But That Liberal Will Get You Time and Again
The Wootens — (from left) Nate, Tiffany, Mya and Cole — recently moved from red Indiana to Austin, a dark blueish spot in the otherwise-cherry-red Texas. John Burnett/NPR hide caption
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John Burnett/NPR
The Wootens — (from left) Nate, Tiffany, Mya and Cole — recently moved from cherry Indiana to Austin, a dark blue spot in the otherwise-cerise Texas.
John Burnett/NPR
There's a private Facebook group with almost 8,000 members called Conservatives Moving to Texas. Iii of them are sitting at a dinner table — munching on charcoal-broil weenies and brownies — in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. None are vaxxed.
And they love it here.
"Equally before long as I drove into Texas, literally, as presently as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, similar, 'This is wonderful,' " says Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-quondam portrait photographer from Orange County, Calif.
"People weren't wearing masks — nobody cared. It's kind of similar heaven on globe."
She says when the state of California forced her to close her photography studio over COVID-xix restrictions, she and her husband, a retired newspaper editor, knew information technology was time to "escape."
America is growing more than geographically polarized — red Zilch codes are getting redder and blueish ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to exist sorting.
"We felt very out of place and very uncomfortable at times," says Tiffany Wooten, a 43-twelvemonth-quondam stay-calm mom whose family recently relocated from conservative Indiana to liberal Austin. "We were looking at blue cities because nosotros wanted to be with our ain people."
The trend seems to be quickening as conservatives flee places with strict COVID-19 rules.
Karen Bates, a 52-year-onetime mortgage executive, moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with her family terminal year from Puerto Rico. She says the island'southward government was going to force her teenaged girl, who has Type i diabetes, to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. She now attends a Christian schoolhouse.
"She's not had to wear a mask," Bates says. "She doesn't accept to become vaccinated. She's thriving on the tennis team, making directly A's. I honey the freedom of [vaccine] option in Texas."
In the modernistic era, Texas has fashioned itself into a sort-of breakaway red-meat commonwealth — banning books and restricting abortion, blocking mask mandates, and edifice its own border fence. It retains this national image in spite of the fact that its five largest counties went for President Biden.
But more and more than Trump followers are flocking to red Texas in search of the promised land.
"People are request, 'Tell me about the well-nigh bourgeois towns. Where should I be moving?' " says Seeden, of the people who post comments on the Conservatives Moving to Texas page.
Americans have been 'sorting' politically for years
Conservatives from Southern California and elsewhere — (from left) Karen Bates, Bridget Melson, Lynn Seeden, Curt Seeden and Shirley Husar — found a more agreeable political environment when they moved to North Texas. John Burnett/NPR hibernate explanation
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John Burnett/NPR
Conservatives from Southern California and elsewhere — (from left) Karen Bates, Bridget Melson, Lynn Seeden, Curt Seeden and Shirley Husar — found a more agreeable political environment when they moved to North Texas.
John Burnett/NPR
The national real manor brokerage, Redfin, predicted that in 2022, "people volition vote with their anxiety, moving to places that align with their politics."
It'due south actually been happening for some time.
Residents accept been fleeing states like California with high taxes, expensive real estate and school mask mandates and heading to conservative strongholds like Idaho, Tennessee and Texas.
More 1 of every 10 people moving to Texas during the pandemic was from California, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&Thou University. Near came from Southern California. Florida was the 2d biggest contributor of new Texans.
Family therapist and conservative activist Dr. Bridget Melson, 52, is a new Texan.
Six years ago, when Melson and her family decided to go out Riverside County, Calif., for the Lonely Star State, they were methodical.
"We want our medical freedoms. We want our constitutional rights. We are definitely pro-life," says Melson, who created the Facebook group. "Nosotros looked where the carmine counties were. We knew Austin was going to be a lost cause, and then nosotros knew we didn't want to be there. And we really wanted to take decent weather and the least corporeality of bugs, then we figured the Metroplex."
Melson asked some friends to join her for interviews with NPR in her stylish dwelling in a posh rural subdivision with its own equestrian eye. She sits on the Bartonville Town Council and is running for mayor. She maintains that Republicans migrating from blue states are the most militant virtually stopping creeping liberalism.
"People used to come up upwardly to me and say, 'Don't California my Texas.' Just nosotros're the damn cavalry! We're here to salve yous. Because we know what's going to happen. And if nosotros don't run for office, go involved in schoolhouse boards, and pay attending and leave and vote, then you're gonna California Texas."
'The Big Sort' may be making Americans more politically extreme
While schools, law-breaking, real estate prices and quality of life are even so major considerations for folks who are moving, finding an area with shared political views is key.
Political scientist Larry Sabato posted an analysis on Thursday that shows how America'southward "super landslide" counties have grown over time.
Of the nation'due south total three,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote — has jumped from half-dozen% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
"Trump'southward blowouts were concentrated in white, rural counties in the Greater South, Interior Due west, and Slap-up Plains," Sabato writes, "while Biden'southward were in a smattering of big cities, higher towns, and smaller counties with big percentages of heavily Autonomous nonwhite voters."
Put another mode, Biden won 85% of counties with a Whole Foods and simply 32% of counties with a Cracker Barrel.
What are the implications of people clustering in Sean Hannity's America, or Rachel Maddow's?
"Groups of similar-minded people tend to become more than farthermost over time in the mode that they're like-minded," says Bill Bishop, a journalist who wrote the influential book The Large Sort : Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Trigger-happy Usa Apart in 2008.
Bishop'south book explains how Americans sorted themselves by politics, geography, lifestyle and economic science over the preceding three decades. Sitting in a Central Texas café, Bishop says that trend has only intensified in the fourteen years since the book'southward publication.
"They are notwithstanding sorting themselves in ways that end up that places are increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic," he says. "Then you lot can run across that playing out in Congress. In that location are fewer people in the middle. So politics becomes less about solving our problems anymore. It'south about cheering for our side. And and so we're stuck."
Yet while social scientists and journalists may fret over this political segregation, for the people changing ZIP codes to be with their own tribe, it'south a kind of deliverance.
Moving to areas with people you lot agree with has advantages
The Wooten family moved to Austin final spring from Greenfield, Ind. — a suburb of Indianapolis. They're renting an apartment in Central Austin with a view of Lady Bird Lake. They bought stand up-up paddleboards for the lake and take hikes along the trails in and around the city .
"Indiana'southward a ruby-red land as it is, just Greenfield is likewise very red," says Tiffany Wooten. "We as Democrats felt very out of place. If people in public were talking about politics it was always a Trump view. We heard 'Those damn liberals' a lot."
She says during the Trump years, information technology seems like people became more antagonistic toward them for being Democrats. She fifty-fifty fell out with some of her own family unit of conservative Christians over their support for the former president. And her eighteen-yr-erstwhile son, Cole, says his politics ran counter to the kids at his high school, who were MAGA fans like their parents.
"Some of 'em would even have Trump meetups," he says. "They would all bring their Trump flags and then just preach to each other about how swell he was. It was just a really threatening temper."
I afternoon, they discovered someone had put broken drinking glass in their mailbox.
"Yep, we were open to moving, but Texas is a really cherry-red land," Tiffany says. "Still, I was thinking in my mind, 'How much worse can information technology go? We're in Indiana.' "
Fortunately for them, husband Nate, a structure executive, landed a new chore in Austin. The Texas state capital is known for its liberal politics — the huckleberry, every bit they say, in the red cherry pie.
"Nosotros experience practiced here, we feel safe hither," Tiffany says.
In fact, the COVID-xix protocols that collection some Californians to escape to North Texas are a plus for the Wootens in Austin.
"It does feel like people take (mask wearing) more than seriously here than they did in Greenfield," says Nate Wooten. "Just being considerate of other people. Even if you're vaccinated and you get somewhere, yet clothing a mask."
What a divergence a new city makes. Twelve-year-one-time Mya Wooten is taking a social justice class at her private school in downtown Austin, an opportunity they would not have establish in Greenfield. Mya says a recent assignment was to pick an issue to protest.
"Information technology was body of water pollution, women's rights, or LGBTQ rights," she says. "And then my topic was women'south rights, and I made a poster of an open woman's oral cavity and information technology said, 'I have the right to be heard.' "
By moving to Austin, the Wootens joined The Big Sort. They fabricated Greenfield a tad less purple, and Austin a smidgeon bluer. Tiffany sometimes wonders if they've done the right thing.
"I'm non sure that it's super salubrious for u.s. to exist completely putting ourselves in a box and maxim, 'I'm gonna be with the blue people considering they remember exactly like me.' We need to exist able to communicate with each other even if we do non fully agree with each other."
The Wootens miss having their ideas challenged and engaging with the other side. On the other hand, she says, "We feel amongst our people in Austin."
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/18/1081295373/the-big-sort-americans-move-to-areas-political-alignment
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