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Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

Democratic states moving into California and Californians mostly leaving for conservative states. Interesting.

There are multiple ways to interpret though.

Most other "blue" states suffer from the same problem as California: massive wealth concentration and the subsequent sky-high rents and real estate prices.

I know when I was seriously considering relocating, the politics of the region wasn't a consideration. I was far more concerned about availability of jobs (and cost of living relative to what I could earn). If I were in SF and couldn't get a job at Big Tech, I'd be looking to move to a red state. Not for political reasons, just because it's better to be a median dev in a flyover state than a bottom quartile dev in SF/Seattle/NYC/etc.

That's pretty shortsighted. You still have to live in those areas, raise kids in those areas, and pay taxes in those areas.

Why wouldn't you consider the local politics?

...you'd be able to send your kids to a better school. And your kids would be better off.

California has some of the worst public schools in the country. In a red state you could send your kid to private school or afford a house in the best school districts.

http://school-ratings.com/counties/San_Mateo.html?type=&rank...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/05/california-schools-ea...

California has some great schools, but in those districts you’ll pay a huge premium. For example Sunnyvale homes are 1mil more than East Palo Alto homes.

So you either end up paying for private school. Or pay the same amount more for a more expensive home.

It's lower income, lower education people who are out-migrating, and those groups tend to be more right leaning on average. So if anything, the states are becoming even more uniform politically.

Education, yes. But surprisingly, "An individual’s likelihood of being a Democrat decreases with every additional dollar he or she earns."

https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...

Cost of living correlates with urban life correlates with 'liberal'

The data's pretty mixed on that. For outflow states:

Texas (#1): Solid R

Arizona (#2): R

Nevada (#3): Lean D

Oregon, Washington (#4, #5): Solid D

Colorado (#6): D

Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma (#7, #8, #9): Solid R

Georgia (#10): R

That's 6 R, 4 D.

Colorado is a very conservative democratic state.

It might be more accurate to say that Colorado is a very libertarian democratic state.

For most of it's history it has voted Republican, with only the last decade or so being Democrat [1]. But the state still holds a lot of very conservative views. It's very down the middle.

[1] https://www.270towin.com/states/Colorado

Oregon is interesting in that it's D because of Portland. The state is mostly conservative small cities or rural and yet the population of the Portland metro area leans so far left and has such a large population relative to the other parts of the state that it changes the entire state. Remove Portland voters from the polls and Oregon would be R.[0]

[0]http://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/212726-70134-how-liberal-i...

You could say the same thing about lots of blue states.

Any examples? I don't know of any other state that has 1 city with such an impact on the entire state as to turn it blue.

Georgia is Republican. But Atlanta is not.

I was hoping someone else would make this connection in the comments.

What I see happening is a slow but steady demographic shift based on politics. I know my own recent move from Virginia to Arkansas was largely because of this, and statistics from the past few elections have been showing a decrease in the number of "swing" counties.

Communities are becoming more politically homogenous. I wonder if this happened prior to the US Civil War, and if there were even enough data collected to accurately measure it.

> Communities are becoming more politically homogenous. I wonder if this happened prior to the US Civil War

Not particularly; compared to today, US states, in national partisan terms, were more homogenous for most of the history of the nation; this got a bit shook up with the New Deal Coalition and further when the LBJ committed to civil rights and then Republicans targeted the Democrats disaffected segregationist base. Greater political homogeneity is just a reversion to historical norms after some mid-20th Century disruptions.

Don't forget that a lot of those conservative states are large, and liberal states small. The data is not normalized.

If more dense places are more liberal, wouldn't normalizing for population density remove that insight from the reporting?

New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida are small now?

Now imagine if California reverses course and enacts conservative-friendly policies - and turns into a red state.

By and large califirnia is a red state: outside the major urban areas the state is mostly quote red; some urban areas (e.g. Orange county) are also quite red and those populations send conservatives to congress.

But because the majority of the population do live in major urban areas you see the state legislature about 70/30 D/R and the statewide offices tend to go to the majority as well.

But within recent memory there have been several republican governors, two of whom (nixon and regan) became US presidents.

So though I don't see much chance of the state tipping "red" any time soon it's not an utterly outlandish idea.

That is true of the entire US: rural areas are mostly red, urban areas are mostly blue.

That's the cliché but it seems a bit unfair, because in my mind, "rural" evokes small towns of 21 people and vast expanses of farm/ranch land. My hometown has a population of about ~70,000 spread out over 55 square miles (~1,300 people per square mile); is that "rural" or "urban?"

What I'm getting at is, it's more precise to say "most of the US--rural and urban--is red, while the densest population centers are overwhelmingly blue."

The threshold from red to blue corosses at 800ppl/sqm:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/11/what-republicans-are-...

The definition of "urban" according to the USA census department have cores of 1000ppl/sqm and are surrounding by areas of 500ppl/sqm.

So if you have a density of 1,300, then there is a higher chance the area went blue. Of course, there can be lots of exceptions, and 1,300 is rather close to the crossover point.

It would be interesting to see those 2012 calculations updated, especially with regards to the results of the 2016 Presidential election; judging by the resulting red-or-blue-by-county political map, things have changed since then.

I didn't find a nice graph, but the rural-urban divide actually increased for the 2016 election. See:

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14/501737150/rural-voters-played...

> Here's another divide that started to get more attention this election: the rural-urban gap. Rural voters vote more Republican, while urban voters vote more Democratic, and that divide grew this year from where it was in 2012 and 2008. It's a nuanced divide, too; strikingly, as counties get progressively more rural, they more or less steadily grow more Republican. And it's possible that living in a rural area caused people to vote more Republican this election.

> Exit polls show that the rural-urban divide grew from 2008 to 2012, and again this election. What's particularly interesting is that the rural vote seems to have moved more than the urban or suburban votes.

In turn, I was born in a hospital next to a Seoul apartment complex that was part of a 3-apartment complex thing that had more people than your hometown. That's density.

Oh most definitely, a friend from my hometown spent a couple of years in Seoul and related just how different it was from our hometown but also any other US city he'd lived in, including the greater Seattle area. But I would never mean to imply that my red/blue density supposition would apply to a place as culturally and politically distinct from the US.

> By and large califirnia is a red state: outside the major urban areas the state is mostly

...unpopulated.

Seriously, compare the Bay Area + LA metro + San Diego Metro population to the state population.

Sure, most of the land area is Republican-majority, but...

  republican governors, two of whom (nixon and regan) became US presidents

Nixon was never Governor.

Thanks. Too late to edit my post.

It wasn't a very long time ago that California was red. You don't have to imagine. It was only after Pete Wilson decided to crackdown on latinos that the state shifted into solid D.

It's been almost 20 years since Pete Wilson was governor. In the meantime, the GOP has moved quite a bit to the right, and CA as a whole has moved left on most issues. If anything, it looks like the remaining red districts in places like Central Valley could be at risk as first generation Latinos hit voting age and start to outnumber the conservatives.

Much of the potential 2018 shift in Congress may come from CA, for example: http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/369254-perfect-storm...

Eg for the Central Valley districts: "Walters’s district has grown by 33,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Of those new residents, 30,000 are nonwhite. The white population actually declined in Royce’s district while the overall population grew by 10,000 residents. In Denham’s district, 17,000 of the 21,000 new residents are nonwhite."

(Not to mention the new tax plan was hugely unpopular in CA in general.)

  It wasn't a very long time ago that California was red.

In Presidential voting, and only through 1988.

Even then, the Legislature was consistently Democrat-controlled (in recent years, Democrat supermajorities).

I don’t think you remember Nixon and Reagan, or when the OC was a conservative bastion.

"OC was a conservative bastion" is very, very different from claiming "not long ago, California (overall) was red".

Without looking it up: when do you think was the most recent time that Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature?

"...the most recent time that Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature"

I looked it up.

The answer?

1970. And that just 1 2-year term and with bare single-seat majorities in both houses.

Before 1969? Next most recent: 1956.

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