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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Here's a map of the Presidential vote swing from 2012 to 2024:

https://x.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1860310329248325759

It makes me wonder how much of Trump's appeal to midwestern industrial workers is dependent on trade rather than a broader, cultural working-class identity. I don't think farmers in Iowa swung massively toward him because they were mad their factories were being sent to China. Ditto with the Rio Grande Valley and Miami-Dade county.

I think the heavily hispanic areas swung towards Trump as a side effect of hispanics regarding themselves as having more in common with their white counterparts, leading them to vote with their coworkers and immediate bosses. This change has been more or less predictable for decades now even if most of the voices calling attention to it have done so prematurely.

I wish that infographic could include population change on the z-axis, in addition to the voting change.

I live in an extremely blue enclave of an extremely red region, and one thing I've seen is that all the aspiring PMCs move as close to the blue enclave as they can manage, or they flee to the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC megalopolis, never to be seen again.

NYT had a good article about political sorting:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/upshot/voters-moving-polarization.html

all the aspiring PMCs move as close to the blue enclave as they can manage

This is as much about economic opportunity as it is about cultural sorting.

In our country, we have red counties and blue cities. So someone with the talent, interest, and capability to do the sorts of high-skill jobs you need to do to get ahead in this day and age often end up having to move to a blue enclave, whether they like it or not.

There are certainly some strivers who pursue trades, or other skilled professions with more geographical flexibility. But in general, the money follows population, and the population is clustered around blue areas.

The brain drain is real. But describing it in terms of a desire to become Democratic simply doesn’t explain the cause by itself. People are just trying to provide the best livelihood they can to themselves and their families, and to do that they have to follow the money = population = density = Democratic correlation.

More people are moving from blue areas to red ones than the opposite.

I would attribute that to the population getting older in general. City life, and its progressive paeans, are more attractive to the young who seek opportunity and change. They are willing to tolerate things like noisy neighbors and the homeless because they are willing to bear that burden, even if it annoys them privately. The old and those with families wish for the reverse and move away to where they can get away from that within their financial means.

It very well may be that the blues diminish because their societal bedrocks self-select and become redder in the bargain.

Manufacturing is a surprisingly large portion of the economy in rural areas. In dollar terms, manufacturing is a larger sector of Iowa's economy than agriculture.

Anne Selzer in shambles.

But yes, I think the party realignment is largely about cultural signalling. It's not like the average Iowan is going to have a coherent opinion on trade policy.

The average swing voter sees the election as a referendum on the direction the country, with Harris representing the status quo.

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