Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Phillips Welcome, Midwesterners! You're Not as Republican as You Think
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:02 AM
Atlas put out this map of which states people are moving from and to. You can see that people are emptying out of the Midwest (except, weirdly, Michigan) and filling up the Mid-South.
It'll be interesting to see what the political implications of this are in a few years. I grew up in Illinois and, while I'm probably more liberal than many Illinoisans, I'm so completely not as far left as it goes in Illinois. Up there, I'd call myself a middle-of-the-road liberal. But I moved down here, and though my politics haven't changed, I'm now as far left as you can get.
There are a lot of Midwesterners moving south who think they're Republicans, and they're going to find themselves to the left of the Mid-South's Republican parties. It'll be interesting to see if this has a moderating effect on Republicans or if it's an unexpected boon to Democrats.
(Considering our Democrats' ability to blow every opportunity, I'm going to guess the Republicans will find some way to accommodate them.)
Comments (5)
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Midwesterners are moving down here just to feel superior whenever we have an accumulation of snow on the roads. So tiresome.
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dislikeBetsy,
This process had been going on for decades and the results have been far different than you project. The wave of GM workers who flocked here in the 80s was supposed to halt the Republican growth in Williamson County and the surrounding areas. Instead the union workers moved more and more Republican. And year after year the majority of people moving to Tennessee, particularly Middle Tennessee, either arrive as Republicans or switch when they have been living here for a while.
"And year after year the majority of people moving to Tennessee, particularly Middle Tennessee, either arrive as Republicans or switch when they have been living here for a while."
That's debateable. States like Virginia and North Carolina (and even Georgia) have become less Republican over the last decade with much larger migrations of people from other parts of the country than Tennessee. They are not only not becoming Republicans, they are shifting those states into battleground territory. The states that are the most Republican continue to be, southern states that are dominated by southern conservative whites or very non-diverse mountain west and plains states. I don't see why Tennessee, if they see large migrations like those other states, would be any different.
Chris,
One has to look at events in each state to understand some specific voting. My larger point is accurate. The view that Southern states went Republican because of integration is an urban {or more accurately, suburban} myth. To be sure, some racists did migrate to the Republicans because of Democrats' support for integration. But the majority of them went back. Instead, as Kevin Phillips predicted, the shift of population to the South and West was a more permanent source of Republican votes.
"The view that Southern states went Republican because of integration is an urban {or more accurately, suburban} myth."
Mark, I don't think that's a myth at all. Southern states were always conservative, and the Republicans played to that in the intervening years after the Civil Rights Law. Nixon, and later Reagan, explictly played upon racial fears. I do believe that there are other things at play besides civil rights, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest racial issues had a lot to do with the political dynamics. For one thing, plenty of formally Democratic office holders who complained about the civil rights laws switched sides.
And it's no coincidence that as northern implants have moved into the DC suburbs in VA and the research triangle in NC, those states have shifted to the left. Williamson county has received a lot of out of state migration also, but a lot of that is from other southern states like Alabama.
