Everybody knows that some important states, mainly Florida, are nearly always a coin toss.
Since different demographics vote differently, why didn’t Obama, or the local governor (if he’s a Democrat) invest in universities and high-tech industries in Florida, thereby getting an influx of better educated, more Democrats-leaning people?
There’s a “surplus” in NYS and NJ, so it won’t be missed.
I know this may lead to a cascade, but how come no one’s tried it before?
Because you can’t really engineer something like that. Mass movement tends to happen more organically. I agree that if a specific state wanted to change its demographics it could do it through a variety of measures, but there’s no way to get it fine tuned so that you only grab a surplus of New Yorkers and not turn New York into a red state while you’re turning Florida blue.
Florida has a Republican governor, and generally has had one. Red states tend to have Republican governors, and soforth.
A Dem from outside trying to change the population probably wouldn’t have much luck. Florida is very populated state. You can’t just bring in a few thousand college students (even assuming they’d all vote democrat) and hope they’d offset 4 million Republican adults.
And anyway, college students, when they vote, usually do so by absentee in their parents’ state.
The Obama administration did do some of that. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Rust Belt states to save the car industry and whole working populations.
And you know what happened? Those states turned away from the Democrats and voted for Trump. Very few saw that coming.
Because it would take pretty massive amounts of spending to accomplish this decades-long, nakedly-political goal, and the opposition party will stop it.
Because it already happens in the natural course of things.
The reason Florida and North Carolina are the only states in the south where liberals have any kind of a shot is because those states have seen large influxes of northerners to their growing cities in the last few decades. Colorado is the most liberal state in the rockies because they have a growing urban population, many of whom came from California. On the other hand, traditionally liberal states like Wisconsin, Michigan and West Virginia don’t have thriving urban centers, and are thus becoming friendlier to Republicans.
A two-party system has a natural equilibrium; parties that lose power adjust themselves to regain it. Any effort to make one party eternally ascendant is foolish.