No, Marginalized People Can't All Move To Blue States
This is not helpful advice.
Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump have won a second term as president. Stephen Miller will serve as deputy White House chief of staff (the Josh Lyman position from West Wing). MAGA controls the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Trump is already talking about gutting the Department of Education. I can understand the desire to run away while sad piano music plays.
Pamela Keith, a former Democratic congressional candidate from Florida, suggests people who currently live in a “red” state move to a “blue” state, where there’s reproductive freedom and more kombucha than guns.
“It’s happening,” Keith posted Sunday on social media. “A realignment in the United States is happening. Blue states are going to band together and operate in a way that is consistent with the Constitution and basic human decency. It’s time for patriotic people to move out of red states and leave those racist haters to their own devices. It’s time for mass migration into blue states. Bring all the talent this way.”
The Next Great Migration
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Sen. Josh Hawley delivered a gloating supervillain monologue about how the Dobbs decision marked “another period of transformative change in American politics.”
“I think we will see a major sorting out across the country that is already underway, as we speak, as states move to change their laws or adopt new laws in response to this decision,” Hawley said. “I think it'll probably redraw some demographic lines around the country, and will lead to impacts in voting patterns, I think, all around the country.”
Barely able to contain his glee, the Senate sprinter declared, “More and more red states, they’re going to become more red, and purple states are going to become red, and the blue states are going to get a lot bluer.”
“I would look for Republicans, as a result of this in time, to extend their strength in the Electoral College,” he added. “And that’s very good news for those of us who want to see Republican presidents elected, that want to see a Supreme Court that remains conservative.”
Everything evil is hardly new again. During the Great Migration, six million Black people, about half the Black population at the time, left the southern United States and moved to northern, midwestern, and western states from about the 1910s until the 1970s. They were fleeing Jim Crow tyranny and a deliberate campaign of racial terror.
The Great Migration was often spun as an overall positive move for Black people, but recent studies showed that leaving the only home they only knew for a more passively racist urban life had serious drawbacks for Black migrants. A 2015 study from the American Economic Review revealed that mortality rates increased 40 percent for Black men and 50 percent for Black women who moved during the Great Migration. Heart disease, lung cancer, and cirrhosis were common causes of death — all preferable to lynchings but still pretty bleak.
“We thought what we would find was that migration north extended life and made the African-American population healthier,” said the study’s co-author, Seth Sanders, who is not Black. “We actually found exactly the opposite. Urban life is stressful. Being away from your roots is probably stressful.”
Yeah, imagine that.
The challenges Black people faced during the Great Migration would likely also apply to marginalized groups fleeing from “red” states. Discriminatory laws forced Black people to live in overcrowded neighborhoods and slums (a stark change from their rural backgrounds). Such overtly bigoted laws might not exist today but NIMBY policies would leave lower income people struggling to find housing.
The 10 states with the highest cost of living are all “blue”: California, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Connecticut, and Maryland. The states with the lowest cost of living are solidly red: Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Dakota, Iowa (despite out Ann Selzer-inspired dreams), North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, Nebraska. Snobs might sneer at the theatre and food scene in those states, but vulnerable people live there and can’t afford to move. Seriously, if it were a practical option for everyone, you wouldn’t need a fascist election victory to convince someone to leave West Virginia.
I presume Pamela Keith is aware of this, but resettling in a different state requires a job that pays money. It’s especially difficult if you have no family or friends in your new home. The average rent for an apartment in Portland, Oregon, is $1,754. First and last month’s rent plus a security deposit put that even further out of reach for the most vulnerable. Trans people in particular are disproportionately poor.
Obviously, you don’t have to live in San Francisco or Los Angeles to enjoy California’s legal protections, but outside the major cities, you’ll eventually still find yourself in Trump country. Almost every “blue” state has rural areas that aren’t any friendlier to marginalized people than where they are now.
“Blue” states aren’t forever, either. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin swept into power on a wave of post-covid white resentment in 2021, just a year after Joe Biden carried the state by 10 points. Fascist states usually like to spread their misery. Think Nazi Germany or the Confederacy. An unchecked MAGA will inevitably see free people anywhere as a threat.
Now, the folks who probably should consider moving are well-off white heterosexual men in “blue” states. They can relocate to “red” states to save freedom and democracy. This is their draft notice. If they set up some theatres and wine bars, I’ll come down for a long weekend.
I’ve heard this jejune “just move to a blue state!” advice for years now. Blue states are going to somehow absorb the entire populations of all the red states, are they? They have enough resources and housing and jobs for the whole country? So, we abandon all of our fellow citizens who, for an awful lot of very good reasons (one being, we simply don’t want to), can’t and obviously won’t move, and leave them stranded in what’s often designated as Dumbfuckistan, or the flyover states where no one wants to live? Someone get out the big Bugs Bunny saw and set Florida adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, and f*ck everyone else? Yep, that’ll fix everything. It’s patently absurd on its face and sounds like a plan a 10-year-old would come up with.
Also, we’re not nomads. Many of us have deep roots and family and close-knit communities in these despised red states. And while it’s always tempting to demonize entire populations in any given situation, keep in mind that many of us blue dots in Redneckistan have already been living for years with state legislators, governors, and US representatives whose collective ironclad grip rivals that of the Kremlin’s. In other words, the US is going to experience on a macro level the oppression we already know. Moving to a blue state won’t change that.
In conclusion, This is my home. I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ll die here, probably still singing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” with my dying breath. The Fascists are the ones who need to move elsewhere, like out of my f*cking country, because I ain’t goin’ nowhere.
I had planned to move to Cleveland from Manhattan since way before the election. I am still moving to Cleveland, Ohio, a blue dot in a red state. I have been harassed for wearing rainbow pride tags and not looking feminine enough on the NY subway. On Friday I had my first threat from someone mentioning Trump. NYC is not going to keep me safe, being a blue state won't help me if some bigot starts punching me in the face while I'm riding the A train.
I can't afford NYC anymore, one of the major reasons for the move. But I also want to be near family and friends, which I am not, being in NYC. Right now I feel the only people I can rely on are those people that truly care about me and they live in red states. If the law cannot protect me, friends and family will. So there's one blue vote moving to a red state.