An NPR story that I didn’t have time to blog about earlier in the week: “Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own.” It starts, as these things often do, with an anecdote:
There’s a private Facebook group with nearly 8,000 members called Conservatives Moving to Texas. Three of them are sitting at a dinner table — munching on barbecue weenies and brownies — in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. None are vaxxed.
And they love it here.
“As soon as I drove into Texas, literally, as soon as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, like, ‘This is wonderful,’ ” says Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-old portrait photographer from Orange County, Calif.
“People weren’t wearing masks — nobody cared. It’s kind of like heaven on earth.”
She says when the state of California forced her to close her photography studio over COVID-19 restrictions, she and her husband, a retired newspaper editor, knew it was time to “escape.”
So, on the one hand, I get why someone who is anti-mask would want to live in a place where they’re not shamed for their choice and, certainly, why someone who wants everyone around them to be masked and vaccinated would prefer to live in a place where that’s the norm. But finding a new job, packing up one’s household, and moving across the country is a rather significant undertaking. I’ve done it a dozen or so times but, even though I’m much more politically motivated than most, never for politics.
This is followed by a thesis statement:
America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.
Which is followed by more anecdote:
“We felt very out of place and very uncomfortable at times,” says Tiffany Wooten, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom whose family recently relocated from conservative Indiana to liberal Austin. “We were looking at blue cities because we wanted to be with our own people.”
The trend seems to be quickening as conservatives flee places with strict COVID-19 rules.
Karen Bates, a 52-year-old mortgage executive, moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with her family last year from Puerto Rico. She says the island’s government was going to force her teenaged daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes, to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. She now attends a Christian school.
“She’s not had to wear a mask,” Bates says. “She doesn’t have to get vaccinated. She’s thriving on the tennis team, making straight A’s. I love the freedom of [vaccine] choice in Texas.”
In the modern era, Texas has fashioned itself into a sort-of breakaway red-meat republic — banning books and restricting abortion, blocking mask mandates, and building its own border fence. It retains this national image in spite of the fact that its five largest counties went for President Biden.
But more and more Trump followers are flocking to red Texas in search of the promised land.
“People are asking, ‘Tell me about the most conservative towns. Where should I be moving?’ ” says Seeden, of the people who post comments on the Conservatives Moving to Texas page.
So, again, the impulse is understandable. But most of us have understood the COVID restrictions to be something temporary. And that’s even more true for the most virulent anti-mask, anti-vaccine folks, who keep reminding us that this all started as a very short-term measure to “flatten the curve.” So, a major—and expensive—lifestyle reordering in response to something that appears to be ending even in the bluest cities in the bluest states seems drastic.
The national real estate brokerage, Redfin, predicted that in 2022, “people will vote with their feet, moving to places that align with their politics.”
It’s actually been happening for some time.
Residents have been fleeing states like California with high taxes, expensive real estate and school mask mandates and heading to conservative strongholds like Idaho, Tennessee and Texas.
More than one of every 10 people moving to Texas during the pandemic was from California, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Most came from Southern California. Florida was the second biggest contributor of new Texans.
That 10% of those moving to Texas are doing so from California seems like an impressive bit of evidence, until one realizes that 12% of Americans live in California. Further, while tax policies are certainly political, moving to places with lower taxes isn’t necessarily a political statement.
After some more anecdotes, we get this:
While schools, crime, real estate prices and quality of life are still major considerations for folks who are moving, finding an area with shared political views is key.
Political scientist Larry Sabato posted an analysis on Thursday that shows how America’s “super landslide” counties have grown over time.
Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote — has jumped from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
“Trump’s blowouts were concentrated in white, rural counties in the Greater South, Interior West, and Great Plains,” Sabato writes, “while Biden’s were in a smattering of big cities, college towns, and smaller counties with large percentages of heavily Democratic nonwhite voters.”
Put another way, Biden won 85% of counties with a Whole Foods and only 32% of counties with a Cracker Barrel.
It’s not at all obvious that the evidence supports the thesis. That voting patterns are increasingly aligned with geography doesn’t necessarily mean that people moved to neighborhoods with politics in mind. It’s just that the two major political parties are themselves incredibly sorted, aiming to mobilize distinct bases. Democrats increasingly appeal to the college-educated and professional classes, as well as Blacks and Hispanics, all of whom tend to live near the major urban centers whereas Republicans increasingly appeal to blue-collar and agricultural workers in the rural and suburban areas.
The rest of the report is more anecdote and argues that this sorting, while dangerous to our national politics, may be a good thing for the individual psyche.
