Sometimes I read two entirely different things and then wonder if they’re related. It happened over the last few days.
First, here’s my friend Damon Linker, talking about how Republicans might not get the big midterm “red wave” they’ve been anticipating — but still have an electoral advantage because of the geography of their constituency:
But there is also the extremely efficient distribution of Republican voters across the country. Whereas Democrats tend to cluster into more densely populated areas in and around cities, Republicans are widely distributed within and across a larger number of states, which gives them outsized strength in the state-based parts of our electoral institutions—the Senate and the Electoral College.
And here’s Fernanda Santos, writing in the Washington Post about how she moved her nonbinary child from Arizona to NYC:
My child, a nonconformist since birth, began identifying as nonbinary last year, at age 12.
That is one reason why Arizona’s ugly detour to the right in recent years began to weigh heavily on me. Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill that banned schools from teaching about sexual orientation unless students had signed permission from a parent or guardian to receive the lesson. The Republican governor, Doug Ducey, vetoed the bill as too broad, but he had no such problem this past spring with bills targeting transgender youths, including barring transgender girls from participating in girls’ high school sports.
By the time the primary was held, I had already resolved to leave Arizona. Last month, we sold our house, packed our belongings and moved to New York City.
That’s just a single data point, of course.
But it made me think that two things can possibly be true:
* It’s entirely rational for some families who don’t fit into a conservative paradigm — like Fernanda Santos and her child — to flee from conservative places to cities where they’ll be more accepted.
* But, per Damon, the more they do that, the more Dem-sympathetic voters will be clustered in a few cities and left-leaning states, which will simply strengthen the GOP’s geographic advantage — and thus empower forces that are seemingly eager to force those non-conservative families back into a “traditional” mode.
In other words: Fleeing a GOP-held state might make things better for your family, but over the long term it might make things worse for everybody who thinks like you.
The “Big Sort” is already a thing, the phenomenon where Americans are increasingly moving to places where their new neighbors will be ideologically simpatico. From Richard Florida in 2016:
Two interrelated factors appear to be driving the Big Sort, according to the study. On the one hand, like-minded people cluster together or with other like-minded people, and on the other, such clustering together makes people more like-minded. “There is clear evidence of significant spatial polarization of support for the country’s two main political parties across recent presidential elections,” the authors of the study write, “as like people tend to vote the same way, and like people tend to cluster together, such clustering increases greater polarization in voting patterns is the consequence.”
Recent developments, it seems to me, could accelerate that trend.
If you have a child who is LGBTQ, you might no longer feel comfortable in places like Texas or Florida, where state agencies are now empowered to investigate families who provide gender confirming care as child abuse, or where vague new laws make gay teachers nervous about keeping family photos on their desks. If you’re a woman who cares about your right to an abortion, you might want to live in a state where it’s not illegal. Maybe you just don’t want to live next door to somebody who owns a red “Make America Great Again” cap.
There are other examples of this kind of thing, and more keep coming all the time. The point here is that it’s completely understandable for some folks to flee red states for blue ones, for their sanity and to live freely in whatever manner they need and desire.
And also, politically, it might be a disaster for your point of view. Because the act of fleeing just empowers those conservative forces you’ve fled.
I don’t have an answer to this. Every now and again, I see people on Twitter suggesting that Democrats should deliberately move to red states in order to shift the country’s politics. But honestly, who would do that? And how do you ask Fernanda Santos not to move her child somewhere they’ll be safe? You can’t.
The Big Sort makes complete sense. And it might make everything worse.