For the majority of my life, as the politics of Oregon, and many other States, has shifted leftward, I have heard people say “I’m moving to Texas/Florida/some other red blooded American State”. For Oregon specifically, it’s to escape the income tax, or a variety of stupid laws, such as having a gas station attendant pump your gas, or to get away from the ever growing homeless population. Usually it is a mixture of factors.
An interesting phenomenon is also happening in left wing States, and it’s a similar situation, although far more dire. From a broad observation, it appears that States such as California, New York, or States with highly dense metropolitan areas, have far starker problems similar to the ones I mentioned above. It is at that level of deprecation that a certain type of person leaves. Broadly speaking, this person either is an urban or suburban liberal. They may or may not have been college educated, but the fact that some are not does not change the matter much. They tend to work in specialist fields, and typically only work in service related jobs, and seldom have ever worked any job that had manual labor. If they did, they did it when they were younger, and it was not for a long period of time. They hold left wing ideals, but are not overzealous about them. They appear reasonable people; you can have polite discussions with them about current events, and openly disagree with them, and still remain friends or acquaintances. The most important aspect, however, is the fact that most did not leave their home States because of the issues above, but rather because the cost of living was too high, and/or they had a better job opportunity. Usually it is a factor of the two.
These are the type of people that are driving States like Oregon, which used to be a fairly right wing State, leftward. These people are not engaged into politics or current events, as most people are in general. A critique of all Americans is that the majority vote only because it is something they can do, and do not think about the larger ramifications about what they are voting on. For most people, voting is almost akin to sports, where they want their sports team to win, so they go out and vote. However, as more people from leftwing States move to States like Oregon, and ever slowly change the paradigm, they slowly drive out people who are against their ideals. This is not to say this is the only reason rightwing people leave their home states. Generally it is also first and foremost for economic opportunity, and other considerations have a marginal impact.
With this background understood, we can see how, over time, most States appear to shift blue, and some States grow red marginally. The two prime examples of this are Texas and Florida. With Texas, as sectors such as tech and finance grow with populations leaving the Northeast and California respectively, the urban areas of Texas grow, and turn more leftwing as these transplants arrive. During the 2020 election, Texas’ state legislature remained red because the aggregate number of rightwing counties outnumbers the metropolitan areas. However, the metropolitan areas outnumber the population in the majority of the counties, and the number of leftwing people versus rightwing people is shrinking every year, which almost lead to the governors race being won by a Democrat, and the Electoral College vote going towards Joe Biden. A similar occurrence is happening in States such as Arizona, Wyoming, and the Carolinas.
Seemingly the opposite is occurring in Florida. Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a majority of the States were enforcing some strict lockdown measures, Florida was a pariah, and had relatively light lockdown and masking measures. A lot of people who held particularly righwing beliefs moved to Florida. And because of that, during the 2020 election, a State that was only marginally rightwing turned into a redwave landslide victory for Ron DeSantis and Republicans. In reality, this was not a victory for the rightwing.
As stated previous, Florida was marginally a rightwing State. If someone of rightwing propensity wanted to win the State, they had to drive a hard fought campaign where there was a threat that they may lose. With the pandemic, and the rightwing migration from States such as Oregon to Florida, rightwingers in Florida can sit comfortably and win elections without much effort. This comes at the expense of States such as Oregon, where losing rightwing people only drives the State even more leftwing. Before the pandemic, while Oregon was a fairly leftwing State, it had fairly lax gun laws,or had no intention of taxing or banning fossil fuel sources. Since the final mass migration of rightwingers from Oregon, measures such as 114 and the banning of gasoline powered car sales by 2035, are only the beginning. This only happened because, instead of standing and fighting against the leftwing Californians, people left for Florida.
A common strategy of any group of people trying to colonize a new territory is to make it unlivable for the native inhabitants to live in. Typically this was through direct conflict such as warfare. However, the modern colonization is not through physical fighting, but rather through the ballot box, and slowly creating conditions in which people refuse to live under, and leave. This is temporary, however, as eventually that process will cause those who created the process themselves to leave, and to move to those very areas that the original inhabitants fled to. To flee to Texas or Florida is to only find a temporary safe harbor.
We must stand against the storm, the avalanche of insanity. Moving to another State only weakens those who stay behind, and makes their lives more difficult. And consolidating in a handful of “red states” weakens the power of the right in the federal government, which then allows for insane federal laws and policies to be passed that affect everyone, including those in the right wing States that fled there to evade those laws in the first place. The only way to stop the tide is to make every single election in every local government, State government, and federal election, a hard fought fight where the other side has to put maximum effort into winning.
Easy victories are not victories we should be looking for.