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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

All this talk about Austin becoming the new SV - but then you see regressive laws like this getting pushed through. No thanks.

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If you thought that Austin was progressive but weren't aware that voting in Austin is futile, here's your wakeup call.

Austin has dozens of elected officials below the state level. Voting is never futile. Vote even if you don't think you'll win because that's what motivates other people to vote, and it's the only thing you can do to delay having to actually fight an authoritarian regime.

> Austin has dozens of elected officials below the state level.

Which the party of states' rights will happily run over.

Republican-controlled state legislatures have no issue with overturning local government legislature to impose their agenda.

There are hundreds of local policies that states don't touch, including things related to collecting and spending taxes.

If everyone in Texas voted, it might have avoided this situation. You vote when it's hopeless until it isn't anymore.

Migration of people from SV to Austin will change the political landscape and stop stuff like this from being passed.

Houston underwent the greatest ethnic transformation of any major U.S. city in my lifetime. 1 out of 4 Houstonians is now foreign-born, and a lot of people have moved to Houston from the northern U.S. in the last decade. Austin has voted differently from a lot of Texas long before any SV influx, and they may help diversify voting in the state but not nearly as much as changes in other parts of Texas.

I tell people from outside Texas that Houston is the most diverse city in the US and they act like I'm shamelessly lying. With all the stuff there is about Texas government and politics to criticize, it's a very unique part of the country under significant tensions pulling the place and people in multiple contradictory directions.

It used to frustrate me but now it just makes me laugh when I see people talk about Dallas, Houston like they aren't two of the more diverse and largest metros in the country.

Yet when my Indian friends were getting a housing tour in Dallas, they were told how diverse the area is: they have Protestant, Baptist, and Catholic Churches in this neighborhood!

That didn’t impress them much (in fact it did the opposite) and they stayed in SF.

It certainly depends on the area. I'm within about 2 miles of a Buddhist template and multiple mosques. There are another sixty churches in the same area, but it is what it is.

It not about the religion. It’s that a local thought that was indicative of diversity. It spoke to the local mindset.

Dallas is very different than Houston and I made no claims about Dallas.

In practice it really isn’t. The city sprawls endlessly with no mass transit, so you end up staying in your corner of the greater Houston area all the time, which is 90% suburbs with no walkability. Urban Houston is more diverse yes, but once you get beyond 610 you lose all city benefits and all the neighborhoods are homogeneous and monocultural. Houston is ok. Greater Houston is a terrible place. Great food though.

Sounds like the Bay Area.

Sounds like most American metropolitan areas.

Scene: Houston, wedding-anniversary dinner in a French restaurant a few years ago. The server looked faintly Asian but sounded faintly French.

Me: Are you Vietnamese by any chance?

Her: No, I'm from Kazakhstan.

Me: That's so interesting; I didn't know we had Kazakhs here in Houston.

Her: Yes, there's about 5,000 of us.

I was gobsmacked, as our Brit friends might say.

Now if the blue cities in Texas can just somehow get rid of the conservative-rigged gerrymandering that gives the red rural areas such disproportionate power in state government.

I’m not sure ethnic change translates into progressive social policies. Latino immigrants tend to be socially conservative. (This is why Republicans hyperventilating about immigrants changing the political landscape should calm themselves down and Democrats shouldn’t take anything for granted.)

SV immigrants probably a lot more socially progressive.

I’ll give you that, but more languages are spoken in Houston than in NYC or LA, so even though the Hispanic population is in the majority, there are a lot of other kinds of people as well. And in the past election, Biden received twice as many votes from Houston as he did from Austin due to the fact that for all its fame Austin is a much smaller city.

Probably not just SV, but it's true Texas is changing. It's a shame it didn't change faster.

All of the demographic change is essentially growth in the Hispanic population. The Hispanic demo votes overwhelmingly conservative.

That is not correct. Depending on the survey you look at, only 30-38% of Latino voters voted for Trump in 2020[1][2].

This was a big shift toward Republicans in 2020, but it still didn't make Latinos majority Republican.

There are trends that work for and against both parties right now, too, so 2022 is anyone's guess, but they'll still likely vote majority Democrat.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/racist-latino-vote-accel...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/05/latinos-a...

No, it won't. Austin is one of the most gerrymandered regions of the country.

I live in downtown Austin. My congressman is Chip Roy, an ultra-right-wing MAGA nonsense spewing idiot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_21st_congressional_d...

Better if they migrate to rural Texas. We’re all cracked, packed and stacked here in Austin and other metropolitan areas since Tom de Lay and the rest of the Republicans redistricted back in 2003.

Woke: moving to Bell or Lubbock County to improve Texas politics

Bespoke: moving to Milam or Scurry County to improve Texas politics

Blame packing and cracking voting districts.

Texas is close enough to flipping blue that it wouldn't take a whole lot. A few more votes in a few more districts.

Shouldn't we build an app to make that easier? The data is public, just focus on the districts where the voting was closest and connect that to Zillow or something similar. You can't guarantee results, of course, but we can point people in the right direction to change the state.

I don't think so. Folks shouldn't sacrifice quality of life (moving to rural areas versus areas they might desire more) to tip the state faster than it will already tip. It's just a matter of time, governed by the birth, immigration (domestic and foreign), and death rate.

It's just a matter of time (I don't say that lightly, I have made my donations to support relief efforts from recent policy decisions).

The website can't force anyone to make the move, but can help with deciding where to move to in order to improve quality of life for everyone in the state.

It's also a solid investment to purchase real estate in a place you know quality of life will improve.

Help yourself to the data: https://ballotpedia.org/Pivot_Counties_in_Texas

Sort by counties in descending order closest to ~50% blue for targeting relocation suggestions, turning counties that flip solid blue. Best bang for your buck imho. Probably cheaper housing too, close enough to urban cores for hybrid remote, far enough out to be affordable. A couple days worth of CRUD/GIS/data science work if I had to hazard a guess.

Thank you. That's an amazing resource. That combined with the number of votes it'd take to make the district flip would be perfect.

These regressive voters are mostly concentrated in suburban environments. It's not a huge ordeal for most people to live in suburban Austin or Dallas or San Antonio or etc.

> Folks shouldn't sacrifice quality of life (moving to rural areas versus areas they might desire more) to tip the state faster than it will already tip

Personally, I don't think "quality of life" is the word that should be used to distinctualize rural and urban living. I've lived in both and had a quality life in both, each came with their tradeoffs and sharp costs I had to manage.

Is deliberately facilitating demographic change for political purposes an ethical use of technology? I imagine there would be some moral outrage if the people of the pivot districts learned that SV types (who may well not even live in Texas) were collaborating to enact political change by targeted migration. Is this not basically political colonization?

Political districts in the US are already designed to favor specific parties and incumbents, the playing field is already not neutral.

This seems like little more than playing by the established rules of the game, which favors targeted demographics and swing districts over the broad populace.

The question is not whether the playing field is neutral or not through the actions of others, but whether "we" (tech) should undertake to change that playing field further. What right do "we" have to interfere in other peoples' lives from afar?

Wouldn't giving the majority its fair share of political voice, in a democratic republic, be a net positive?

The point of a federal system is to let a minority form the majority in a particular place and live under policies they want. Why should they accept the outcome of democracy and open borders if we chase them around the map and prevent that everywhere?

I am not saying I want to live under this absurd law, but I suppose people do and they are not going to just disappear.

>Why should they accept the outcome of democracy and open borders if we chase them around the map and prevent that everywhere?

Because that's how the democracy works, and if they accept it when it works in their favor (as it's designed to,) they can accept when it doesn't.

It isn't illegal to be a liberal and live in Texas and vote, as much as other Texans might wish it were.

Since the president is not elected by direct vote, the decisions in some states carry much greater impact and influence than others. A tool like this would help make the result more reflective of the desired outcomes for the larger population.

And you are not interfering from afar - people need to move in order to vote. We can only guide these people, however, and help them find the places they can make the difference they want to make.

We have the same rights as anyone in a civil society to try to effect political change in our favor, within the bounds of the law.

All that's being suggested here is that if people move from SV, or wherever, to Texas that they vote their conscience, and where they could reside so that vote could be the most effective. It isn't interference, it's participation.

Since I’m neither a US resident nor a citizen, I already did my part with the foreign interference in elections by lifting the idea. It’s up to my American friends to run with it.

If you do, keep me posted. ;-)

The Free State Project did this to the town of Grafton, New Hampshire, invading to turn it into the country's first libertarian majority city so they could take over the government. And yeah, the locals were not too happy about it. One of the reasons they chose Grafton is there were no zoning laws, so they could move in quickly without having to build housing, which meant many of them were living in the woods, and since they had no experience doing that and kept leaving food out, the town became overrun with bears.

Exercising their right to bear arms, and legs, and bodies, and torsos ....

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

I would never expect bears to be the last line of defence for democracy, but here we are…

Source? Because every time I've seen the polls the large cities might be turning purplish, but once you get outside the city limits they are all red.

Off the top of my head, Ballotpedia is among the more accessible. I'm not aware of a specific dataset, though I suspect that exists.

https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_election_results,_2020

Presidential margin was 631,221 votes.

Texas House balance is 83/67. Majority is 150/2 + 1 = 76 seats. Minority needs a gain of 9.

https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_House_of_Representatives_elect...

Texas Senate is 13/18, majority is |31/2| + 1 = 16 seats. Minority needs a gain of 3.

https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_State_Senate_elections,_2020

Unfortunately, Ballotpedia doesn't give vote counts / majority per race.

MIT's Election Lab might be even more useful:

https://electionlab.mit.edu/data

... though the Texas returns appear not to be provided either as data feeds or as web scrapes.

Interesting, that.

> Because every time I've seen the polls the large cities might be turning purplish, but once you get outside the city limits they are all red.

That describes most of the country, really -- not just Texas. But elections are decided by people, not land.

I half suspect this is because of Austin becoming the new sv. They don't want you guys, they want to stay red. This will scare a lot of people off.

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