Analysis: Young White Liberals Helping to Turn Red State Cities Deep Blue
Cities in red states such as Texas, Georgia, and Arizona are becoming increasingly deep blue as a wave of millennials and white liberals move from blue state cities, coupled with a booming foreign-born population.
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.
Texas, for example, is experiencing rapidly growing Democrat margins in its metro areas and cities, The Atlantic analysis notes. In the five Texas counties where Austin, Dallas-Forth Worth, Houston, and San Antonio are located, the Democrat voting margin has widened to almost 800,000 in 2018 — far outpacing the Democrats’ 2012 margin of a little more than 130,000.
The deep blue turn for these Texas cities is, aside from immigration, white liberals and young people moving from out-of-state, according to 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. [Emphasis added]
“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.” [Emphasis added]
The same is occurring in Atlanta, Georgia, its surrounding suburbs, and Maricopa County, Arizona, where the city of Phoenix is located. 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.
In Atlanta, the Democrat voting margin has more than doubled since 2012.
Domestic migration to red-state cities comes as residents flee cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Fransisco — escaping a high cost-of-living and growing income inequality but bringing their politics with them.
Analysis by The Atlantic finds New York City, for instance, is decreasing by about 277 residents every day with every borough in the city, except for the GOP-dominate Staten Island, losing residents. Queens, New York City lost the most residents with an outflow of almost 18,000.
Similarly, 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. Chicago, Illinois also lost residents last year, with about 22,000 residents moving out of the metro area.
While major deep blue cities in blue states lose residents, the Census Bureau reveals that legal immigration — where the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants a year, mostly from Central and Latin America — is driving nearly half of all population growth in the country.
Chain Migration Expected to Add 8M Potential Foreign-Born Voters to U.S. Electorate over Next Two Decades https://t.co/xlmQar2qoo
— John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) January 14, 2018
Since 2011, the level to which immigration has accounted for overall population growth has increased more than 13 percent. At the current rate of legal immigration, about 1-in-6 U.S. residents will be foreign-born by 2060 and about 1-in-10 U.S. voters in the upcoming 2020 election will have been born outside of the country.
In the next two decades, should the country’s legal immigration policy go unchanged, the U.S. is set to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters. About eight million of these new foreign-born voters will have arrived through the process known as “chain migration,” where newly naturalized citizens are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Foreign-born voters, as research by Axios, the New York Times, University of Maryland, College Park researcher James Gimpel, and Ronald Brownstein has confirmed, are more likely than native-born Americans to vote for Democrats.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.