Blue state residents should be concerned about more than the results of last week's election. Ongoing and long term demographic trends show that the political base of the coastal cities is shrinking. Link: City Journal Autumn 2003 | I’m Outta Here by Steven Malanga.
While the census study does not say what propels such massive out-migration, job-killing taxes are a likely culprit. Most of the states joining California and New York on the list of losers—including Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio—also have among the heaviest state and local tax burdens in the U.S., with Gotham being one of the country’s highest-taxed places to live. Most of the states that had the greatest net gain in residents, by contrast, have low taxes, with four—Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Washington—having no personal income tax at all.
In short, people are voting with their feet, looking for a life they can no longer find in America's "great cities."
Significantly, they are moving to a new areas with unfamilair political and social structures. David Brooks explains. The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Take a Ride to Exurbia.
"Ninety percent of the office space built in America in the 1990's was built in suburbia, usually in low office parks along the interstates. Now you have a tribe of people who not only don't work in cities, they don't commute to cities or go to the movies in cities or have any contact with urban life. You have these huge, sprawling communities with no center. Mesa, Ariz., for example, has more people than St. Louis or Minneapolis."
In Brooks' excellent books, Bobo's in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, he tries to map the ethos and structure of this new burgeoning sector of our nation. More bad news for blue people. It appears that Karl Rove has found these new communities first. But these communities are far too dynamic to stay locked up with any poltical partyand are in play. Nonetheless, one doubts that they are going to trust their affairs to the politicians and policies that continue to run our great cities into the ground.