It's official: Here are the states gaining and losing seats (and thus electoral votes) in 2011. I've put states entirely controlled by Republicans in bold and states entirely controlled by Democrats in italics, although in some of these states there are backstops against total partisan redistricting -- Arizona, for example, has a nonpartisan panel. The gainers:
Arizona +1
Florida +2
Georgia +1
Nevada +1
South Carolina +1
Texas +4
Utah +1
Washington +1
The losers:
Illinois -1
Iowa -1
Louisiana -1
Massachusetts -1
Michigan -1
Missouri -1
New Jersey -1
New York -2
Ohio -2
Pennsylvania -1
This is about as bad as it could get for Democrats, and as good as it could get for Republicans. The next GOP presidential candidate gets six free electoral votes from South Carolina, Texas, Utah. The Democratic caucus in the House is about to see internal warfare in the rust belt and northeast, as their members are forced into Thunderdome battle for the diminished number of seats. Only in Illinois, I think, will the Democrats be able to create a map that hurts the GOP's newly elected members and takes back a seat or two.People in a free society vote with their feet. What we all know instinctly we can see in the census data.People are voting with their feet. Not from bad to good weather, but from high tax to low tax. California vs. Texas is a perfect example. Not just taxes, but business climate as well.
One bad side of this is again California. They continue to trade out high-education, high-earning native born citizens for poorly educated, net-drain on the government immigrants. Their educated Leftists who leave the land they ruined are in many cases not changing their politics - they are taking it with them.
As a result, the shifting populations of economic refugees from CA and other Blue States are ruining politics from Wake County in North Carolina to King County in Washington as they leave CA, MA, NY and take their toxic poltics with them, soiling another nest - but maybe they'll learn. This time. Maybe.
You can see the clash though from the Duck Hunters off the Potomac other places they move to. Oh well - it is a free country. The greatness of our system is that different States can try different things. When one State fails, hopefully others will not repeat the mistake. When one State succeeds, hopefully others will follow.
Another truth comes out when you look at the census data in a long virew - one I ususally cover on Thursday. As any Ward Boss will tell you - one of the easiest ways to control a group of people and to stop them from being free thinking individuals is to have them act based on racial and sectarian lines.
That is why the whole Diversity bit is more political than anything else, and why I will continue to point out that by pushing a retrograde sectarian policy as pushed by the Diversity Bullies - the Navy is engaging in politics pure and simple. That is why it is well withing a standard deviation to use the moniker; "CNO Roughead (D-Navy)."
Via BaseballCrank;
“These numbers are an opportunity for Republicans, but also a challenge, since the main areas undergoing population growth are (with a few exceptions like Utah) growing mainly through a growing Latino population. Which explains why Democrats are so eager to try to divide off Latino voters to vote as a homogenous race-conscious bloc the way African-Americans do; it’s their only path to offset their shrinking deep-blue-state power base. There’s no future in being the party of the Northeast and the West Coast, and Democrats know this; liberal pundits and left-wing bloggers are quite open about the extent to which they bank on racial demographics as their salvation, and those demographics only benefit them if they can maintain very high rates of racial division in the voting patterns of Latino and African-American voters, far higher than you would find among white voters. Republicans don’t have to win the Latino vote outright to fend off that challenge, they only need individual Latinos to remain open enough to both sides that Republicans can persuade a decent percentage to vote GOP, as the Democrats still do among white voters. Frankly, it’s not a coincidence that the two states with the most population growth have had, for the past decade and a half, GOP governors starting with George W. and Jeb Bush who worked hard to cater to Latino voters and declined to join in the harshest anti-immigration (even anti-illegal-immigration) rhetoric or policies.Does that mean that if you believe that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin that you are a Republican? Does that mean that you think one should vote based on the judgment of upper brain functions and not the tribal instincts from the most primitive parts of our DNA - that you are a Republican?
“Let’s look deeper at the map through the eyes of a Democrat, and you can see why the campaign of relentless racial division touted on a daily basis by left-leaning commentators and pursued by President Obama in some of his ugliest moments of the 2010 stretch run – calling Republicans the ‘enemies’ of Latinos who had to be ‘punished,’ asserting that Republicans were ‘counting on …black folks staying home’ – will only be exacerbated as Obama’s natural strategy for 2012, given how his performance in office has lost him much of the support among white voters (and some among Latino voters) that he enjoyed in 2008.”
No, of course not - you can find good people on both sides of the aisle. But if the Democrats want to make the logic train go there; so be it.
Hat tip HotAir.
Bad edit this AM - post now fixed.
UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini agrees,
Not only did the South and West win -- which liberals will dismiss as a function of weather -- but low tax states consistently beat high tax states. Not only did conservative states beat liberal states, most tellingly, the winners were almost to a man conservatively governed.Consider this striking fact unearthed by political strategist (and former Giuliani adviser) Ken Kurson, posted on Facebook:
Avg tax rate in states gaining a Congressional seat: 2.8%
Avg tax rate in states losing a Congressional seat: 6.05%
People vote with their feet.
