Red and Blue Economies Are Heading in Sharply Different Directions

I have long maintained that part of the economic problems facing "red states" and red rural areas is that their social reactionary nature and hostility towards non-whites, non-straights and non-Christians makes them unattractive to the business of the 21st century and the future.  Here in Virginia, Southwest Virginia is a prime example.  That region continues to demand that state monies be used to turn around the region economically yet the residents (and, yes, there are exceptions) continue to embrace social, religious and political views that are anathema to the economic change they claim to want.  Now a study, as reported in the New York Times looks at the diverging paths of so-called blue economies associated with rising urban areas and those of red economies associated with rural and reactionary regions.  And yes, the red areas tend to be far more white and perhaps more racist.  Here are article highlights:

At a quick glance, red and blue metropolitan areas are performing equally well on average in the most watched indicators of labor market health. . . . Silicon Valley (blue) is booming. So is Provo, Utah (red).

But below the surface, red and blue local economies are worlds apart on enduring, fundamental measures that determine their future prospects and their biggest economic challenges.

The correlations between deeper economic measures and how the contrasting metro areas voted in 2016 are striking.

In bluer metros, more residents have college degrees: The 10 large metros with the highest educational attainment each voted for Hillary Clinton by at least a 10-point margin. Median household incomes are higher in bluer metros even after adjusting for the cost of living, which is higher in bluer metros as well. (Metro area is a better measure for a local labor market than a neighborhood, city, county or state.)

And bluer metros have a more favorable job mix for the future, with fewer manufacturing jobs, a higher share of harder-to-automate “non-routine” jobs, and a higher share of jobs in occupations projected to grow faster.

These measures — education, household income, cost of living, non-routine jobs and projected job growth — are highly correlated with one another, and with voting Democratic.

Other economic measures are less strongly correlated with partisanship but still show a pattern. Bluer metros have less year-to-year volatility of job growth. In part that’s because goods-related sectors like manufacturing and mining are more volatile and are clustered in Republican-leaning areas.

Home values have risen more in bluer metros than in redder ones. And blue metros have a higher prime-age employment-population ratio, even though the unemployment rate varies little by partisanship. That’s because red metros have a higher share of prime-age adults who are not in the labor force and therefore aren’t counted in the unemployment rate.

But there are a few places that vote differently than you’d expect from their local economic fundamentals. Colorado Springs and the Provo-Orem area, for instance, have education levels and an occupation mix more typical of blue metros but voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016 by a wide margin. On the flip side, Stockton, Calif., and El Paso look more like red metros economically but voted for Mrs. Clinton.

Why do some metros vote differently than their economics might suggest they would? Race, ethnicity and religion. Metros that vote Democratic despite having lower education and a job mix more typical of redder metros tend to have large Hispanic populations, including many in inland California and on the Texas border. Metros that vote more Republican despite having higher education and a blue-metro job mix tend to be whiter.

[I]ncome inequality — and all the social and political challenges that come with it — tends to be lower in redder metros. And while cost-of-living-adjusted household incomes are higher in bluer metros, cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for a given occupation are typically higher in redder metros.

There’s a reason for this difference: Bluer metros tend to have higher-paying occupations and fewer prime-age adults out of the labor force, which increases household incomes. But if you move from a bluer to a redder metro and find a job in the same occupation, you’re likely to get an increase in salary after taking living costs into account.

The economic challenges of blue metros — unaffordability and inequality — are different than those of red metros, which face lower living standards and greater risks of job loss. Even if the economy takes a back seat in the 2020 election to health care, immigration and President Trump’s record, these economic differences won’t be far from the surface. And if national economic conditions soften, these differences will become more reason for partisan disagreement on urgent policy priorities.

If the places that moved left between 2012 and 2016 continue getting bluer — and the places that swung Obama-to-Trump keep getting redder — the local economies of red and blue America will keep growing further apart.

Innovation and progressive thinking gravitates to blue regions while "conservatism," closed mindedness and an unwelcoming atmosphere toward those who are different concentrates in red regions. Both bring economic consequences. 

Boycott the Republican Party

At the risk of boring long time readers, I used to be a Republican at a time when the Party was in the equivalence of a galaxy far, far away and bore no resemblance to the hideous phenomenon that it is today.  I held city committee seat for eight (8) years, was a precinct captain and worked on many a campaign.  But then something happened.  The Christofascists became ascendant in the Party and the Party's agenda became more and more homophobic and racists (in my experience, most Christofascists are racists as are the so-called lily white "family values" organizations). I left the Party and decided that the only way to "save" the Party was to work against it and see it suffer as many electoral defeats as possible.  Hopefully, at some point some sane people would rise up and work to expel the  Christofascists and racists from the Party.  To date, that has not happened and the result has been that the Party has descended deeper and deeper into hate and insanity, the election of Donald Trump being the ultimate consequence of the degeneration of the Party and the exodus of morally decent people from the GOP.  Now, other are coming to the same conclusion that I reached many years ago: the Republican Party needs to be boycotted and defeated whenever and wherever possible.  A piece in The Atlantic by two moderate conservatives makes the case as to why such a boycott is necessary.  Here are article excerpts:

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no.

Count us in, Mr. Beasley. . . . . This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.

For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship.

So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered . . . . A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes. Leave aside the question of whether Trump’s cooperation with the Russians violated the law. He at least tacitly collaborated with a foreign-intelligence operation against his country—sometimes in full public view.  . . . . the broader response to Trump’s behavior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.

The reason is that Trump and his forces have taken command of the party. Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only rearguard actions, which we doubt can hold the line against a multiyear, multifront assault from Trump and his allies.

[W]e should not count on the past year to provide the template for the next three. Under the pressure of persistent attacks, many of them seemingly minor, democratic institutions can erode gradually until they suddenly fail. That the structures hold up for a while does not mean they will hold up indefinitely—and if they do, they may not hold up well.

Even now, erosion is visible. Republican partisans and policy makers routinely accept insults to constitutional norms that, under Barack Obama, they would have condemned as outrageous. When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato Institute, almost two-thirds of Republican respondents agreed with the president that journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” How much damage can Trump do in the next three years? We don’t know, but we see no grounds to be complacent.

It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party, because a portion of the base seems eager to out-Trump Trump. In last year’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republican primary voters defied the president himself by nominating a candidate who was openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and many stuck with him when he was credibly alleged to have been a child molester. After initially balking, the Republican Party threw its institutional support behind him too. In Virginia, pressure from the base drove a previously sensible Republican gubernatorial candidate into the fever swamps. Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether.

So we arrive at a syllogism:

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.

(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

If the syllogism holds, then the most-important tasks in U.S. politics right now are to change the Republicans’ trajectory and to deprive them of power in the meantime. . . . The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.

The off-year elections in November showed that this is possible. Democrats flooded polling places, desperate to “resist.” Independents added their voice. Even some Republicans abandoned their party. One Virginia Republican, explaining why he had just voted for Democrats in every race, told The Washington Post, “I’ve been with the Republicans my whole life, but what the party has been doing is appalling.” . . . A few more spankings like that will give anti-Trump Republicans a fighting chance to regain influence within their party.

We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.