And the future political implications

MICHAEL BARONE writing in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal has a very intersting article about the shifting (literally) demographics in the Unites States.

The gist of the article is that native-born Americans — mostly middle-class, traditional families — are fleeing the Coastal Megalopolises, effectively abandoning them to immigrants:

Democratic politicians like to decry what they describe as a widening economic gap in the nation. But the part of the nation where it is widening most visibly is their home turf, the place where they win their biggest margins (these metro areas voted 61% for John Kerry) and where, in exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartments and Beverly Hills mansions with immigrant servants passing the hors d’oeuvres, they raise most of their money.

And shifting populations foretells bad news for Democrats come the 2010 Census (and the realignment of House seats that accompanies that Census):

The bad news for them is that the Coastal Megalopolises grew only 4% in 2000-06, while the nation grew 6%. Coastal Megalopolitan states–New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois–are projected to lose five House seats in the 2010 Census, while California, which has gained seats in every census since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, is projected to pick up none.

And where do you think those House seats are going?

This is another political world from the Coastal Megalopolises: the Interior Boomtowns voted 56% for George W. Bush in 2004. Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Nevada–states dominated by Interior Boomtowns–are projected to pick up 10 House seats in the 2010 Census.

This conclusion is not going to sit well with the Left:

What’s now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.

I’m sure they’ll find a way to either discredit the article, spin it, or blame President Bush.

_________

OTHERS:

Ed thinks that these coastal cities need to think about “why their middle classes have found flyover country a destination.”

Mark Noonan think that the left is “doomed by demographics.”