In his most recent post, Wretchard of Belmont Club notes that there been a relative shift in the population from the states that Mr. Kerry carried to the states that Mr. Bush carried and wonders why. Wretchard and his commenters suggest a number of possibilities including Blue State social attitudes leading to decreased birthrates, possible increased rates of abortion, lower tax rates, and the availability of cheap land.
I began to comment on this question but I found that my comment had overflowed its banks and threatened to drown the thread so I decided to take my comment over here.
There are a few other answers and some of them are not without irony.
Besides relatively slower natural increase in the Blue States there’s also been an enormous movement of population from the North-East and Midwest to the South and West.
The stereotypical Red State is part of the old Confederacy which post-Civil War was un- or under-developed for almost a hundred years due to racist social attitudes, disdain, geography, and climate. Starting in the 1930’s the federal government began making enormous investments in the South and the West. If you don’t believe me google “Tennessee Valley Authority”, “Boulder Dam”, “rural electrification”, or “Interstate Highway Act”.
World War II saw an enormous growth in the number and size of military bases in this country. Many of them were built in coastal areas that had undeveloped or cheap land. That meant neither the developed North-East or Mid-West. And, in particular, California, Texas, and Florida.
So my first answer for the reason for the growth, ironically for small government Red Staters (by no means all): federal government subsidy.
These government subsidies had secondary effects. Many of the GI’s who were stationed in these bases liked what they saw and returned to these new areas after the war. And electrification made something else possible: air conditioning. One of the reasons that these unsettled areas had remained that way is that they became terribly hot and uncomfortable in the summer time. The air conditioning that available and cheap electrical power made possible made life much more pleasant in these areas.
So my second answer is that modernization made life more pleasant in the South and the West.
You saw my mention of the Interstate Highway Act? The Interstate Highway system has made it significantly easier to reach areas of the country that had previously been pretty remote.
My third answer is that modern communications and transportation made previously remote areas accessible.
These areas of the South and West had been the home of a set of attitudes that Walter Russell Mead has dubbed “Jacksonian” (populist nationalists). And those attitudes are the stereotypical Red State attitudes. The people who moved there after World War II and, at an accelerating rate, after the back of segregationism was broken in the 1960’s tended to adopt these values rather than convert the natives to the attitudes more prevalent in their home states for reasons that belong in another post.
UPDATE: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam.
