2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I think I have a good understanding of why Hillary lost, but what I still don't get [View all]LisaM
(28,609 posts)I know, I live in one of them (Seattle). I can tell you that the people moving here pay attention to national races and vanish in between (we had four elections in the last year, and one had the lowest percentage turnout since the Depression). They are in a tech bubble and don't think about down-ticket races. They have liberal social values, but don't understand that the Democrats share them so don't identify with the party.
Aside from the apathetic turnout in off years (which, I think, leads to a smaller candidate pool), as long as people keep flocking to the cities, this is not going to change unless our system changes. Along with the other problems, it's becoming unrepresentative. States that are losing population are getting way more power in proportion to their size.
How do we get people to move to these places? I always think that North Carolina and Georgia are on the cusp of change, because they have liberal big cities, but it hasn't quite happened yet. I'd think that anywhere that has a reasonably livable city in a red state could flip the state in a few years. But people won't move there. I get that because life is often intolerable in rural areas, especially for POC and LGBT people, but if we continue with NYC and Seattle and San Francisco and Portland growing and growing and red states losing population, nothing will change except that it will get more lopsided. And on the state level, gerrymandering has made a huge difference.
I wish some of the tech companies would target smaller cities, though that's tricky, too, because I'm sure the people who live there don't want the high rents and other crap that comes with gentrification.