The California Exodus

Was just discussing this in my American government classes this morning. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "California’s population dropped by 500,000 in two years as exodus continues":

The California exodus has shown no sign of slowing down as the state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022, with the number of residents leaving surpassing those moving in by nearly 700,000.

The population decrease was second only to New York, which lost about 15,000 more people than California, census data show.

California has been seeing a decline in population for years, with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more people to move to other parts of the country, experts say. The primary reason for the exodus is the state’s high housing costs, but other reasons include the long commutes and the crowds, crime and pollution in the larger urban centers. The increased ability to work remotely — and not having to live near a big city — has also been a factor.

The rate of the exodus may now be slowing as the pandemic’s effects ease, but some experts say it could be a few years before the Golden State starts to record the kind of population growth it has seen in the past.

The census data point to those states that have seen population gains even as California’s has shrunk.

Net migration out of California surpassed that of the next highest state, New York, by about 143,000 people. Nearby states such as Utah have sought to discourage Californians from moving there. A similar story is playing out in Nevada, where California migrants are seeking to re-create their lifestyle.

California gained about 157,000 more people from natural change — the difference in number between births and deaths — than New York did, making New York’s total population loss greater.

During the final year of the two-year span, from July 2021 to July 2022, California lost about 211,000 people, according to data from the state Department of Finance. More than half — 113,048 — were from Los Angeles County, the most populous of California’s 58 counties...

Bruce Cannon Gibney, How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

At Amazon, Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

American Politics Is Being Shaped by the AWFLs (Affluent White Liberal Feminists)

From Mary Harrington, at UnHerd, "A sex war is coming":

“Gas prices? They’ll go down. But sure, tell me more about how you want the government to tell me what to do with my body.” So writes one liberal feminist on Twitter, following it up with: “Republicans suck. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to hear your side. I don’t care. Y’all are bad people.”

If 21st-century politics is shaping up as class war, the American midterm elections have concretised a troubling facet of this political landscape: this class war is also a sex war.

Writing about the dynamic as a feminist is uncomfortable in the extreme because it’s difficult to do so without being accused of misogyny. This is not least because among the very online Right, there really is more than a tinge of misogyny to the term most commonly used to denote progressive-leaning Virtual women: AWFLs.

Coined by Right-wing commentator Scott Greer, AWFL stands for “affluent white female liberals”, and generally connotes not just the demographic but its perceived characteristic worldview — a mixture of progressive moral piety, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and unexamined class snobbery.

Whether or not you agree with this hostile evaluation, the AWFL class has been growing in relative power and influence for some decades. This is for wholly non-conspiratorial reasons: very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

Even the staunchly liberal New Yorker has worried recently that this constitutes a blind spot, while the far-Left Jacobin described the emphasis of New York’s Kathy Hochul on abortion rather than inflation as “girlboss politics”. Much was made of a WSJ poll last week, that suggested, albeit based on a small sample, that even white suburban women (an affluent demographic that overlaps with the derisive “AWFL” designation) were swinging against the Democrats based on economic concerns.

But results so far suggest that this swing, if it’s come at all, has been muted. And perhaps this makes sense. For the changing nature of work isn’t the only way this political bloc relies on technology for its ascendancy...

 

Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated.

At the New York Times, "The white majority is fading, the economy is changing and there’s a pervasive sense of loss in districts where Republicans fought the outcome of the 2020 election":

When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled.

Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a wall,” Mr. Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population.

Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a signed copy of a book by Mr. Nehls about the supposedly stolen election, said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.”

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.

Although overshadowed by the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the House vote that day was the most consequential of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn the election. It cast doubt on the central ritual of American democracy, galvanized the party’s grass roots around the myth of a stolen victory and set a precedent that legal experts — and some Republican lawmakers — warn could perpetually embroil Congress in choosing a president.

To understand the social forces converging in that historic vote — objecting to the Electoral College count — The Times examined the constituencies of the lawmakers who joined the effort, analyzing census and other data from congressional districts and interviewing scores of residents and local officials. The Times previously revealed the back-room maneuvers inside the House, including convincing lawmakers that they could reject the results without explicitly endorsing Mr. Trump’s outlandish fraud claims.

Many of the 139 objectors, including Mr. Nehls, said they were driven in part by the demands of their voters. “You sent me to Congress to fight for President Trump and election integrity,” Mr. Nehls wrote in a tweet on Jan. 5, 2021, “and that’s exactly what I am doing.” At a Republican caucus meeting a few days later, Representative Bill Johnson, from an Ohio district stretching into Appalachia, told colleagues that his constituents would “go ballistic” with “raging fire” if he broke with Mr. Trump, according to a recording.

Certain districts primarily reflect either the racial or socioeconomic characteristics. But the typical objector district shows both — a fact demographers said was striking.

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

That may help explain why the dispute over Mr. Trump’s defeat has emerged at this moment in history, with economic inequality reaching new heights and the white population of the United States expected within about two decades to lose its majority.

Many of the objectors’ districts started with a significantly larger Black minority, or had a rapid increase in the Hispanic population, making the decline in the white population more pronounced.

Of the 12 Republican-held districts that swung to minority white — almost all in California and Texas — 10 were represented by objectors. The most significant drops occurred in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and California desert towns, where the white percentage fell by more than a third. Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

Many residents say they have lost faith in political leaders — except for former President Donald J. Trump. Montgomery County, Va., is in one of the country’s poorest congressional districts. Many residents say they have lost faith in political leaders — except for former President Donald J. Trump.Credit...Laura Saunders for The New York Times

While Mr. Nehls’s district exemplifies demographic change, Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

Marie March, a restaurant owner in the town of Christiansburg, said she embodied “the mind-set of the Trump MAGA voter.” “You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up,” she said of the local support for Mr. Trump’s dispute of the election results. “We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.”

Ms. March, who said she attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington but did not go to the Capitol, was inspired by Mr. Trump to win a seat in the state legislature last year. She said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted...

 

Buffalo and the Myth of Racist America

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "Democrats want to create another George Floyd moment."

The Dream is in the Desert

For black Americans, at LAT, "‘We’re here to stay.’ Despite isolation and racism, Black Americans feel at home in California’s desert":

PALM SPRINGS — La’Ronjanae Curtis has grown used to the disbelief of college classmates and friends when she tells them she was born in Palm Springs, a city of 48,000 where people of color are relatively few. “There are Black people out there?” they always say. Curtis proudly tells them that she’s living proof.

Tourists flock to the Coachella Valley and Mojave Desert to take in the psychedelic hues of their sunsets, lose themselves among otherworldly rock formations, and sip drinks poolside at Modernist hideaways in Palm Springs the way Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack did in an earlier era.

For the few Black Americans who live in the California desert, it takes willpower to feel at ease in these playgrounds, and imagination to make them feel like home.

In the first half of the last century, hundreds of Black people from the South, and from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, settled in desert communities like Palm Springs. They came for some of the same reasons that drew many white people: plentiful jobs, ample land to put down stakes, and the live-and-let-live openness of what still felt like America’s frontier.

But the picture-postcard settings and air of possibility masked an uglier reality for Black newcomers.

Many towns historically restricted Black families to segregated neighborhoods through housing covenants and lending practices. That legacy lives on.

Today, the presence of an established Black community isn’t obvious when driving through Curtis’ hometown, where low-lying houses hide behind Moorish-style screens, meticulously kept cactus gardens look as untouchable as jewelry displays, and locals ride around their condo complexes in golf carts designed to resemble Mercedes and Rolls Royces.

Most Black residents live far from the carefully constructed fantasy visitors see.

Curtis, who attends San Diego State University, says relatives on both sides of her family migrated from San Francisco in the middle of the last century. They mainly settled in Desert Highland Gateway Estates, a neighborhood of about 400 homes that sits on the wind-whipped northern outskirts — three miles from the Midcentury Modern furniture stores and spray-misted restaurant patios of downtown.

The other historically Black neighborhood, Lawrence Crossley, is at the opposite end of the city near the airport — a single U-shaped street lined with several dozen two- and three-bedroom houses shaded by palms. The lush green of a municipal golf course borders the neighborhood on one side. At the far end, a strip of barren desert.

Dominique Brenagh, 38, takes shelter from the 100-degree heat in the shade of his carport at the small ranch-style house where he grew up and his family still lives.

Brenagh says his father’s relatives moved to Palm Springs in the 1950s from Louisiana in part to escape the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow era.

“Back in those times, you had the KKK out there that was oppressing people,” he says of the South.

Brenagh looks back on his own life as a happy one by comparison. He smiles when reminiscing about sneaking from his backyard onto the golf course to play with friends.

“I love it here,” he says...

Keep reading.

 

Surprise: The Wealthy Fled New York City as the Coronavirus Broke Out

Yeah, big surprise here.

At NYT, "The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City":

Hundreds of thousands of New York City residents, in particular those from the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, left as the coronavirus pandemic hit, an analysis of multiple sources of aggregated smartphone location data has found https://t.co/IO8qUK8zqq

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 15, 2020

Hundreds of thousands of New York City residents, in particular those from the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, left as the coronavirus pandemic hit, an analysis of multiple sources of aggregated smartphone location data has found.

Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1. In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes.

Some of these areas are typically home to lots of students, many of whom left as colleges and universities closed; other residents might have left to care for friends or family members across the country. But, on average, income is a strong simple predictor of a neighborhood’s change: The higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out.

Relatively few residents from blocks with median household incomes of about $90,000 or less (in the 80th percentile or lower) left New York. This migration out of the city began in mid-March, and accelerated in the days after March 15, when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he was closing the city’s schools.

The highest-earning neighborhoods emptied first.

“There is a way that these crises fall with a different weight on people based on social class,” said Kim Phillips-Fein, a history professor at New York University and author of a book about how New York changed during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. “Even though there’s a strong rhetoric of ‘We’re all in it together,’ that’s not really the case.”

These estimates are based on data provided by Descartes Labs, a geospatial analysis company.

Descartes Labs used anonymized smartphone location data to find a large sample of New York City residents — not commuters or tourists — based on where they lived during a two-week period in February. They then analyzed their aggregate movements as the pandemic hit and whether they had left the city. The sample was about 140,000 residents, including residents from nearly every populated census tract in the city.

Smartphone location data is imperfect. It misses people who don’t own a smartphone. It requires guesses about who is a resident rather than a visitor or commuter. It relies on the kinds of apps that track and transmit a user’s precise location. And it is unlikely to be perfectly representative of the general population.

But it can be more useful than other methods to measure quick changes in population on a large scale...

Interestingly, that 420,000 who left is the exact same number of all the Chinese who flew into the country before President Trump banned flights from China.

Keep reading.

Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami

From Ronald Brownstein, at the Atlantic, "Even with a surge in overall participation, white working-class voters could still remain decisive in the 2020 election":

Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history.

But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election.

With Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency stirring such strong emotions among both supporters and opponents, strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called “a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.”

In a recent paper, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, an enormous increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, recently forecast that the 2020 contest could produce a massive turnout that is also unprecedentedly diverse.

“I think we are heading for a record presidential turnout at least in the modern era, and by that I mean since the franchise went to 18-year-olds,” in 1972, says Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “And I mean not only in total numbers [but also] in terms of the percentage of eligible voters [who turn out]. The emotion behind politics … is sky-high, and I don’t think it’s just on one side. I think it’s on both sides.”

McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated.

Experts on both sides point to an array of indicators that signal turnout may reach new heights next year. Signs of political interest, from the number of small-donor contributions made to presidential candidates to the viewership for cable news, are all spiking. In polls, very high shares of Americans already say they are paying a lot of attention to the 2020 presidential race.

But the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.

Yet one of the key questions for 2020 is whether Democrats will benefit as much from the likely expansion of the electorate...

Keep reading.

It's gonna be great.

As long as the economy holds up into late next year, Trump is going to be a very formidable incumbent, and difficult to beat.

A lot depends on who the Democrats nominate, and I'm hoping they nominate one of their far-left wing avatars, Bernie, Elizabeth, or Kamala. I'm positive Trump will make short work of them. Biden would be a tricky opponent. And I do think he could cut into some of Trump's working class support. But we'll see. We'll. see.

How Trump Can Win Reelection

It's Larry Sabato, who got pretty much everything wrong in 2016, at least concerning the presidential race, so caveat emptor.

At the Washington Post, "It’s easy to see how Trump can win reelection":

It's Easy To See How Trump Could Win Reelection -- from @LarrySabato and me in @PostOpinions https://t.co/DCt6aCewAr

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) April 24, 2019

President Trump thrives on chaos, much of it his own creation. But it would be a mistake to assume that the reelection campaign of this most untraditional president will mirror the tumult of his 2016 effort. It’s too early to handicap 2020, but Trump may try to capitalize on some of the same factors that helped three modern Republican presidents, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, win reelection.

The reelections of all three men were not always certain. Around this time in the 1972 election cycle, Nixon held only a modest lead over the early Democratic front-runner, Edmund Muskie, who in 1968 had been the vice-presidential running mate of Hubert Humphrey. In late January 1983, pollster Lou Harris found former vice president Walter Mondale leading Reagan 53 percent to 44 percent. John Kerry’s challenge to Bush was nip-and-tuck throughout 2004. Fast-forward to 2019, and Trump often trails some Democrats in presidential trial heats, but with his large, solid base and a continuing good economy, it isn’t hard to see how Trump could win again.

That is not to suggest that Trump is destined to win, much less that he would rebound to a gigantic victory like Nixon’s and Reagan’s. For one thing, the landslides that one finds at regular intervals throughout much of the 20th century don’t even seem possible in this highly partisan, polarized era. America is in a stretch of eight consecutive presidential elections where neither side has won the popular vote by double digits, the longest such streak of close, competitive elections in U.S. history.

Another caveat: Trump’s approval rating has been upside down for essentially his entire presidency, and he has shown no inclination to broaden his base of support by changing his policies or softening his sharp rhetoric. From that perspective, even matching Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 seems like a major reach. Yet Trump could again win the presidency without winning the popular vote because of the strength of his coalition in the crucial Midwest battlegrounds.

Trump is in the process of jumping one major hurdle: He lacks a major primary challenger. (Bill Weld, the 2016 Libertarian vice-presidential candidate who recently declared a GOP primary challenge, does not count as “major.”) With approval ratings among Republicans usually exceeding 80 percent, and with his allies firmly in control of the party apparatus almost everywhere, Trump has thus far boxed out major intraparty opposition. The last three reelected GOP presidents all waltzed to renomination.

Trump is also going to be in a much better financial position than he was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton vastly outspent him. Trump already has $40 million in the bank for his reelection bid, and he should be able to raise hundreds of millions more now that his party is more completely behind him than in 2016. Money is not everything, as Trump himself showed in 2016, but any campaign would prefer having more, not less.

The Internet will be a campaign wild card again. Trump will probably reprise his 2016 digital advertising strategy to dissuade specific demographic groups, such as African Americans and young women, from voting for the Democratic candidate. His army of domestic online trolls no doubt will also turn out in force, and foreign actors, particularly Russians tied to the Kremlin, will almost certainly try to influence the election. Don’t expect the Trump administration to devote a lot of energy to frustrating those efforts.

The Democratic Party may inadvertently boost Trump if it gets carried away with an impeachment frenzy that prompts a voter backlash. Opposition to Trump will help unify the Democrats and fund the eventual nominee after a standard-bearer emerges from what is a giant and growing field of about 20 candidates. But one or more factions of the Democratic Party may emerge from the primary season disappointed and angry. Trump’s well-funded digital strategy will work to widen these fissures.

Ultimately, Trump may turn out to be at the mercy of conventional factors...

More.

Millennial Poll: America is Racist

Well, what else is new?

46% of younger Americans agree that “America is more racist than other countries.”

A nation cannot long survive if it’s institutions and elites propagate the idea that it is evil and unjust. We’re at a crisis point, and the future looks grim. https://t.co/DnGHcHdorG

— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) November 27, 2018

Democrats Won the Wealthy Suburbs

This is interesting.

At WaPo, "These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority":

Analysis | These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority https://t.co/LvZ2AT15n6

— Thomas Edsall (@Edsall) November 11, 2018

In Tuesday’s election, House districts on the outskirts of major American cities were the site of electoral shifts that propelled Democrats to power.

Wealthy and middle class voters delivered the suburban votes for enough Democratic pickups to secure a majority. In several cases, the battleground districts were wealthy and highly educated places that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, exposing the vulnerability of those Republican lawmakers.

The precinct-level results shown on the maps in this story show the most precise view of how voters within a district swung. This level of detail can also provide more insight into what caused a district to flip — or not.

These maps show how those neighborhoods handed Democrats the House.

We’ll start in Virginia’s 7th District, where Rep. Dave Brat (R) was challenged by ex-CIA operative Abigail Spanberger (D). This north-south district goes from above Culpeper to rural areas near the southern border of the state, but the voters are concentrated in the suburbs of Richmond and Fredericksburg.

Here are precinct-level results for the 2016 presidential election, with circles sized based on the margin of victory for the Democrat or Republican in each precinct.

The district backed Donald Trump by six percentage points in 2016. Democratic margins around Richmond were outweighed by the Republican tilt of the rest of the district.

But in 2018, those Fredericksburg and Richmond suburbs flipped to Spanberger, securing her the win.

In 2018, Brat’s support in wealthier neighborhoods softened ... while middle-class voters surged for Spanberger. Remember that there are many more voters around the cities in the east part of the district.

As with many of the districts shown here, the 7th District voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney, but less favorably for Trump.

“These are places that just don’t like the president that much, and I think that’s reflected in this House vote,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor at the nonpartisan political analysis site Sabato’s Crystal Ball...

Click through for the maps. This is a really cool article.

30-Year-Old Man Must Move Out of Parents' House, Judge Rules (VIDEO)

This story was getting a lot of attention the other day, and then the dude went on CNN with Brooke Baldwin, god knows why?

At Hot Air, "The 30-Year-Old Being Evicted From His Parents’ Home Is Exactly How You Thought He’d Be":

Exit question: Is it true, as Brooke Baldwin claims near the end, that the public views Millennials as “so entitled”? Goofing on them is fun but what supposedly makes Millennials more entitled than the garbage generation you and I know as Boomers? Millennials have had their career prospects damaged by the financial crisis, with all sorts of bad knock-on effects (some of which may resonate with Rotondo), and they’ve had their retirement prospects cannibalized by greedy elders who won’t let go of their federal entitlements no matter what it means for the country’s future. If ever you’re forced to choose between Millennials and Boomers, take the Millennials every time.

Actually, I'm a Boomer so no.

Interesting post, in any case.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Tipped Off Illegal Aliens Ahead of ICE Enforcement

At the Washington Post, via Memeorandum, "Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tipped off immigrants about ICE raid and isn't sorry she did."

And at Althouse.

More at the San Francisco Chronicle:

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be conducting an operation in the Bay Area in the next day or so.https://t.co/xcqWge3VRX

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) February 25, 2018

Leftists Allege U.S. Separating Illegal Alien Families

Actually, that sounds like a plan. But to leftists, it's just evidence that immigration enforcement is evil.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. is separating immigrant parents and children to discourage others, activists say."

Hannity: President Trump Delivered Soaring First State of the Union Address (VIDEO)

The Democrats have nothing. They're nihilists.

From Hannity's show last night. It's good:

About That 2018 Democrat Midterms Rout?

At WaPo, "That upcoming Democratic rout? Suddenly, it’s looking far less certain":

Analysis: That upcoming Democratic rout? Suddenly, it’s looking far less certain. https://t.co/p2yPW8QeKD

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 1, 2018

There have been a lot of positive signs for Democrats’ chances in 2018 over the past few months: A series of special elections in which the party vastly improved on its performance in past contests, though without always seeing a victory as a result. A widening gap in the “generic ballot” poll question, asking people if they prefer to vote for the Democrats or the Republicans in the upcoming House contests. And, of course, President Trump’s ongoing unpopularity.

Mix those ingredients together, and the result is a midterm election that looks like it could be awfully good for the still-battered party. This has led to a surge of enthusiasm on the left about a seemingly inevitable blue wave sweeping over Washington, bringing the Democrats back to power.

But those trends aren’t as stable as they seem.

Consider the generic ballot question. In RealClearPolitics’ average of polling, the Democrats had a stunning 13-point advantage over the Republicans in late December. Since then, though, that advantage has plunged.

The Democratic advantage now is 7.3 points — still big, but the lowest it has been since last July.

At the same time, Trump’s getting more popular. He hit a low in approval last December, too. He’s still unpopular — but since that low he’s seen a four-point increase in approval according to the RealClearPolitics average. His net approval rating — those who approve minus those who don’t — has risen from minus-21 to minus-13.

Those still aren’t great numbers, but there’s a correlation between a president’s approval and how his party fares in House races. As Trump’s approval rises, so do his party’s chances in November.

Then there’s money. On Thursday morning, The Post reported that the Republican National Committee had substantially outraised the Democrats in 2017. The RNC and its House and Senate committees raised a total of nearly $289 million last year. The Democrats raised a combined $258 million — but the Democratic National Committee raised only $64.5 million to the RNC’s $123 million.

As we will write in nearly every article about the 2018 elections until, say, August, it’s still early. Lots of time to raise money, lots of time for movement in the polls. But the question is how those polls will move. Recent polls have shown an improvement in perceptions of the Republican tax bill, for example, which could both be driving the recent increase in the party’s overall polling and could suggest a longer-term improvement is in the offing...

The Democrats are totally freakin' out. The State of the Union speech was phenomenal and leftists have seen the future. It's not bright for them. (They're already unglued, so I can't say they've become any more unglued than they already are; perhaps they're just showing it more?)

More at the link.

When Dreamer Platitudes Whitewash Bloody Reality

From Michelle Malkin, "'Dreamers' and Demons":

Michelle Malkin: 'Dreamers' and Demons https://t.co/V1vNre1jhY

— John Oliver (@sokeijarhead) February 1, 2018

Xinran Ji, 24, had big dreams. But demons demolished them.

The bright hopes of young Xinran Ji, a University of Southern California engineering student from Inner Mongolia, died in 2014 at the hands of a then-19-year-old "Dreamer" and his thug pals. Mexican illegal alien Jonathan DelCarmen, who first jumped the southern border at age 12, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last summer in the savage robbery and fatal beating of Ji -- who was walking home from a study group after midnight.

No, it wasn't President Trump, ICE agents, Republicans or conservative talk show hosts who racially profiled Xinran Ji. It was "Dreamer" DelCarmen and his partners in crime: Alberto Ochoa, 17, Andrew Garcia, 18, and Alejandra Guerrero, 16. The gangsters targeted Ji because he was Asian and assumed he "must have money." Guerrero had sent Facebook messages about wanting to "flock" (rob) white and Chinese people. Off-campus neighborhoods around USC are dominated by Mexican Mafia affiliates that target foreign students and shake down local businesses owned by law-abiding immigrants.

"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends stalked Ji on a street corner in south central L.A. before bashing him in the head with a baseball bat and a wrench. The attack was caught on multiple security cameras. Ji managed to stagger home to his apartment, leaving a quarter-mile trail of blood behind him.

Sometime during the night, Xinran Ji died in his bed. And the aspirations of his family, who sacrificed everything to send him to America to pursue his studies, perished with him.

"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends drove off to a nearby beach to rob two more innocent people in a city and state that have defiantly declared themselves "sanctuaries" for people in the United States illegally -- not for the best and brightest like Xinran Ji, but for lawless barbarians like Jonathan DelCarmen.

"It's like heaven fell down," Ji's father told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George Lomeli at Garcia's sentencing hearing.

"His life was taken by these demons," Ji's aunt added. "They robbed and killed an innocent youth with very vicious means, and this was inhuman."

Garcia received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ji's parents' sentence was far worse: a brutal, violent and permanent separation from their only child. In Washington, D.C., however, some families matter more than others. And victims of indiscriminate open borders, like Xinran Ji, don't exist.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, proud promoter of sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants, led more than two dozen Democrats in turning the State of the Union address into "Take an Illegal Alien to Work Day."

Platitudes whitewash bloody reality.

"I want to be clear: DREAMers are Americans," declared Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who invited an illegal alien from El Salvador who now works at Apple. "They contribute to our economy, our communities and our strength and stability as a nation."

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., brought a Mexican illegal alien, Cesar Montelongo, now enrolled in the M.D.-Ph.D. program at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

"I hope Cesar's presence reminds President Trump what's at stake in the debate over DACA: the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young people who want to contribute to our country's future."

Democrats and pro-amnesty radicals protest any glint of sunlight shed on the destructive consequences of not enforcing our nation's immigration laws. They claim it's unfair to focus on single cases or "anecdotes," even as they promote DACA recipients as a holy, unassailable class of "honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists and valedictorians."

This propaganda, to which open-borders Republicans have fecklessly capitulated, is an offense to decency and truth...

More.

This is What the Democratic Party Has Become

From Ann Coulter, "Democrats Boo America":

NEW COLUMN IS POSTED! DEMOCRATS BOO AMERICA https://t.co/gFCVYctd19

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 31, 2018

Democrats Boo America https://t.co/qqlc2S5PVH

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 1, 2018

Unlike the president, I don't call everything "incredible," but Trump's State of the Union address was incredible, beautifully delivered. (This guy could have a future in television!)

As proof, I cite every single media outlet bitterly complaining after the speech that, as MSNBC's chyron put it: "TRUMP FAILS TO MENTION RUSSIA'S ELECTION MEDDLING IN STATE OF THE UNION."

He did not address the elephant in the room!

A lot of people don't like Trump, but no one was thinking that. It's only an elephant in your room, media. This is the very definition of solipsistic.

What did they want him to say? "I confess!"? Then they would have complained that the speech was all about him. There would be five Mueller deputies going over the speech, line by line.

If that's all they got, it was a great speech.

The media claimed that Trump tricked them into reporting that his address was going to be bipartisan -- and then double-crossed them by delivering a "divisive" speech.


To be sure, there were a few partisan flourishes, galling to both sides.

Points Liberals Hate:

-- "Beautiful clean coal";

-- The end of Obamacare's individual mandate;

-- Keeping Guantanamo open; and

-- Firing useless government employees working for the Veterans Administration.

Points Conservatives Hate:

-- Amnesty;

-- Pointless wars; and

-- Any policy Trump mentioned when the camera flashed to Ivanka.

Altogether, these partisan remarks consumed about seven minutes of an 80-minute speech.

The bulk of Trump's address celebrated:

-- A booming economy;


-- Companies bringing jobs home;

-- Low black unemployment;

-- The flag;

-- The national motto;

-- God;

-- Rebuilding roads and bridges;

-- Law enforcement;

-- The life of a child born to an opioid addict;

-- The military;

-- Veterans; and

-- Getting the best immigrants we can.

I'm trying to imagine FDR opposing any of that. But according to today's Democrats, those issues are "divisive." (Calling the president a "racist" 2 million times a day -- that's not particularly divisive.)

Democrats have apparently decided that the magic of immigration-created demographic transformation means the future is theirs! They no longer have to worry about middle-of-the-road voters, independents, undecideds -- or really any Americans at all.

The entire party has embraced Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet's advice (offered back when he thought Trump was going to lose): "The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. ... F*ck Anthony Kennedy." (No asterisk in the original.)

Drawing on his family's mystique, Rep. Joseph Kennedy III delivered the Democratic rebuttal while standing in an auto body shop in front of a broken-down car. The only thing missing was a wet girl in the back seat, seaweed in her hair, desperately scratching at the windshield.

To drive home the point that the Democratic Party is not a moribund carcass with nothing but memories, next year Chelsea Clinton should give the response. Then Hillary, followed by Amy Carter.

Kennedy began by unironically denouncing privilege and celebrity. (As everyone knows, Democrats cannot STAND celebrity!) He then devoted the lion's share of his speech to the Democrats' pet issues: transgenders and foreigners. This is a party so completely insulated from the concerns of normal people that it is now dedicating itself to exotic micro-issues...

More.

President Trump is Winning

Well, it's been a terrible week for Democrats, and it's going to be a lot worse for them if the memo comes out tomorrow, and that's looking likely. I loved the State of the Union. President Trump was a master, a great communicator if there ever was one, and he trolled the Democrats hard. The Nancy Pelosi memes alone were priceless.

More on that in a bit. Meanwhile, from Thomas Edsall, at the New York Times, "Trump Has Got Democrats Right Where He Wants Them" (also at Memeorandum):

.@Edsall: The greatest unknown is how immigration reform will influence the voting behavior of the white working class https://t.co/wVhbIsWwdF

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) February 1, 2018

President Trump’s immigration proposal has put Democrats in a bind; they know it and he knows it.

Trump’s immigration “framework” — first outlined on Jan. 25 — represents an unusually sophisticated strategy. He proposes to more than double the number of Dreamers granted a path to citizenship, a significant concession to Democrats.

In return, he seeks approval of a set of policies strongly opposed by the left, each of which is designed to stem what Trump sees as a threatening increase in the nonwhite population of the United States.

What kind of numbers are we talking about? According to the Pew Research Center:

In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014.

There are now an estimated 690,000 registered Dreamers in the United States, all of whom were brought to this country as children before 2007. Trump’s offer would increase the number offered a path to citizenship to 1.8 million by adding those who are eligible for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), but who never registered.

For a Democratic Party whose electoral strength depends on Hispanic support (64 percent of Latinos identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party in 2016) preventing the deportation of the Dreamers and providing them with legal status has become a matter of political necessity.

Trump, acutely aware of the importance of DACA to Democrats, deliberately turned the status of Dreamers into a crisis on Sept. 5 when he ended the Dreamers program.

Since then, DACA has been the subject of constant debate and negotiation. Democrats have continued to threaten to shut down the government, when the Treasury runs out of money on Feb. 8, if no favorable agreement can be reached.

Trump’s proposal more than meets Democratic demands on DACA. But in return Trump wants Democrats to swallow three proposals of varying unpalatability.

First, the creation of a $25 billion fund for construction of a southern border wall to prevent illegal entry to the United States, primarily by undocumented Hispanics.

Second, a shift in immigration priorities from family reunification to a merit system granting entry to workers with relatively high skills. This would require limiting reunification preferences to minor children and spouses, while eliminating them for parents, siblings and adult children, what critics call “chain migration.” These steps would reduce immigration from developing countries: The two top countries of origin benefiting from family reunification policies are Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Third, an end to the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. The countries providing the largest numbers of immigrants under the lottery visa program, according to the State Department, are Cameroon, Congo, Liberia, Egypt, Iran, Nepal, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The greatest unknown is how immigration reform will influence the voting behavior of the white working class.

In a Jan. 29 Vox essay, “The math is clear: Democrats need to win more working-class white votes,” Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, writes that Democrats seeking to regain control of Congress may be forced to mute their opposition to Trump immigration provisions they find offensive.

Teixeira argues that:

The view that Democrats can get along without working-class white voters is simply wrong. It reflects wishful thinking and a rigid set of political priors — namely, that Democrats’ political problems always stem from insufficient motivation of base voters — more than a cold, hard look at what the electoral and demographic data say.

The problem for Democrats is that not only do they need to improve margins among white working-class voters but they cannot allow a repetition of the minority voting patterns in 2016. That year, black turnout fell to 59.6 percent from 66.6 percent in 2012; and Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote, five percentage points less than President Barack Obama in 2012.

Doug Jones’s December victory in the Alabama Senate race demonstrated how crucial black voters are to Democrats: In that close contest, African-Americans, 92 percent of whom voted for Jones, made up 29 percent of the electorate. They are 26 percent of the voting age population.

The conflicts the Trump proposals present for Democrats are most painful to Hispanic and black elected officials.

Brilliant. Freakin' brilliant. I love this president. I really do.

More.

Marriage and Kids vs. Dogs and Netflix

I'd like to see actually statistics on this, but if it's anywhere near majority opinion, we can be relieved that humans will die out by self-extinction over the near few generations.

My god, what is wrong with these people?

It's Lauren Southern, in the U.K.: