In recent years, millions of people across the United States have moved from Democratic cities to Republican suburbs, complicating the politics of swing states in a pivotal election year, according to a Stateline analysis.
Republican suburban counties in four swing states — Georgia in the South and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Midwest — gained the most new arrivals; heavily Democratic cities lost the most. In Western swing states Arizona and Nevada, meanwhile, the biggest people magnets have been slightly Democratic cities that are expected to be hotly contested.
Those shifts reflect a nationwide trend: In Republican counties, as defined by the 2020 presidential vote, 3.7 million more people have moved in than have left since 2020, while Democratic counties had a net loss of 3.7 million, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates and county presidential election data kept by the University of Michigan.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates released in March included people who moved within the country between mid-2020 and mid-2023, a time of pandemic dislocations, lockdowns in big cities, and the rise of remote work that fed a search for affordable housing in less crowded and more scenic settings. Those settings, as it turns out, also tend to be more conservative. The census numbers do not include births or immigration.
Whether the newcomers will vote Democratic this year, or whether they were disenchanted with Democratic policies in their former homes and will vote Republican, remains to be seen. The changes might affect local and congressional races the most, but even a few movers crossing state lines could sway presidential vote totals in swing states.
“We are looking at an election to be determined by a shift of such small numbers of people in each of these states that a few thousand votes in any one state can impact the electoral vote there,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who has edited and helped write several books on presidential swing states.
The counties gaining the most movers in Georgia (Forsyth County), Michigan (Ottawa County), Pennsylvania (Cumberland County) and Wisconsin (Waukesha County) were solidly for then-incumbent President Donald Trump in 2020. But in the three Midwest counties, Joe Biden had the best showing for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Politics in a changing county
In some of the growing counties, there has been tension as new residents bring their own expectations.
“People keep moving here because they like it, then they try to make it like the place they left,” said David Avant, who runs a business networking website in Forsyth County, Georgia. His county gained about 17,000 new arrivals between mid-2020 and mid-2023, according to the Stateline analysis.
Politics might not yet be changing in some of the red counties surveyed. In Michigan, Doug Zylstra became the first Democrat elected in almost 50 years to the 11-member Ottawa County Board of Commissioners in 2018 and was reelected in 2022, but the commission took a more conservative turn in 2023 when a new majority took office.
People keep moving here because they like it, then they try to make it like the place they left.
– David Avant of Forsyth County, Georgia
“The people of Ottawa County chose to replace the previous Republican-majority board, which promoted Democratic ideology and practices,” said Sylvia Rhodea, one of the new Republicans on the commission.
In a January 2023 meeting, Rhodea criticized the previous board’s diversity, equity and inclusion program as “based on the premise that county resident characteristics of being 90% white and largely conservative were problematic for businesses” and as one that “seeks to replace the American value of equality with the Marxist value of…
This article was originally published by a lailluminator.com . Read the Original article here. .