CONTEMPLATING THOSE THREE MAPS.

I concluded my "Tale of Three Maps" with a call for additional research.

Internal migration, and shifting voting patterns, might not be the "red state boom and blue state depression" Red State's Nick Arama hails, let alone the flight from bad governance Town Hall's Guy Benson cheers.  "These shifts are a direct result of bad governance in blue states and cities. Right/leaners and normies aren’t melting down and forming militia style mobs to harass and stalk leftist leaders. They’re just leaving."

There's definitely room for additional research, perhaps conducted, if that is still possible, in a dispassionate way.  Note, for instance, how Mississippi rates among the least free and not losing seats, while Tennessee rates among the most free and not gaining seats.  What is a parsimonious set of explanatory variables to capture internal migration?

None of which stops City Journal's Steven Malanga, in "Blue States’ Demographic Nightmare," from thinking, yet again, of a permanent electoral realignment.  I'm old enough to have seen that sort of triumphalism, from court intellectuals of all political persuasion, come a cropper as complex adaptive systems do what they darn well please.

That's not what the Manhattan Institute is paying Mr Malanga to do.  His article reviews the same evidence as the posts calling attention to those three maps, concluding with the possibly perverse behavior of Democrat politicians in the states losing population.

Looking at these results, one might conclude that Democratic voters and the politicians they elect would consider reforms to keep and attract more voters. But states like California, New York, and Illinois have been racking up losses for more than a decade with no sign of political change. If anything, Democratic states seem to be pressing ahead with the very policies that repel a substantial number of citizens and businesses. During the Biden years, Democrats decided that the solution to this problem was to import a cohort of new voters. That immigration policy, ironically, had as much to do with the improbable reelection of Trump as any other Democratic strategy.

The great Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith once observed that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Today, you might describe the process as “managed decline.” It’s a feat that many Democratic states are pulling off quite convincingly.

It might be that those states, particularly their population centers, are residually inhabited by the more leftish voters, suggesting that trimming would not be a winning strategy.  But the conclusions of the article are catnip for Rick Moran at Pajamas Media.  "The Fuse to the Blue State Demographic Bomb Has Been Lit. Sit Back, and Enjoy the Show."  Demography was supposed to produce that Democrat majority that never emerged, so don't go all in on the electoral prediction markets yet.  Mr Moran acknowledges that where people choose to live, rather than who their ancestors are, might be more important in building that future coalition.

In 2002, Democrats John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which significantly revived the "demography is destiny" argument. They proposed that growing minority populations and professional classes would create an inevitable advantage for the Democratic Party — a thesis that has been a central point of debate in U.S. politics for over two decades.

It was debatable until the elections of 2020 and 2024, when millions of black males, Hispanic males, and younger white males abandoned the party that had done nothing for them and dipped a toe into Republican waters when Donald Trump ran for president.

So much for "demographics is destiny."

Now that the Judis-Teixeira theory of Democratic Party supremacy has died, all of a sudden, sociologists are claiming "demographics are destiny" was never a correct interpretation of the facts.

In fact, there's a lot more to demographics than race or gender. There's the very real and consequential fact of people "voting with their feet." As it stands now, those votes are shifting massively toward red states.

Maybe it's time to obsess less about the presidency, which is what most of those "emerging majority" arguments focus on, and to think about Tieboutian competition among jurisdictions.  And immigration might be the surprise to come.

The blue states are in a demographic doom loop. They need to create high taxes to pay for the numerous goodies they give to residents, but that leads to an exodus of wealth and people. To make up for the losses, blue states import and encourage illegal aliens to settle there. But illegals are a huge drain on the state treasury, leading to the need to raise taxes, and the loop closes on itself.

That's conventional wisdom in the Pajamas Media world, where "illegal alien" equates to "public charge."  Think about "illegal alien" in terms of "providing a cheap labor subsidy" and the calculus might change.  Yes, I confess, empirical confirmations of a phenomenon structuring some of my late career research does structure my thinking.  A recent Cato Institute research paper by David J. Bier, Michael Howard, and Julián Salazar argues that on net, immigrant labor is not a drain on the public purse.  "The model provides a comprehensive estimate of the fiscal flows to and from immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the United States and utilizes the highest quality data available from the US government."  That "both legal and illegal" is important, and it raises the normative argument that perhaps speeding up legal immigration reduces the rate of illegal immigration.

We've raised that point before and we'll likely return to it again.