think the more relevant behavior is the shift from rural to urban. The rugged individualism of rural living lends itself to small government conservatism while the crowded interdependency of urban life depends on big government regulation. I think cities shade blue not because they attract liberals but rather because big government is necessary for cities to function. If cities create liberals then states with rapidly growing cities will trend blue.
As Austin, Houston, Phoenix, and Raleigh grow at the expense of more rural counties it is hard to see how what were primarily rural states can avoid becoming bluer. Conversely, as the older, denser, urban areas like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh lose populations to the suburbs one would expect those areas to grow a bit redder.
The end result I hope is a moderation of the political climate with a lot more swing states resulting in a lot more political compromises.
That wasnât borne out in 2024 where the red shift was pretty widespread. Almost every county in California was more red than in 2020, including Los Angeles, San Diego and all of the Bay Area counties. Ditto Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Raleigh. The New York City area had large red shifts.
DB2
Ok well than what happened in 2018 and 2020? If you are going to hang your hat on a single election I think you will be disappointed.
You are correct about short-term ânoiseâ. Iâm just not sure that btâs idea (states with rapidly growing cities will trend blue) will hold up any better than The Emerging Democratic Majority (Teixeira, 2002) and âNew Progressive America: Twenty Years of Demographic, Geographic, and Attitudinal Changes Across the Country Herald a New Progressive Majorityâ (Teixeira, 2009) have.
DB2
I live in the arid southwest and water is getting to be a huge problem. The Colorado River cannot deliver what was promised in the original 1922 Colorado River Compact. Recent years have seen a lot drought in the region and climate models predict more of that (yes, the models might be wrong but so farâŚ). One suburb of Phoenix has already lost access to the public water supply (Rio Verde Foothills) and yet the Phoenix and Tucson areas continue to grow like a metastasizing cancer. Even the little town I Iive in is growing rapidly and though we depend on an aquifer to supply our water needs, no one really knows much about that aquifer, specifically its recharge rate.
We are a clever species but not good at long term planning.
We may be better than you think. From YaleEnvironment369:
Water officials in San Diego, though, say they are not worried. âWe have sufficient supplies now and in the future,â said Sandra Kerl, general manager of the San Diego Water Authority. âWe recently did a stress test, and we are good until 2045â and even beyond.
San Diego is not alone. While the public image may be that booming southwestern cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque are on the verge of a climate apocalypse, many experts agree that these metropolitan areas have enough of a water cushion to not only survive, but continue to grow into the surrounding desert for the foreseeable future, even during the worst drought in 1,200 years.
DB2
Agriculture and idiot English landscaped grass lawns are the monster users of water, not toilets and showers (egregious as they can also be).
But you will never see me living where A/C is a requirement for an active life.
I think we will continue on this back and forth. Every Presidential election, the other party will take control. It seems the people do not like either of the parties that get elected. I suspect in 4 years it will change again with all the chaos we are experiencing now. It would be nice if we actually had a party that put the middle class first.
If change is allowed? Surely it will be�
Maybe. But Iâm talking about long term planning. We are amazing at fixing problems in the short term. But planning for long term sustainabilityâŚnot so much.
Re: water
Water is not a problem. It never goes away. It either gets dirty or it evaporates.
Cleaning up dirty water is well known technology. Mostly it requires energy. And investment to install equipment or do construction.
The real problem is people want it cheap. If you want to live in a desert someone has to fund those costs.
People think of if as free, and get upset when they find out otherwise, and are told that safe drinking water has value.
But it IS a problem when the rain stops falling in the desert southwest and the mountains that feed the Colorado River drainage. Maybe with enough moneyâŚbut thatâs not an unlimited resource either.
