There’s another blue wave underway, outside the voting booth.
Young people are moving to ever bluer states like Washington, Colorado and California, away from stubbornly red states like Iowa and Kansas, simply because they can see that the state governments are making real progress towards a better future for everyone, not just local billionaires like the Kochs.
It may be subtle as it happens, and hard to define so easily, but when students of the future look back and study it with 2020 hindsight, that is the irrefutible conclusion they will draw from the evidence available.
Red states spent up their people like bargaining chips in a high-stakes game of billionaire tax poker. Some of them, like Kansas, nearly went belly-up because of it, and in that failure, they targeted the most vulnerable among us to take resources from, so their billionaire boys’ club could flourish and turn Kansas into California…
[It didn’t work.][1]
I suppose it is some consolation that the areas most affected by these demographic shifts is deep red rural Trump country, but isn’t that, too, something that fair legislation and caring lawmakers could remedy, if they just cared for all The People and not just the rich people?
Shouldn’t our most vulnerable be the subjects of our best efforts, at the expense of the most privileged, not the opposite?
There is how every state and nation will be judged. History proves this point over and over again.
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kansas/articles/2017-11-23/report-kansas-rural-population-sees-rapid-decline
Very nice article. As these states demonstrate “what works,” the momentum for progressive policies will build. Voters in other states will demand the same. Stalement in Congress has helped to drive policy-making back to the states. Meanwhile, the teachers’ strikes in deep red states are another hopeful sign that conservative policies are failing at the state level.
Automatic voter registration is a commonsense idea that saves money, cuts bureaucracy, and makes the government a little less intrusive. It’s everything conservatives say they want to be, although they are liars.
One small correction: In New York, even if Dems win the 2 special senate elections in April and the deal with IDC holds, they will still not have majority. It would be 31-31 with Brooklyn’s Simcha Felder holding the tiebreaking vote. He is caucuses with GOP so still no go unless they can cajole him into switching…
Trump on November 6, 2018: Republicans are losing seats at levels we’ve never seen before.
“Issues from equal pay to net neutrality to sexual harassment.” The difference between the parties is that every one of these Dem issues is straight pocketbook and political progressivism, while all the GOP has is the same old Culture Wars issues they’ve been pushing for decades.
What worries me about that is the fact that we still have an electoral college that chooses the president, and all these states the young people are moving away from will have disproportionate power in the electoral college since they’re generally low population states which still get a minimum of three electoral votes. We could easily keep having a presidency chosen by a minority of the population as we did with Dubya and Donnie.
In 1954, “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance, and two years later “In God we trust” was added to the money. At that point, Evangelicals were only trying to get into the political sphere. It wasn’t until they provided their lists to Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972 that they moved to overtake an entire political party. “Show up at the prayer breakfast, or don’t bother to show up for reelection”.
Often the GOP is portrayed as capturing the Evangelical vote, Trump’s largest base of support. But what if it’s the reverse, or some sort of unholy symbiot?
That’s not exactly comforting. If Democrats don’t keep control of at least 13 states essentially forever, the increasingly openly authoritarian and terrified Republican majorities in the red states can and will amend the Constitution right out of existence. And if you don’t think that could happen, take a look at how the most recent amendment got added.
The Twenty Seventh Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification in 1791 with the ten amendments that became the Bill of Rights and another that is still out there. It failed to get three fourths approval initially and was considered dead, but still picked up a state from time to time, until right wingers noticed it was still alive and started fanning the flames in the 80’s. More ratifications followed until, boom, it slipped in after 202 years.
Tell me there aren’t 30 easy votes, right now, for amendments stealthily disenfranchising minorities, for a balanced budget amendment, for any number of schemes to dilute blue state power in Congress or diminish federal authority. They could squirt out a Koch Konstitution, rack up thirty ratifications quickly, five more in the next few years and then work away at the others, pushing them through each time some scandal or disaster or wave election temporarily flipped a blue state red.
And the more Democratic voters segregate themselves into a handful of Blue states, the more likely that becomes.
You might want to factor in that those red states are losing congresspeople right and left… no, actually right and right.
The congressional district I grew up in, in Iowa, no longer exists, the loss of population due to the very factors described here took one reliably red congressional pawn off the board completely.
I realize the east and west coastal populations are rising even in red states, but in the midwest and the rust belt, people are fleeing in numbers that actually represent the loss of electoral influence, at every level.
Not to Republicans. In their mindset, they are not being conservative enough.
They will most likely pass legislation that will fine or jail teachers who walk off the job.
Make a push for more charter schools while further squeezing public schools.
Further weaken teachers bargaining rights.
But the other blue wave that has to be considered is the one that is happening right now…teachers are striking (and winning) in very red places like WV, KY, OK and soon TX. This is a very key movement, not just because we want better education, but because they are going right to the heart of the movement that took place in the late 70s…tax reform that basically tied the hands of state legislatures to fully fund things like education. That set the mood and the foundation for the revival of conservative politics. Now its being reversed at precisely a time where are signals are indicating the entire country is preparing for a blue wave.
…not if the red red areas, even within states, are hemorrhaging young voters at the rate we see in Kansas and Iowa.
Some states will actually lose congressional seats in rural enclaves like Iowa did after the last census. That shift is the Republicans’ own fault, but they can’t quit the billionaire-butt-kissing habit long enough to look around and see the future fleeing away from them.
This may not make a lot of sense right now, it will soon, but those folks aren’t JUST moving from the country to the city, they are moving from red to blue with the same effect, maybe even bigger.
you’re misspelling the word “Hypocrites…”
BLM, Indivisible, Dreamers, Parklanders, and now our noble teachers…
The People are rising, and it looks like overwhelming democracy, more and more every day. They’re putting all us old white men to shame, and deservedly so.
Together, they are the future of governance, one that actually LOOKS like the America we see and live and breathe every day, out on the street.
A truly representative democracy.
Hey, it’s Friday and I would absolutely love to see an indictment or two be unsealed. Has anyone seen @antisachetdethe or know his flight schedule? (For anyone who is new, he has amazing mystical powers while he’s in flight.)
I have 112 House race targets on my own list. I think Dems can aim high and look to win over 50%. Any district that is tied to a suburban area is a problem for the GOP. They have a turnout problem. They have a money problem as Dems have more money to spend and will raise virtually unlimited amounts of money post-primary from the large donor base of active voters.
The GOP has 2 other structural problems: 1. They’re sitting in a lot of districts where the population has moved further left while the rep has moved further right. CA, TX, NJ, NY have examples. Dems had the opposite problem in 1994, as Dems had a lot of rural and southern Dems sitting in seats where the voters had veered right. Others exist too. 2. The GOP has spread its vote across too many districts and is therefore thinly defended against a wave election. This is the risk of gerrymandering. There are only so many votes the GOP has. You can be a master map drawer, but what happens is that you end up with smaller PVI advantages across the board which can be overcome by a motivated electorate as we saw in PA-18.
I like the “Raise Hell” as a meme and a motto. It works well.
The power of demonstration is a big reason why ideas spread. California, Washington, Oregon, New York, and New Jersey are among those that are getting a lot of things done with united Dem control. Folks in other states tend to take note of that sort of thing. The GOP margins in the rest of America are not that big. The shift we’re seeing among suburban voters was enough to enable Democrats to make up an 18 seat gap in the VA HOD and elect a Governor. That shift would also flip FL, PA and several other states. IL is going to flip to total Dem control this year and that will have an impact in the midwest.
The truth of the matter is the GOP controls a lot of districts at the federal and legislative level where the voters have shifted further left while the officeholders have shifted further right. That is not sustainable. In 2016, but for the late winds of a Comey/Russia storm, the GOP likely would’ve lost control of the Senate and the WH. Now, we have a much more active and politically conscious and focused voter base, and that should mean bigger victories b/c Team Blue’s potential numbers are bigger than Team Red’s.