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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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This is part of the GOP strategy.
Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri has openly acknowledged that the GOP strategy is to make it so miserable for Democrats in red and purple states that they will move to blue states. That would, in turn, cement Republican power in the White House, Senate and thereby the Supreme Court.
It won't work for long, since they're making people so poor they can't afford to move.
Well their goal is to make them too poor to vote as well
And you don't even have to be poor. We live in Indiana. Our house is worth far less than any blue state houses. We couldn't afford to buy a house in a blue state. I hate it here, but I'm here to stay until the housing market collapses.
High COL also means high income. You are expressing a sunk cost fallacy.
High income if you have a job lined up already. Having been jobless in California, I don't wish to repeat that.
Agree, Definitely recommend having job lined up before any major change like that.
Or just be willing to hustle? Being young helps too.
I got the job before heading to SF. But another friend of mine in tech sold everything he owned in Ohio, and rented a room in a house for like 800/month and lived with 4 other dudes in a huge house in the inner Richmond. Got by on app hustles until he found a gig coding.
He's back in Ohio now bc he decided to breed and be closer to family because of it. But he had a solid couple of years more in SF than I did. I kind of regret not just going for it sooner like he did.
Wages haven't kept up with increases in CoL for years, and the pandemic skyrocketed the latter while barely budging the former.
For real. I live in Texas currently. If I could afford it, I would move tomorrow. This place is Hell, in every sense.
Right? I'm also in Texas because Uncle Sam sent me there. The moment my contract is up, I'm fucking OUT of here.
Wish I hadn't changed my state of record to be Texas, but that just means I'll keep voting there until I can bounce. Right now I'm mad favoring Allred to unseat Cruz in 2024.
Me too. I'm a clinical social worker here, and so many of my LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here, especially with the most recent legislative session. I'm gonna stay here as long as possible and vote in every fucking election possible. Lately I've even been voting in the Republican primaries against the extremist candidates. It's so sad, because it wasn't this bad here when I was growing up in the 90s. We even had a Dem governor.
This is exactly what Abbott wants. Makes me want to plant more trees.
How “Christian” of him, eh? It’s disgusting. We are human souls who deserve safety and to not live in fear. I have hope that many Gen Z Texans feel disgusted as well, won’t move, and can turn Texas blue. Once more and more are able to vote, we can transform this state. Maybe that is too idealistic, but it keeps me sane while I am unable to move.
This is only a viable strategy as long as the electoral college exists.
It's not going away.
This argument needs to die. The EC is never going away, so stop pinning various strategies and hopes on it somehow magically disappearing. If people spent 1/2 as much time on actually voting and campaigning for center and left candidates as they do complaining about the EC, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.
I have worked on campaigns and studied politics for years. With the EC, the current SCOTUS, and the voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics of the last few decades , there is no reasonable long-term path to left, or even center, power. People are allowed to complain. People have been organizing, for years. Nothing has worked, and basic human rights are now being violated in ways and for groups that they hadn’t been before. You’re right that with our current governmental structure, the EC isn’t going anywhere. But democracy’s not about elections alone; it’s about the consent of the governed. A whole lot of us don’t consent, and I don’t think the current institutional infrastructure’s going to survive the blast when that pressure gets too high. And if anything (other than a Constitutional Convention based on the same principles as the EC) happens to the current arrangement, the EC goes too. No one in an underrepresented state would willingly accept those conditions.
HALF the population can't be bothered to vote in most elections. The country is being dragged to the Right and has been for years now and election after election a massive percent of the population doesn't seem it is worth going out to the polls. In presidential elections it is higher, but still - there are a LOT and I mean a LOT of elections that could have swung the other way if only a few hundred more people got off their butts and voted. We could have gotten rid of that blowhard Lauren Boebart (however it is spelled) last cycle. She won by only a few hundred votes in an election where less than 60% of the population of that district voted. Apparently Colorado is a mail-in state, so these people didn't even have to go drive anywhere.
The situation is even worse if you look at demographics. No one had more to lose than the youth of this country and their voting numbers are pitiful. What's worse is that they have the numbers to change elections. They are a massive group that at this point in time have more people than the dreaded Boomers. Yet their numbers are abysmal.
So when I hear about people complaining about the EC or gerrymandering or a host of other roadblocked set up by the Right for them to get their way on election day, I just think back that these are mostly just excuses. I am not saying that gerrymandering isn't real - it absolutely is - but even some of the most gerrymandered districts could swing the other way if enough people voted.
If you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the threat the right poses, and you see structural change is impossible, I sympathize. But blaming people who are struggling for not doing something they see as unlikely to produce positive change and that the state is simultaneously actively making it hard for them to do isn’t helpful. I’ve been politically involved since 2000 (academic study, campaign volunteering/work); Barring major disaster, I’m not seeing voter numbers going up from here significantly without legistative changes. You can yell at clouds all you want, but that’s not the point of leverage you’re looking for.
Making everyone a victim who is on some pre-determined path and they have no control over the things that happen to them is exactly the nonsense that I see the youth are falling for. I see posts by Zoomers all the time that essentially boil down to "we're screwed, so fuck it" or "I give up" or some such. That's not the America that I grew up in and I refuse to buy into this idea that change is impossible. Americans need "tough love" - coddling them in this idea of "IF ONLY so-and-so was different" then we could fix the environment/housing crisis/healthcare. Be the change you want to be. Expecting that it will simply be handled to you leads to this apathy and tuning-out that far too many Americans already fall into.
I don’t think you understand. No one in my position thinks things will he handed to/handled for us. (Your word choice is unclear.). I think we’re on the Titanic and we’ve struck the iceberg, we just haven’t done the horrible dying in the North Atlantic part. And if I wanted boomers who’ve probably studied our political structure less closely, spent less time doing actual campaign work, and seen less of the way things work than I have, telling me I’m entitled, I’d have asked one of those guys who likes talking about millennials like we’re children whose biggest problem is not laying off the avocado toast. “Kids today are weak, entitled whiners playing the victim card, and I know better because I’m older” may pass for discourse some places, but not here.
Ok. I think people’s actual lives are more important than a 250-year-old document that can’t differentiate between a flint-lock pistol and a machine gun. Don’t you?
redacted
I love living in L.A. because while we do have our right-wingers, seeing a Trump flag even in my semi-conservative pocket of the city is rare.
I'd say it's a valid strategy, abhorrent though. Because of the rural bias in GOP there will naturally be more counties, states etc that run gop if Dems move to denser blue areas.
Yeah, but the strategy’s multi-pronged, so even if you stay and suffer for your suffrage, they can find new reasons to prevent you from voting/discount your ballot. And then you’ve put your life and happiness in jeopardy for nothing. Not a great recruitment pitch for the Stay Put Brigade.
Had to scroll too far to find this! I also read that it was totally about strategy in those purple or starting to lean purple states as more young people lean liberal, and the older, evangelical crowd is not being replaced enough with young people to keep a good footing for the Republicans. If the liberal people leave, the states turn solid red, and then they don't need new people so much to keep power.
Of course no one wants to live in a place that is contrary to their beliefs so you can't blame anyone for moving somewhere else... but the implications of that are scary for the country as a whole.