Sunbelt States to Snowbelt Ones?

Many Amer­i­cans began mov­ing to the south­ern and west­ern parts of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s due, in part, to the inven­tion of cen­tral air-conditioning. It made life there bear­able in the summer.

In ret­ro­spect, this caused a rev­o­lu­tion in U.S. pol­i­tics that would res­onate for decades. Richard Nixon won his pres­i­den­tial elec­tion by pur­su­ing the so-called “South­ern Strat­egy” of get­ting south­ern­ers who had tra­di­tion­ally voted Demo­c­ra­tic to switch par­ties. (Some schol­ars allege that Nixon’s cam­paign used thinly-veiled racism to cap­i­tal­ize on the ten­sions and anger that still existed among white south­ern­ers fol­low­ing the Civil-Rights era, but that is a topic for another time.) As a result, the bal­ance of power in the United States shifted from the east to the south and remained there for decades.

Nearly every pres­i­dent who was elected since John F. Kennedy was from the south or south­west. Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter. Ronald Rea­gan. Bill Clin­ton. George Bush and George W. Bush moved to Texas and started their polit­i­cal careers there. (Lyn­don John­son and Ger­ald Ford were not elected.) Many of the lead­ers in Con­gress were also south­ern­ers: Tom Delay, Newt Gin­grich, and so on. Until recent times, I barely remem­ber hear­ing any national leader speak who did not have a south­ern accent. Since the South is more reli­gious than the North, the Repub­li­can Party could also use that fact to its advan­tage through orga­ni­za­tions includ­ing the Moral Major­ity and Chris­t­ian Coalition.

But, accord­ing to a Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor arti­cle, the nation’s demo­graph­ics may be chang­ing again:

For more than a decade, Amer­i­cans pulled up stakes in regions like the North­east and Mid­west to live in warmer climes. Now, in sev­eral key Sun­belt states, that flow has slowed or stopped altogether…

Still, some states have seen a turn­around. Mass­a­chu­setts and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia saw their first net pop­u­la­tion inflow of the decade this year. North Dakota expe­ri­enced its sec­ond – and biggest.

West Vir­ginia saw its biggest influx of the decade and Wyoming, which is now America’s fastest-growing state, had its biggest increase in net migra­tion this year.

The elec­tion of Barack Obama — who is from Illi­nois — might be a rev­o­lu­tion in demo­graphic terms and a har­bin­ger of change to come. The two most-likely con­tenders for the 2012 GOP nom­i­na­tion are Sarah Palin and Mitt Rom­ney, who are from Alaska and Mass­a­chu­setts respectively.

As I watched some of the so-called “Tea Party” protests on tele­vi­sion ear­lier this year, I could not help but won­der: Why, exactly, are these peo­ple so angry? Was it sim­ply racism at the elec­tion of a black man as pres­i­dent? Was it really just anger at the fed­eral government’s spend­ing habits?

Then I saw sev­eral elected offi­cials and con­ser­v­a­tive activists threat­en­ing every­thing from local suc­ces­sion to muted rev­o­lu­tion, and I real­ized: Per­haps the protests were a sym­bol of col­lec­tive dis­may at their region’s loss of power after hold­ing a monop­oly for nearly forty years? For two decades, they had reversed the out­come of the U.S. Civil War — which is always present in the South’s sub­con­scious — and then lost it again.

If the Mon­i­tor arti­cle is cor­rect, the North and East (fairly lib­eral) along with the West (more lib­er­tar­ian than con­ser­v­a­tive) might gain more power through elec­toral votes and the num­ber of con­gres­sional rep­re­sen­ta­tives over the next sev­eral years.