New idea: perhaps it would be cost effective to pay liberal-leaning voters to move from SF and NYC into the rural red-state districts?
https://azbigmedia.com/business/economy/lots-of-californians...
https://www.azeconomy.org/2020/09/economy/destination-arizon...
Californians have been beating a path to the Grand Canyon State and moving to Arizona for more than the last decade – but it’s not exactly been a one-way street.
While close to 500,000 people moved from California to Arizona from 2010 to 2018, just over 308,000 people were moving in the other direction, according to state-to-state migration flow data released this fall by the Census Bureau.
People don't choose where to live because of the electoral college or state congress. Most just don't have that luxury - they need to live where the jobs are. If your concern is around a government that accurately represents its electorate, the way to combat that is to combat gerrymandering and getting rid of the electoral college.
Paying people to move to certain places sounds silly when you consider that a state can simply redistrict itself...
For over a century, Vermont was a solid red state, opting for the Republican candidate in every presidential election between 1856 and 1960, and consistently electing Republican governors. With the back-to-the-land influx of the Sixties and Seventies, this began to change. Vermont’s population surged by 30 percent in those decades, and the majority of the newcomers brought with them into the ballot box the same idealistic, environmentally oriented priorities that had brought them to Vermont in the first place.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/how-the-ba...
It's possible I have my causal arrow wrong, but at least in my youth, living in a city had a big impact on me because I was suddenly living and working with a much more diverse group of people.
Cities have long been hubs of exchanging ideas and culture. Many people who are moving back, at least in my anecdotal experience, are moving back closer to where they grew up. This might initial shift some of these areas a bit blue, but after 4, then 8 years people will return to a sense of regionalism, forget a bit how it feels to be in a hub filled with different experience and different view points.
Of course it is still possible that I'm completely wrong (I hope I am) and we'll see this shift out of cities get more people with conflicting political viewpoints in the same room which might help reduce some extremism.
Or it could be both. The center continues right but we pull back some of the more extreme right wing views out there.
I lived in an area that I used to say was where people who are too conservative for the city, but still want access to it, moved, and they kept their politics, too, so it works both ways.
You may want to consider that not everyone who disagrees with you politically is a racist.
I don't think they said that. Since I'm white and have witnessed racist shit growing up (and honestly, I'm a pretty unobservant guy), I'm guessing it does happen and it also happens more in rural areas and the South.
I do, however, have family that chose to move from the city to different rural areas, and as dark-skinned Italians, they were at the receiving end of racism from their neighbors who didn't like living next to people with dark complexions. They didn't want their kids to grow up in such an environment, and I don't blame them.
It's most likely that both will happen, thanks to Simpsons paradox: The area with immigration shifts toward the newcomers (since they aren't going to be MORE provincial than the natives, even if they partly convert), while also shifting the political power from the urban emigration are to the immigration area.
There IS one exception - military towns, but even that has been upended this cycle.
The explanation is reasonably simple. If a population is spread out, you mind your own business and you are generally opposed to the Law Man telling you what to do.
A dense area changes the dynamics. You have to be more considerate - to keep the peace, there are more laws, regulation, and norms because naturally some people try to break the peace and disturb the herd, and in an urban setting that has an amplified effect. This is a very natural trend in any society.
Another good intention might be to spur economic activity in areas where the local economy is in decline or completely gone. There's a lot of money and wealth and opportunities created in cities that only trickles back down to the rest of the country very indirectly (through government subsidies paid for by taxes, for example). Imagine if even half of West Virginia University's engineering graduates stayed local and built their fortunes in Morgantown (or Charleston) instead of moving to San Fransisco to work for Google or Facebook. Their tax revenues staying local would be huge for a lot of people who are suffering in abject poverty in WV right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
West Virginia is estimated to have lost 3.3% of its population over the last 9 years. Only a few territories are worse.
I've driven through many times and it is a beautiful state. I have a friend working on opioid legal cases and there are so many documents about cities wanting to keep their young people in the state but there aren't enough economic opportunities so people leave or turn to drugs.
Believe it or not, there was a time when California was a purple state, and it had a low(er) cost of living and very high quality of life. This was a long time ago, but still.
If you do decide to move somewhere, please try and be respectful of the folks who already live there and have made it a desirable place to live in the first place. And while you're at it, ask yourself why you want to make a place you're moving to more like a place that you left because you didn't want to live there anymore.
Most cities are blue and rural areas are red.
I live in a red / purple state but all the cities are blue. The current estimate from the 2010 census is that we have grown 10% and added around 1 million people. Some of the rural counties are shrinking. The vast majority of growth is in the cities that were already blue and are just becoming more blue.
I live one state away but if you look at Virginia it did not change from red to blue because people moved into the rural areas and voted opposite of the rural voters. People moved into Arlington, Richmond, and Virginia Beach and made these already blue areas larger and more blue. After a few years it tipped the balance in the state.
So the problem is citizens legally voting for people/policies they want to see in their local jurisdiction? That sounds exactly like how democracy is supposed to work. There's no law saying things have to stay exactly how they were, and there's no law saying seniority makes your vote count more than anyone else's.
Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't make it a good idea. It just means no one can legally stop you.
Cities with poor quality of life and high cost of living are that way because their laws and policies aren't effectively managing the high population. If you move to a low population area, the problems you encounter are wildly different (and yes small towns still have big problems to solve). And if you move to a city that has a large enough population that SF's poor city planning actually matters, you're going to have to move a lot of people to overwhelm the status quo. And if a small number of new people dramatically changes the feel of a city, well that sounds like you had 51% of the people who wanted it one way overriding the 49% who absolutely hate the city they live in.
This fear feels like a socially conservative "I don't want them folk coming here and changing things". If new people move in and things start changing, they were always going to change and a lot of people have been waiting for that change for a long time. Embrace it.
The point is not voting for politicians that make the place as undesirable as the place you left.
What do you think is a better metric of "desirable place to live" than cost of living? People are willing to pay 2, 3, 4 times as much to live in coastal California? Seems like it's still VERY desirable...
So in fact, what people moving are doing is completely rational: they want to bring the things they like because they still desired to live there, other people just had more money... (this part does expose one of the cruelties: people with even more money than the people CURRENTLY in CA can price them out to TX or wherever, where they can then price the current folks there out, etc! But I don't see how you can then possibly view the solution as more free market policies and such...)
It's the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" of city politics discussions... somehow people who otherwise praise economic trends that cause appreciating property values suddenly hate it when it gets too expensive for them!
I suspect it would end up in the supreme court, interesting thought.