The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now.
As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags.
You're viewing a single thread.
Oh, no!
Anyway.
This attitude pisses me off for a number of reasons.
Not everyone can afford to move out of these states as they become steadily shittier. Smart people leaving further entrenches the conservative majority in those states, which makes it harder to flip states. It makes it easier for Republicans to control the Senate, and harder for Democrats to accomplish anything (not that they ever fucking want to). And when Republicans put policies in place that fuck over the people who can't leave, Democrats on the national level consider it to be a Red State Problem that they don't have to worry about doing anything about, because all the people who can't leave evidently deserve it for being outnumbered and not having enough money to move.
Thing is, Democrats' lack of solidarity is gonna come back to bite them in the ass. When their negligence has caused a permanent Republican majority in the Senate, those Red State Problems they didn't give a shit about are gonna be implemented at the national level. They're not gonna stay Red State Problems.
Not that it makes it any better, but a lot of those people who can't afford to move also can't afford to vote (time off work, travel to a polling station, time to actually look into what's going on)
I will never ever ever ever accept "had to work" as an excuse to not vote.
Never.
That's an extreme position that ignores a lot of realities. For someone living paycheck to paycheck with children to feed, losing a job to go vote is not even a question. They're under duress.
Pretty much everywhere requires employers to give you some amount of time off to go vote, often paid. Voting by mail and early voting are much more widely available now.
I'm not saying that voter suppression doesn't happen - it most certainly does - but for the vast majority of people, "had to work" simply isn't a valid excuse.
Then they will be under more duress. I've been there. This is no excuse. Meanwhile, employers should be sued for 95% of their wealth for interfering with the civic duty of their countrymen. And that IS NOT an extreme position.
Control of states like Texas and Florida are permanently lost to conservatives. As long as conservative Governors have complete control over their Secretaries of State, they cannot lose their "elections". Remember, every conservative accusation is a confession.
I reject the premise that any state can be permanently lost. In 2020 Biden received more votes in Texas than he did in New York, and lost the state by only 620k votes (under 6%), with [66 % voter turnout](https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/70-92.shtml#::text=2020%20%E2%80%93%20November%20(Presidential)). Criminal Ken Paxton was going around saying that if he hadn't been able to shut down Harris County sending out mail-in ballots to everybody like they had intended, Trump would have lost Texas. If we can get voter turnout up into the 70s in the big 4 metro areas (Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio), we really could see the state go blue for state-wide and Federal offices. Unfortunately our Governor, Lt Governor, and Attorney General are all elected on mid-term years, and we have even shittier turnout in those years (dropped under 50% in 2022). But if we can get turnout up enough in a Presedential or US Senate year (both in 2024) then we can expect some serious national support in the next midterm to flip our state-wide offices.
You are assuming the Texas Secretary of State, who is under complete control of the Governor's office, would allow a blue victory in Texas.
The Governor's appointed Secretary of State operates elections in Texas, including the tally and review of ballots, which is handled electronically by the SoS and their private helpers. There is simply no world where a conservative/fascist should be trusted to operate and tally their own elections. They even audit their own work when accused of inaccuracy or inpropriety. Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. They lack veracity and are absolutely to never be trusted. Never.
I appreciate your optimism and I agree that we need greater voter turnout, but I guarantee you voter turnout will not save us if Texas conservatives are counting the votes. Trusting a conservative to be honest is a deadly mistake.
Oh I don't trust them at all. But we at least recently switched from the completely black box eSlate voting machines that store your vote on local internal memory, and were notoriously easier to alter the results in, to ones that print out a human-readable ballot that we can verify before scanning it into the ballot box. So that's a huge step in the right direction. I believe if we can just get turnout high enough, there will be so much national funding for law suits to enforce bipartisan monitoring and media scrutiny and all that that I think it'd be hard for them to wash it all away.
I hope you are right. I was on the purple hope train for years until fascism won in 2016. Watching it grow stronger has really changed my outlook. I know not to trust my neighbors now. I understand what normal people will have to do to our neighbors if we are still living in conservative strongholds when fascism takes power again. I prefer your outcome to the one I see on the horizon.
Yeah 2024 is pretty damn crucial. Have several emmigration strategies if it goes poorly.
This problem will broaden to other states if Democrats continue to treat the issue flippantly.
I think most normal people (non-conservatives) see the danger, but truly have no idea what to do other than vote or flee. Resisting with violence may also become an option soon, but most normal people are opposed to violence.
Conservatism has never been defeated by pacifism. We should be training and preparing to resist the genocide of the normal people that conservatives are working toward.
Fleeing within the U.S. will not be enough to escape the conservative plague unless some wealthy blue states are able to balkanize into their own territories.
... Democrats on the national level consider it to be a Red State Problem that they don’t have to worry about doing anything about, because all the people who can’t leave evidently deserve it for being outnumbered and not having enough money to move.
Conservative policies don't only hurt progressives; they hurt everybody. If state conservatives are doing things which hurt everybody, they're that much closer to being voted out.
Except for the whole "leaving the state" thing.
Sounds to me like Democrats should start fighting to eliminate gerrymander instead of whining about it.
They should start fighting to do a lot of things (and won't), but I was talking about the Senate, which are statewide races largely unaffected by gerrymandering.
republican policies create more republicans and now that they're a majority (per the article) a majority of the next generation will be republican.
