White flight of the liberal kind turning red state cities blue

FPI / September 18, 2019

A wave of white liberals is leaving high-tax leftist states and moving into cities in Republican-dominated states. And they are taking their progressive ideology with them, turning their new cities deep blue, reports say.

In a recent analysis, The Atlantic cited how Texas metro areas are experiencing rapid growth of leftists. In the five Texas counties where Austin, Dallas-Forth Worth, Houston, and San Antonio are located, the analysis found the Democrat voting margin had widened to almost 800,000 in 2018 — far outpacing the Democrats’ 2012 margin of a little more than 130,000.

Immigration is a factor, but the migration of white liberals and young people from out-of-state is largely driving the blue wave, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.

“And while a growing Hispanic population may someday fundamentally transform Texas politics, for now the leftward turn is driven mostly by the predominately white people moving to Texas from other states,” Bloomberg said.

“As the 2020 presidential election nears, red-state cities are seeing not only the impact of immigration to the U.S. — with a national foreign-born population of 44.5 million — but of domestic migration as young people and white liberals flee hard-left states like New York, Illinois, and California,” Breitbart News said in a Sept. 17 report.

“The Latino growth gets a lot of the attention, but that’s far from the only thing going on,” said Ruy Texeira, a political demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress. “You can’t understand or explain the way Texas has shifted in the last couple of decades without looking at what’s going on with the white population.”

Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, and Maricopa County, Arizona, where Phoenix is located, are seeing similar results, according to the Breitbart report.

In Atlanta, the Democrat voting margin has more than doubled since 2012.

In Maricopa County in 2016, Democrats were running a voter deficit of nearly 45,000. Fast-forward to 2018 and Democrats turned that deficit into a surplus of about 51,200 votes.

White liberals are fleeing cities run by liberals. They are leaving en masse from New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — “escaping a high cost-of-living and growing income inequality but bringing their politics with them,” the Breitbart report said.

The Atlantic found that New York City is decreasing by about 277 residents every day with every borough in the city, except for the GOP-dominated Staten Island, losing residents.

Los Angeles had the highest out-migration in the nation last year with nearly 100,000 residents leaving the city than those who moved in. About 22,000 residents moved out of the Chicago metro area last year.

In Texas, meanwhile, a Dallas Morning News poll in August had Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders each beating President Donald Trump in Texas by 2 percentage points in the Lone Star State, inside the poll’s 3-point margin of error.

“A Democratic win in Texas would fundamentally redraw the electoral map,” Bloomberg noted. “With 38 electoral votes, it’s worth as much as Pennsylvania and Ohio combined.”

“I view it as more permanently purple than eventually blue. I see Texas in the future more like we see Florida and maybe Georgia,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “But I think the short answer is that yes, Texas is going to be competitive.”

Free Press International