Democrats were more likely to consider moving to blue states (48%) than red states (25%) or swing states (27%). JB Pritzkers successful 2018 campaign, the number of Illinois counties voting Democratic got smaller and smaller during a 20-year period. With Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park. The GOP's defending 20 of the 34 seats up for grabs in 2022. That doesn't mean that a Republican can't . The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. DeSantis, wrote one Democratic respondent, is crazy.. But then again, that is how a democracy works, he said, and Im not sure what there is to be done about it.. CINCINNATI President-elect Joe Biden is the first person to win the presidency without carrying Ohio since 1960. Texas led the nation in restricting abortion rights even before the U.S. Supreme Court removed the constitutional right to it last summer by overturning Roe v. Wade. Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures. This book examines how socio-cultural, demographic . But the South Texas results robbed Republicans of the hoped-for narrative that Hispanic voters were abandoning Democrats in droves. One Florida resident wrote: Hurricanes and heat plus critters. Another: too hot. Democrats in Texas and Florida had additional reasons, frequently mentioning politics and policy concerns. As functionally one-party polities, these states can pursue aggressive policy agendas, but they also risk overreaching and alienating residents who dont subscribe to their dominant political values. Republicans continued their 28-year dominance of statewide races but fell short of their hopes for a South Texas congressional sweep. Just32%of Texans want to make abortion laws stricter, yet Republicans bannedup to 90%of abortions,primarily affectingwomen of color. See all customer images . But because I wouldnt say anything about guns and abortion, oh, they was deathly against me, Spencer said. To the extent that planning to move may require at least three of those steps, not very many respondents are close to moving. Your donation keeps our trusted reporting free and accessible for all Texans and during a legislative session when lawmakers are set to tackle issues from school choice for K-12 students to school safety improvements to changes in property taxes, its critical that Texans know what lawmakers decisions mean for their futures. If you put together the city and the suburbs, thats a winning combination for any candidate. Thats the political home turf of state Sen. Darren Bailey, one of four declared GOP candidates aiming to unseat Pritzker next year. The shooting of 19 children and two adults at a Uvalde elementary school in May touched off criticism of Republicans support of gun rights and gave Democrats hope that voters would agree the GOP had failed Texas children by repeatedly refusing over the years to limit access to firearms. In any event, our purpose is not predictive. The four governors are on track to win reelection even though a large share of their constituents are dissatisfied with recent economic and social trends. Our initial question was framed as interest in leaving, without necessarily having it be a real option. Claremont McKenna College Midterm dynamics suggest that 2022 is likelier to see Republicans making inroads into blue states than Democrats making inroads into red ones, but, since gubernatorial elections can sometimes . . As Jacobson, the journalist, found in his reporting for the University of Virginias Center for Politics, the trend is similar in presidential elections here. . Texas Republicans maintained their nearly three-decade grip on state government on Tuesday, comfortably fending off a vigorous run to unseat Gov. Texas has started taking public donations to defray some of the $7 million it has spent on buses since April. On any political map, Illinois is a reliable blue state that has elected Democratic governors four of the last five elections and last backed a Republican presidential candidate before Michael Jordan was winning championships in Chicago. Bailey, whose home county was represented by a Democrat less than 20 years ago, regards himself as a direct byproduct of downstates hardening red hue, a trend he attributes to a decline in moral integrity and fiscal integrity by those in power, particularly Democrats. P odhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years. Our survey asked respondents to describe their interest in moving as follows: Regardless of whether you will move, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move to another state, or would you rather remain in your current state? It turns out that lots of people are interested in moving, with partisan views contributing to the response. While interesting for a variety of reasons, match-ups including Biden or Trump do not cause respondents to consider the possibility of a governor introducing a blue or red state model to the nation as a whole. Texas, on the other hand, has been seeing a huge influx. Its a phenomenon examined in stunning detail in the documentary Blue to Red: The Shifting of America airing Sunday, July 31, at 9 p.m. Eastern on Newsmax. Increasingly, Americans are also choosing to move to places that align with their political views. By Nicole Narea @nicolenarea Nov 11, 2022, 10:04am EST Read: Americas red-blue divide is about to get starker. PublishedJanuary 10, 2022 at 5:35 AM CST, St. Louis Public Radio | The color purple represents their multi-faceted makeup. I wont get that for nothing. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the countrys basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years. Currently, it looks to be a race between the governor from Chicago and one of possibly four or more GOP contenders, three of whom hail from deep-red downstate. Last year, the American Enterprise Institute released a The Golden State was followed by New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. For all the stresses of the last four years, the vast majority of voters in each state who identify with the incumbents party are going to remain loyal to the incumbent. Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election by taking 100 electoral votes from this 'blue wall' and flipping them. This survey, implemented online by YouGov between October 11 and 26, 2022, included 5,060 respondents. ), Our survey asked respondents across the nation to register their early preferences for the 2024 presidential race. Throughout this report, we discuss voters as Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. We have relied on standard questions about party identification to describe these voters and have combined some categories together. When Im talking to people, just about everyone acknowledges the fact life is not what it should be, and its certainly not what our founding fathers intended, he said. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movements long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Georgia, once a strongly Republican state, has turned blue. A two-Democrats in the Senate, Biden-voting blue state. But although Arizona is blue for now, Volgy isn't committed to that. That's not a new trend this year. The margin of error in the national sample is 3; for each of the four states examined extensively in this report, it is 4. Pat Quinn lost reelection. Andrew Sinclair, Ph.D. Weve done an awful lot for the entire state, but, especially I think working together with Republicans, we were able to create jobs. The governors of all four states have positioned themselves to win reelection in 2022 by retaining the support of members of their states dominant party, rendering opposition by people outside that party largely irrelevant. Poshard believes a combination of factors is making Democrats less appealing in areas outside Chicago and the suburbs. Either way, Nevada is the exception that proves the rule: The three blue states with the lowest vaccination rates Arizona (45 percent), Nevada (44 percent) and Georgia (38 percent) are also the three blue states with the highest hospitalization rates, as well as three that Trump came closest to winning in 2020. Key states with a less white electorate are now, according to Redfin: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The new data for 2022 follows a similar path as 2020 and 2021s migration patterns. As many readers noted, Democrats moving to red states could tilt future elections blue. Aug. 3, 2021, at 4:50 p.m. States to Watch in the 2022 Midterms. Drazan has thus far focused her campaign on issues such as public safety. Further highlighting this polarization: While relatively competitive overall, only four states (FL, NC, OH, VA) were decided by less than 5% popular vote margin in the 2012 presidential election. Follow him@davemckinney. And it was another rebuke of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto ORourke, who lost his third election in four years. North Carolina is probably the most likely of those to go blue in 2024. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com. Billionaire hedge fund boss Ken Griffin, citing a better corporate environment, announced last year that he was moving his firm Citadel from Chicago to Florida. The most common activity was discussing leaving with family, followed by searching for a place to live. We are rapidly becoming two very different nations with two very different cultures. Dave McKinney covers Illinois politics and government for WBEZ. The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. Get it Mar 13 - 28. Thats all to say downstate votes werent decisive in Pritzkers 2018 win. "Texas is ready to turn blue." Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean 2010 "Texas Dems are presenting the biggest challenge the state's GOP has faced in decades. Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former. Florida Is Turning Red. Turning Red: Directed by Domee Shi. But the big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th centuryagriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extractiondecline. For example, if a state has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+5, that means it is 5 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it would ask the public for any information on potential hazards associ. I would bet if you look across the Democrat Party and downstate Illinois youll find probably 50 to 60% of the precincts not even filled with committeemen, because that expectation that working in the rank-and-file of the party will result in some sort of help in getting a job isnt there anymore, he said. That doesnt mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. The responses varied by party, with greater percentages of Republicans than Democrats in both red and blue states expressing this view. In 2018, he won his second term by just over 13. In 2018, during his one and only run for the Illinois House, Bailey won with 76% of the vote. Florida just does whatever it wants though and is impossible to predict, especially this far out. Pritzkers campaign has made clear it doesnt aim to cede any of that turf next November to whatever Republican prevails in the June 28, 2022 primary, and that it hopes to build on 2018s results. We refuse to throw in the towel and give up on a state as remarkable, freedom-loving, beautiful, diverse, industrious, and trailblazing as Texas, they said. Put another way, in an election that . Before 2020, Arizona had voted Democratic only once in a presidential election since 1948 and Democrats had not occupied both U.S. Senate seats since 1952. by J. Andrew Sinclair, Ph.D. & Kenneth P. Miller, J.D., Ph.D. Construction equipment giant Caterpillar also announced last year that it would be relocating its headquarters from Illinois to Texas. Same Since 2000: After 2020 Election They just didnt vote, period.. Thats owed primarily to Democrat-heavy Cook County with its 5 million residents, including Chicago. The NAR noted in its report that many of the areas that saw the most people relocating featured economies where the labor market had bounded back since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, which featured state and local governments across the United States shutting down or restricting business operations in an effort to quell the virus. Her Democratic opponent and former Speaker of the House, Tina Kotek, is no longer in the lead. It doesnt matter if Im in Clay County, in Louisville, Ill. The rest were either undecided or preferred someone other than the top three candidates. What about the voters from the other party? The people in power, however, would rather not have you know that. He identified Illinois as among 14 states with the strongest county-by-county Democratic declines during the five presidential cycles after 2000. My work as a community organizer in Texas, a soldierand a graduate student at Harvard are just as much their achievements as they are mine. Many of the cities and states that saw their economies bounce back the most from the pandemic-induced slump were those with Republican leaders, who were typically more likely to undo restrictions as they saw them as too excessive. Florida added one seat, and Texas added two. Claremont McKenna College Democrats had hoped this seasons political fervor over abortion rights, the deadly blackout during the 2021 snowstorm, gun violence and the economy would help them overcome a generation-long losing streak in Texas halls of power. In both California and New York, 1-in-5 Democratic registered voters stated that the quality of life has worsened at a time when most of their state and federal representatives are Democrats. For nearly a century, in 25 races for the Executive Mansion, Republicans outpolled Democrats in more counties 22 times during that span, a WBEZ analysis of election data going back to 1924 showed. For all respondents who expressed an interest in moving, we asked a simple follow-up question: why? Since then, its been a solidly red county. The short answer is that Republicans win a lot of small towns, just as Republicans in presidential races win a lot of rural counties, making the vast majority of the U.S. political map red, by area. The picture is a bit clearer for the Republicans. Opinions in your inbox: Get a digest of our takes on current events every day. In California, 86% of the Republicans interested in exiting want to move to Texas or Florida. If a red wave arrives in November, as many expect, it will likely wash ashore in landlocked Nevada, a state whose recent history of Democratic victories masks just how hard-fought those. Director, Rose Institute of State and Local Government The trend of population migration Democratically dominated blue states to Republican-controlled red states is examined in the documentary Blue to Red: The Shifting of America airing Sunday, at 9 p.m. Eastern on Newsmax. Beyond determining who will occupy governors offices, these contests will shape our nations direction in the coming years. The analysis relied on the United States Postal Services change-of-address data to identify domestic migration patterns. Since 1972, Clay County has drifted back and forth between Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, voting for Walker in 1972, Democratic nominee Neil Hartigan in 1990 and Poshard in 1998. . Texas 2022 Elections Republican victories show Texas is still far from turning blue Republicans continued their 28-year dominance of statewide races but fell short of their hopes for a South. study (Podhorzer also offers a slightly different grouping of the states that reflects the more recent trend in which Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. He won in remote downstate counties like Alexander, in more populated places like Peoria and Rock Island counties and in university-dominated counties like Champaign, Knox and DeKalb. All of this is fueling what Ive called the great divergence now under way between red and blue states. are registered trademarks of Newsmax Media, Inc. Newsmax TV, and Newsmax World are trademarks of Newsmax Media, Inc. Jacobson documented a similar trend of Republicans dominating Democrats on a county-by-county basis across the country during the past five presidential cycles in a report published by the University of Virginia Center for Politics Sabato Crystal Ball.. Beyond determining who will occupy governors' offices, these contests will shape our nation's direction in the coming years. Spencer lives next door to Baileys legislative office in Louisville, the county seat, and looks out at the county courthouse where Bailey originally litigated against Pritzker, challenging the governors authority to issue and then extend his stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic. Despite the supposed destiny predicted by the DNC, in 2020, Latinos . Data for 2022 are likely to show "massively more divergence", predicts Mr Warshaw. Forbes magazine says the shift in population has been as much political as it has been economic. 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