If Demographics Are Destiny, Democrats Are in Trouble

Washington, D.C. – There’s a saying some people like to throw around in politics: Demographics is destiny.

It is, up to a point. Some places have been and will continue to be, at least for the immediate future, homogenous enough that the same kinds of people will end up winning elections there over and over and over again.

Most of those places are, counter to what you might expect, hopelessly liberal. This includes most major American cities. There are a few that can be made to lean a bit to the right if the wind blows a certain way but, to put a different spin on it, man will be living on Mars before you’ll see a Republican mayor in Boston, Massachusetts.

Like economic status, political identity is not permanent. Just as some people get dropped each year from the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, others go from one political party to another or decide to eschew party identification altogether. It’s the American way.

There are those of late who believe the demographic changes underway in the United States, particularly where certain ethnic groups are growing in size, means there will soon be more Democrats and, as a result, the country will become more liberal. It’s an interesting assertion that’s produced some books that sold very well, but it’s hardly true.

Instead, thanks to assimilation and out-migration – two very American traditions – the country is moving, literally and figuratively, to the right, at least in economic terms. This will cause the GOP to rise in many places as Democrats fall.

Up to now, most analysts have been talking about the difference between the blue and red states. Those demographics are changing as the upwardly mobile are fleeing blue cities where taxes and regulation are high and crime is rampant for the relatively safer and more secure red suburbs and exurbs.

It’s now blue cities v. red states. This is why Florida is gaining population and, at the same time, becoming more Republican. In the post-lockdown period, a new analysis from the National Association of Realtors reports, 319,000 people moved to the Sunshine State from other parts of the country.

Looking at the election returns from 2022, we can safely presume these are red voters running away from blue policies that destroyed their communities. States like Texas and the Carolinas are also gaining, thanks in no small part to the ongoing in-migration of workers, investors and retirees looking for a light regulatory touch on business, low taxes and opportunity.

These states are turning redder with each election. The places they are leaving, meanwhile, are the ones where the big blue population centers like Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Manhattan that can’t solve problems like overspending, overregulation and crime and still have enough political power to dictate to the rest of the state the terms under which they will live.

That’s not a good arrangement for innovators and job creators. Or, for that matter, for anyone who socked away a stash of cash in investments or retirement accounts. These people all resent, to one degree or another, costs imposed on them by the politicians in the state capital, who rely on the taxes generated by the activities of new and growing businesses to fund the old social welfare programs with large constituencies they are forced to defend and enlarge to win reelection.

In these places, it’s not so much a matter of lost jobs as it is a loss of faith in the idea things will improve, running headlong into a general collapse in the number of opportunities available, whether they exist or can be made.

People are, as it is often said, “voting with their feet.” As the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Halaschak noted recently, an American Enterprise Institute report breaking down the census data found that from April 2020 to July 2021, the top states for inbound migration were all red: Florida, Texas, Arizona, North and South Carolina and Tennessee. The states at the bottom were of the bluest of the blue: California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Institutions and individuals are also relocating. Over the last several years, band name companies like Caterpillar, Boeing and Tesla have all moved out of blue states over issues related to the overall business climate. Goldman Sachs has moved people to Florida to service all its clients who have moved there. Even some prominent, high net-worth individuals like hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin, who’s worth an estimated $29 billion, are moving from high-tax Illinois to Florida, a low tax/no tax state.

That’s costly – to Illinois. A spokesman for Citadel, the company he found, said Griffin’s individual state income tax payments were in the neighborhood of $200 million per year, while his employees may have sent Springfield as much as $1 billion over the last decade.

That’s a static loss of $300 million a year. The downstream economic effects of something like that might even be enough to keep Illinois’ billionaire Democratic Gov. Jay Pritzker awake at night.

Can you imagine something like that being repeated over and over in blue cities and blue states around the country? You don’t have to because it’s happening all over America.

There are plenty of political analysts who think the nation’s future will be decided by people who are brown and black. That’s supposed to make them liberal, according to the elites who write books about what’s wrong with Kansas and why so many people on the lower end of the economic spectrum vote against what these same elites perceive as being their own interests. If they could be made to understand the only color that really matters is green, they might understand which demographics matter.

The high-tax cities and the politicians who run them, who think they have the votes to run America, are in for a shock. The blue wall that gives the Democrats the edge in the electoral college is starting to crumble. More and more of America is turning red – and that’s what matters in picking a president.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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