The National GOP's Biggest Challenge? Texodus and Flexodus

It isn't Donald Trump, abortion, J6 protestors or election deniers. Republicans are moving to a small handful of states, abandoning the rest to leftists. Democrats may soon LOVE the Electoral College.

Following November's somewhat surprising and disappointing election results, I found a few green shoots of optimism. True, the GOP underperformed, helped no doubt by last-minute election coverage of Donald Trump hosting grifters and anti-semites for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and poor candidates with repulsive messages in several states (see: Arizona). His last-minute rallies in Pennsylvania and Arizona helped precisely no GOP candidates, and even his Ohio rally beneficiary, Sen.-elect JD Vance, badly underperformed the rest of the GOP ticket in that GOP-trending state (thanks in part to him).

But regardless, the GOP improved its performances with voters across all demographic groups, at least compared to the last mid-term election in 2018.

CNN exit poll, November 2022

And it is true that voters narrowly preferred GOP candidates for the US House over Democrats nationally (I’m not sure how valuable that statistic actually is). True, the national vote for House Republicans was three million votes more than for Democrats. But half that margin came from just two states: Texas and Florida. Alarms bells should be going off in GOP campaign offices everywhere. Especially in blue-trending states like Pennsylvania and even Virginia.

Texodus and Flexodus

“The Great Sorting is underway, and many votes are now made with moving vans rather than ballots,” writes Scott McKay for The American Spectator. And that’s a shift worth noting and fretting about if you’re a national Republican strategist not named or affiliated with George Santos.

McKay authors a terrific southern political blog site I follow that reminds me of the late great John McGuinness, prolific journalist of Louisiana’s colorful politics and magnificent author of the definitive “The Last Hayride” about the late Gov. Edwin Edwards’ 1983 successful campaign for a third term as governor in Baton Rouge (Edwards would later win a fourth term, in 1991, before finally going to jail in 2000 for extorting companies that applied for casino licenses). Students of southern politics guffaw and marvel at Louisiana politics during the 1980s and 90s. I was involved in campaigns there in 1986 and 1990, so I know what I speak.

What other candidate besides Edwards, running against notorious racist David Duke (head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People) for Governor in 1991, sported bumper stickers that said, “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” It worked. Gotta love Louisiana politics. Edwards died at age 93 on July 11, 2021.

McKay’s site borrows from McGuinness’s title, and his Spectator post is worth the time of everyone who wonders about the future of politics.

People are moving with their feet and moving vans, and the results may surprise you, especially at the national level. We’ve seen what California has been left to, and now, as radio talker Erick Erickson notes, a vegetable represents Pennsylvania in the US Senate. At least he’s not a New Jersey transplant, I guess.

When Democrats relocate (especially from the People’s Republic of California), they scatter broadly to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere. Republicans relocate to Florida and Texas, with a smattering in South Carolina and a few other warm-weather, lower-cost states. While it’s true that many California ex-pats are Republicans, explain Arizona’s political patterns of late to me. It’s been the top choice for Golden State emigres for decades, and the chickens have come home to roost.

If Republicans concentrate their votes into a few small states, what will that mean for national elections and the electoral college? Growing GOP states may pick up and reapportion House seats but not Senate seats, many of which will increasingly trend Democratic (see: Pennsylvania). As for the Electoral College? You can figure that out. Don’t get me started on control of the Senate or confirmation of future judges and justices.

Oddly, Democrats continue to push for its abolishment. Watch for that to change quickly and soon. The GOP’s only hope may be the increasingly poor, destitute, and frustrated left behind finally revolting, but don’t hold your breath. Everyone has their price.

Have Democrats figured out a way to chase GOP-leaning voters out of their states by making it a socialist, utopian “paradise” with punitive taxes on them and generous handouts and subsidies for loyal lower-income voters (see: New Jersey) courtesy of state-directed federal expenditures and programs? I don’t think they’re that smart, but I’ve been wrong before.

As for New York, they collect millions in income taxes from New Jersey residents who work for New York-based employers and thus pay New York income taxes. It may help explain New Jersey’s first-in-the-nation property taxes. DC area residents don’t understand that because they enjoy “income tax reciprocity” agreements, unlike Jersey residents working in New York. Work in horribly-run, high-tax DC but live in Virginia or Maryland? No worries! In those states, you pay (much lower) income taxes based on where you live, not where you “work.” (air quotes intentional).

And that might explain the trillions in deficit-funded handouts under American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, the recent $1.7 trillion “consolidated appropriations act,” and other atrocities passed by Congress over the past two years.

Texodus and Flexodus, and What They Mean for America

The Great Sorting is underway, and many votes are now made with moving vans rather than ballots.

by SCOTT MCKAY

At my site, The Hayride, which deals more often than not with issues of politics and culture in Louisiana, I appropriated a term to describe the mass phenomenon of westward outmigration that the state’s dysfunctional public sector has created and fueled.

That term: Texodus.

It’s been the case for decades that Texas, with its more honest politics, saner tax code, healthier business sector, safer and smoother streets, and more upwardly mobile society, is draining Louisiana of its productive citizens. And since John Bel Edwards, an unprincipled leftist who flimflammed his way into Louisiana’s governor’s mansion in successive elections by exploiting a fractured field of backbiting GOP candidates, has taken office, Texodus has been turbocharged. Nearly 200,000 Louisianans on net have migrated to other states since Edwards’ first inauguration seven years ago, with a strong plurality of those people making their way across the Sabine River to Texas.

But while we spend a lot of time talking about Texodus, Flexodus is also a thing. You’ll find a huge number of Louisianans now living in Florida. If you spend any time in the Florida panhandle, for example, and particularly in beach communities there like Perdido Key, Destin, and Santa Rosa Beach, you’d think you were in a tony suburb of New Orleans.

You might think of Louisiana as a red state, and in federal elections it’s beet red. But the state’s political culture has never truly recovered from the populist socialism of former Gov. Huey Long Jr.’s political cabal of the 1930s, and its governmental infrastructure is capital-P Progressive and capital-O Oppressive to the proper working of a market economy. Bad politics and the resultant bad economics have plagued this place for almost a century, if not longer, and will continue to cause rampant outmigration until its Republican politicians grow enough of a spine to take Longism out back for the mercy killing it has desperately needed.

Maybe that will finally happen in next year’s statewide election cycle, and the outmigration will stop. There is reason to believe it will.

But Texodus and Flexodus don’t just describe a growing Louisiana diaspora, though the reasons for them are as obvious as applied to other states as they are similar. The fact is that people in blue states — or states that are governed according to the blue model — are increasingly poor, miserable, and hopeless.

And people don’t like to be increasingly poor, miserable, and hopeless.

So they leave.

I was asked during a radio appearance right after the midterms what I thought went wrong for Lee Zeldin in his well-fought-but-ultimately-doomed run against Kathy Hochul for governor of New York. My answer wasn’t earth-shattering, unless you can use that term to describe the obvious: Zeldin did everything right, but what killed him was that the half-million votes he needed to turn the Empire State red were down in Florida turning Ron DeSantis’ reelection into a cakewalk.

Read the rest here. And Happy New Year.