In California, for instance, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by roughly 5 million. In New York, it’s similar; roughly 4 million more Democrats than Republicans.
When it comes to small, rural red states, Trump carried Wyoming by a huge percentage margin - but that was only by 120,000 votes. Montana = Trump by 100,000. Alaska = Trump by less than 40,000. North Dakota = Trump by 120,000. South Dakota = Trump by 110,000. Nebraska = Trump by 180,000. Idaho = Trump by 170,000. Kansas = Trump 200,000.
You can tell where I’m going here: There are seven red states that are only red by virtue of a margin advantage of about 1 million Republicans in total. Whereas there are 9 million “surplus” Democrats in California and New York. Those surplus Democrats may be of some benefit in the House, and state/local politics, but they are no additional use as far as the presidency and the Senate are concerned. California’s electoral votes go to the Democrat regardless of whether the (D) candidate wins by twenty or fifty percent; same for its two senators.
So if two million Californian and New York Democrats would simply move into the rural red states mentioned above, they’d suddenly flip 14 Republican senate seats blue. That would give Democrats a colossal advantage in the Senate. They would also flip several dozen Electoral College votes blue as well, essentially sealing the presidency for the D’s.
Yes, I know, nobody wants to move from San Jose or Manhattan to Idaho or Kansas. But it doesn’t have to mean living on the rural prairie. It could still mean living in a small city. What Democrats have done right now is to inadvertently gerrymander themselves by packing themselves into CA and NY. They have all the numbers necessary to win a huge Senate majority, they’ve just packed themselves badly.
No one chooses where to live based on trying to influence electoral maps. What you’re really describing is the urban/rural divide. People are going to live where they can best meet their needs and responsibilities, whether financial, family, education, professional, etc.
Are there even two million people in California and New York who are so committed to national politics that they’re willing to up sticks to South Dakota for it? And you say they’d do this “suddenly”; where do they live after they move? There aren’t empty houses for 170,001 people in Idaho. And do California and New York then use some kind of overbearing zoning decree to keep their old houses from being filled by other people who would be “gerrymandering themselves” by moving there?
Sure - practically, it is a nonstarter. But intellectually, it is appealing.
I read a book, “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear,” about a group of Libertarians who organized and took over a NH town. (Amusing read, BTW. Spoiler, bears LIKE IT when folk do away with burdens like trash disposal rules! ;)). It is fun to ponder groups of liberals making a concerted effort to make one city in the smallest states a liberal mecca.
This is wrong. If you took the states Trump won in 2016 and only flipped Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, and Kansas, Trump still wins on that map 276-262. The electoral college overweights the voters in big swing states, not small conservative states. If you want to do a ridiculous mass population transfer to “seal the presidency,” you’ve got to send people to places like Florida and Pennsylvania.
To some degree they are. Millennials are forgoing the big city lifestyle and moving into areas that are depressed and doing what they can to get involved and help out, many of those places, usually small cities in rural areas are in general much redder then the cities they leave behind. The pandemic also pushed many people out of the big cities as well. And Trump’s efforts to punish the blue states by doing things like greatly reduce the SALT tax deduction also helped push blue people out of placed like Blue NY and CA and into red areas.
Well then why aren’t you moving to a state where the partisan balance is closer, and your vote has more of a chance of making a difference in the outcome? May I humbly recommend Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, which were the three closest states in the Electoral College in 2020, and all have marquee Senate races this fall.
There’s no Constitutional requirement that states award all of their Electors to the statewide vote winner. Nebraska and Maine award Electors based in part on results in individual Congressional districts.
The most Republican states (Wyoming, West Virginia) are much redder than the most Democratic states (Hawaii, Vermont) are blue. So even though clumping hurts the Democrats more, in any given presidential, it’s still conceivable that the Democrats will lose the popular vote and win the election.
Note that the electorate for Presidential and Senate elections IS gerrymandered, in a sense. The entire states are the voting districts. And these districts don’t get re-drawn very often, certainly not every ten years. But the kind of clumping of which OP speaks is a kind of gerrymander, of sorts.
Well, that’s my point. Asking one voter to uproot his or her life and move to a completely different state just to potentially affect the outcome of some political races is absurd, much less the millions of voters stipulated in the OP.
Although I suppose it’s worked at some level before: