Let’s pause for a moment at the first presidential debate of the 2016 campaign and go back to try to understand how voting patterns have changed over the course of a generation, comparing the 2012 presidential election results with those of 1988, and keeping in mind possible changes since 2012 suggested by 2016 polls.
My thesis is that the changes in states’ voting behavior can best be explained by the dramatic raise in migration over the past generation—not just immigration, which has been the obvious focus of this campaign season, but, even more so, domestic migration within the United States.
The overall picture shows a decline in Republican support — from the 53 percent that George H. W. Bush won in 1988 to the 47 percent that Mitt Romney won in 2012. But the decline has not been uniform.
In 14 states with 201 electoral votes, the Republican share fell by double digits. In 20 states with 161 electoral votes, the Republican share rose or fell by less than 3 percent. In 16 states and D.C. with 176 electoral votes, it fell by about the national average. (Comparing the Democratic share yields nearly identical results, because minority candidates received only 1 or 2 percent in those two elections.)
The double-digit Republican declines in California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are often attributed to high immigration by Latinos and Asians. But they are also the result of massive inward migration by the middle class due to high taxes and high housing costs.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, California leaned Republican because of the huge numbers of immigrants from the Midwest. Starting in the 1980s, it became strongly Democratic not only because of the huge influx from Mexico but also because many descendants of Midwestern migrants moved away.
More than a million descendants of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants from the tri-state region around New York City and from the Philadelphia metropolitan area moved south along Interstate 95. This migration turned these metropolitan areas, which were competitive in 1988, into solidly Democratic ones.
And those internal migrants have made Virginia and Florida, and to a lesser extent North Carolina and Georgia, more Democratic. Virginia, solidly Republican in the 1980s, voted in line with the national average in Obama’s elections and has tilted more Democratic this year. North Carolina, competitive in the last two elections, is doing so again.
It also matters who moves in. The two largest states, California and Texas, have identical percentages of Latinos. California, losing middle-income whites, gains college-educated liberals, while the immense national migration to Texas is culturally and economically conservative. The result is that California is sheltered Democrat and Texas is sheltered Republican. In the 2014 gubernatorial election, Texas Latinos voted Republican at about the same rate as California whites.
States that experienced little or no internal migration and low immigration were predominantly Republican between 1988 and 2012: the Appalachian Mountains; southwest from West Virginia through Arkansas and Oklahoma; most of the Great Plains and northern Rocky Mountain states; and the heavily Germanic-Scandinavian states of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The trends in some states can be surprising. Maryland, with a huge black migration from Washington, D.C., went from marginal to safely Democratic. Massachusetts, after tax cuts in the 1990s, had low migration and its Democratic trend is close to the national average.
The largest swing to the Democrats, 20 percent, occurred in Vermont, where many New Yorkers like Bernie Sanders replaced New England flint farmers, with similar trends in western New Hampshire and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Mississippi, unlike the rest of the inner South, leans Democratic, not Republican, apparently because of higher black turnout.
The growing population of Latinos and Asians in the suburbs of huge metropolitan areas, as well as the greater cultural liberalism among college-educated whites, caused many of them to switch from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party by 2012. This trend is likely to intensify because of Donald Trump’s unpopularity among these groups.
But Trump’s appeal to low-educated and older whites seems to be putting him ahead in places where the elder Bush lagged in 1988 — West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa (Michael Dukakis’s second-best state at the time). Trump is also doing well in Nevada, which, with its huge Latino and Filipino immigrants, was 13 points Democratic from 1988 to 2012, because he is ahead of many whites without college degrees.
The biggest mystery, not surprisingly, is Florida — a must-win for both candidates. A recent influx of Puerto Ricans into the Orlando metro area is helping Democrats. But domestic migrants from the Northeast were Trump’s strongest supporters in the primaries and could tip his 29 electoral votes in favor of the Queens guy with the Palm Beach home.
