538 reports:
Last week, The New York Times’s Robert Gebeloff and David Leonhardt published an article, “The Growing Blue-State Diaspora,” which made the case that transplants from blue states are making red states purple. “This pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six,” they wrote.
It’s a fascinating hypothesis, but it’s overstated, in our view. The first problem is that the predominant political trend of the past two decades has not been consistently better performance by Democrats, but instead greater polarization across partisan and geographic lines. Remember, the GOP controls the House of Representatives, a plurality of state legislatures and a majority of governor’s mansions, and Republicans are slight favorites to take the Senate in November. Democrats have done well in recent presidential elections, but if Republicans take the Senate and hold the House, then by 2016 the GOP will have had control of the Senate for 12.5 of the past 24 years and the House for 18 of 24.
There's more:
In 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton beat Republican George H.W. Bush, there were no states — none — where either candidate won by 20 or more percentage points. In 2012, there were 18 of them, 11 of which were won by Republican Mitt Romney. A few states (such as West Virginia and Colorado) have switched party loyalties, but for the most part, red states have gotten redder and blue states have gotten bluer; theories about the role played by migration need to reconcile with this evidence.
But this presents a challenge. It might seem to follow that if there’s more mixing of Americans across state lines, then everything might converge to a shade of political purple. Why have we seen the opposite pattern instead?
One part of the answer is straightforward: Interstate migration is not increasing. Instead, it has been on a downward trend since the 1980s; fewer Americans (as a share of the population) are relocating across state lines than a couple of decades ago.
Anyone interested in current voting trends should read this one.
