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Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
So there is an article in some paper today saying Silicon Valley is losing jobs again over the past year. Last year I repated a report that without illegal immigration, California would have to report population losses over the last 20 or 30 years.
Chicago reported another population decline yr-over-yr.
And Boston, one of the greatest cities in the country no doubt.
You guys have heard me on this before. Anybody know of any Republican areas that are losing population? First the urban industrial northern cities died (or did the Public Schools come first), than all of the law-abiding whistle blowers in Arkansas.
Q: What is the opposite of the Midas touch called?
A: Democrats
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I don't know where you get your stats but it is a little more bleak than you paint it. You have to remember that the Republican party used to be a competitive party prior to the Southern Democrats changing sides. Conservatives had huge majorities in Congress and the Senate when you added the Republicans to the Conservative Democrats. In the Presidential Relm the only Democrats that could win were conservatives from the Solid South (Carter, Clinton, Gore). Now that the entire south has moved to the Republican party, and all the conservatives are pretty much in one party and the parties are almost at parity.
In the last two presidential elections people in rural areas voted for Bush and People in the cities voted for Gore and Kerry. The battle was in the suburbs. In the last election Kerry won the non Southern subarbs by a large margin and Bush won the southern suburbs by a minor margin. What gave Bush the edge in the popular vote was the huge margins in the rural areas - especially in the south.
What gave Bush the edge in the electoral college was the fact that the system favors small rural states. Each state regardless of size gets two extra electoral votes for their Senators. In addition, even if the state has less than 500,000 people the state gets one electoral vote, even though you normally only get one electoral vote for every 500,000 people. Wyoming with only 300,000 people gets three electoral votes.
Kerry did well even though he was a liberal from Massachusettes. How crazy is that. In the nation as a whole rural America is disappearing. The cities are growing slightly and the suburbs are really growing, but rural areas are still hemorraging.
A new type of voter that never existed before, has appeared and is growing at an alarming rate. The secular voter. Moderate religious people are diminishing, Evangelicals are growing, but the secular vote is growing even faster. The strongly religious used to be divided among the parties but they are almost all Republican now. And even though they are all Republican they only make up about sixty percent of the Republican vote.
White people in America, like white people everywhere, are diminishing because they are not reproducing. What is keeping America at par is the reproducing non-whites and immigration. All these groups trend strongly toward the Democratic side. All this immigration is increasing the amount of non-christians in this country and they mostly vote Democrat.
The bright point is that the exploding suburbs ten to be fiscallly conservative. So if you focus on economics conservatives can win over the suburban voter. But the Suburban voters are less religious than both the urban and rural voters. It is also in the suburbs where the secular voters are exploding.
California will continue to grow and become more politically significant with each passing year. The Silicon Valley's population may have diminshed but the South is growing like a weed. Every census California gets more electoral points and these will continue into the future. The only reason California does not have more is because of our huge illegal population. But you have to remember that the children of these illegal immigrants get automatic citizenship. The secular vote in California is up to 24% and is growing. These voters, unlike most Democrats, do show up and the polls, and are almost exclusively Democrat. California has more fundamentalists than any other state (you read that right) but they are completely eclipsed by the rest of the population. If you want to look to the future of American, just look at California.