“Something remarkable is happening in these disunited states: a rapid rearrangement of population of the kind not seen for decades.”
That’s how two economists from Johns Hopkins University put it in a recent column, and the trend may well be far bigger than even they recognized.
Nor are its consequences all good or bad. On one hand, it’s our federal system at work that lets states and people free to go their own way. On the other, more division and more extremism are sure to follow.
People are moving from one state to another for reasons that often boil down to politics. It has been called the U-Haul Revolution, the Great Re-Sort or the National Divorce. Most headlines on it focus on population moving from blue, Democratic states to red, Republican states, often for lower taxes.
While those trends are well documented, there’s much more to it.
First, even a state with a stable population may have people moving in or out to somewhere they will feel more politically at home. In other words, it’s not just net changes in population but what’s happening below the surface.
Second, at least some progressive Democrats surely are moving, too, to more progressive places. For example, a number of stories reported progressives in Texas and Indiana looking to move because they were angered by their states’ strict new laws against abortion.
BBC reporters recently visited from London and interviewed us at Wirepoints for a new podcast on politically motivated moving, which we’ve been researching. They spent several days in Florida where they had no trouble finding northerners who fled Democratic states. But they also found no shortage of progressives who now felt like oppressed outsiders in increasingly conservative Florida.
We have at least one survey showing how powerful the trend is. A national survey by the Trafalgar Group last year found over 10% of Republicans and over 9% of independents saying they plan to move in the next year to a region in which they are more politically aligned. The number was much smaller for Democrats, but still significant — 2.1%
That’s fine, many of us believe. That’s federalism working. States are intended to be “laboratories of democracy,” as it’s often said.
But it’s fair to note the downside. Progressive states that pick up more progressive voters and get more boldly progressive. Conservative states do the opposite. They rig legislative maps and voting rules to further favor the party in power, as Illinois Democrats have done, but some conservative states have done the same.
They enact policies that further the divide. Illinois, for example, voted last year to constitutionally outlaw right-to-work while Tennessee voted to enshrine it. Some conservative states strictly limited abortion after the Dobbs decision while some liberal states like Illinois moved to further protect it. As those differences among states expand, so does the number of people who feel left out and wanting to move, accelerating the division still more.
In short, as those two economists wrote, “Repelling people with whom you disagree — alienating them so much they actually leave — can enhance politicians’ job security.”
So, we then have Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker saying, “Illinois is the most progressive state, and proud of it,” while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle we should expect to continue: More division.
Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints, and independent research and commentary nonprofit organization.
