I looked at the Virginia governor’s race election results by county. I target about 10 swing or bellwether states for Governor, President, and Senate results, and Virginia is one of them.
What I try to do is look for trendlines (i.e. rural vs. urban, race, income, etc.). I started this to see if I could create a predictor model for future elections as well as aggregate results within certain time fences using all three election cycles. I can safely say after three years of doing this, I’m barely further along than when I started.
One thing that has jumped out is that the two parties have widened the gulf of where they get their votes. Democrats are locking in the urban vote and Republicans the rural. Not a huge finding, but significant when it comes to understanding why things are happening today.
For example, why were so many Biden illegal aliens escorted in and then shipped to major cities? Why is the Trump review of various welfare programs causing so much over-the-top panic and anger among Democrats? Why are “Blue States” ignoring common-sense anti-crime measures and forcing lawlessness on their own constituents? The answer is simple: They need massive numbers on election day.
The number of college students is shrinking (and honestly isn’t an overly large voter bloc), the middle class wants stability and safety (something Democrat policies are 100% in opposition to), and the number of elderly (although currently the largest-growing demographic) by nature will eventually deplete. Historically this is a bloc that is more Republican, but due in large part to the Baby Boomer effect the senior citizen bloc has trended towards the Democrats.
Another factor in the rural/urban divide is that the major population areas (especially in the Blue states) have seen major population losses. Affordability, crime, drugs, and poor schools have had a hollowing-out effect. If you have the means to escape, you do. If you don’t, you wallow in the urban hellscape. The Democrats who created this situation cannot fix it. This is a feature and not a bug in their system.
You say, “No duh Captain Obvious. We’ve been hearing about this for years.” I agree, but I believe we have reached a tipping point.
Up to now, we have been on the road to urban societal collapse. Each year brought an incremental worsening to the overall situational scale. This scale takes into account deterioration and assigns different values to where you were on that scale:
- Crimes goes up—well, I can make my kids stay in the house after dark or play in my backyard.
- I lost my job at Walmart because they closed due to shoplifting—well, I can get welfare benefits and work a side job to make ends meet.
- My kids go to school and they are getting an education, but they aren’t proficient in the 3 Rs—well, at least they’re at the same level as their peers.
But now we’ve reached the bottom of the scale: Kids in the house or in the backyard are killed in random attacks, welfare abuse is clearing out those who shouldn’t have been enrolled, and the urban public schools (especially for minorities) are a shining example of expensive incompetence and failure (think Milwaukee Public Schools).
We will not see a massive depopulation of these urban areas (there are only so many people who have the means to choose flight), but it does lead to a major shift in political power. This allows us to make sense of the Biden years and the Democrats’ current reactions to Donald Trump understandable. The Democrats not only needed to bring in new voters, but voters who have no memory of what it was once like in the United States. The prosperity, hope, and opportunity to make yourself better personally and financially is being replaced by envy, anger, and intolerance. In other words, the Democrats need people who have much lower expectations and bring a new lowest notch level to the overall situational scale.
This perfectly encapsulates the Mamdani win. Even if (sorry, when) he fails, the result will still be 1000% better than what the Biden Illegals came from. In the meantime, he and the Democrats will scream about inequality, racism, and an economy that they drove into the ditch but somehow now the Republicans own and must fix.
Things will get worse until they get better.