It’s really not that far (from Jackson, the epicenter of Mississippi’s black population, to Pensacola is 251 miles), and it wouldn’t be like moving to some cold, culturally foreign Northern city.
My first impulse was to simply pay for a moving truck and their first six months’ rent. But then it occurred to me that they could get a lot more bang for their buck, and put these people on more solid ground, by establishing businesses in those cities (maybe even negotiating tax breaks!) that provide housing (like the old “company towns”). Recruit lots of Mississippians (but still hire locals too) and even if the enterprise loses money, you might only have to subsidize ten or twenty percent the cost of simply paying their rent without getting anything back. It would also look like less of a nakedly political move, and it would be much harder to demonize without looking anti-jobs and racist to boot.
This reminds me of the the Charles Barkley Taco Bell ad: “That’s a terrible idea”.
No matter how hard you try to hide shipping appreciable amounts of the desired demographics across state lines, everybody would be talking about the tens of thousands of new residents thanking Tom Steyer for paying for them to move.
Nothing in your post explains what exactly is terrible about it. Black Mississippians should just sit and stew in a state where the white (bare) majority is so extreme they never get a shot at any statewide office? Why is that the right thing?
I think that’s highly debatable (why did Democrats lose FL and GA then?), but in any case it’s not just about that. These long-suffering people deserve to be airlifted out of that bigoted hellhole.
Moving a person across state lines and paying for 6 months rent is at least $4000.
I think it costs less than $20 to register a voter and motivate them to vote (however I’m sure there is a ceiling to this, because voter turnout almost never goes higher than 55-60%).
Yeah, I’ve been doing that game for decades as a Democratic volunteer and it’s a slog, albeit a necessary one. This is a group that already votes, in futility, and (unlike nonvoters) is overwhelmingly consistent as to which party they support.
There’s also extra leverage here because FL and GA are big states that are very close to being flipped blue, and they are already being tilled for non-imported Democratic votes to the max.
What makes you think black people in these places are some monolithic group that will pick up and change their whole life because of what some white billionaire theoretically wants them to do?
I mean this with all sincerity, thank you for your service. Registering voters is important.
Moving people around is expensive, plus there aren’t always jobs there. Plus people don’t want to move away from family and community.
Libertarians had a plan to all move to New Hampshire and start a libertarian state there, but they couldn’t get enough people. Its just way too much trouble for people to move around like that.
The vote margin in GA in 2016 was about 200k voters, it was 300k voters in 2012. So I’m hoping that it’ll turn purple (along with Texas) in 2024 or so.
I’m not sure what is moving some states leftward. I assume it is immigration from other states, the death of older white conservatives and younger non-white voters entering the political sphere.
They don’t have to be monolithic. Each voter who moves makes a difference. And if somehow none of them take up the offer (which I seriously doubt), then that white billionaire isn’t out any money, is he?
—There will be jobs there if the billionaire sets them up. And are poor black Mississippians really set up with great jobs as is? What about Medicaid expansion?
—Libertarians are a fringe group. If NH had been 48 or 49 percent libertarian, it would have made perfect sense for libertarians from elsewhere (especially nearby Boston or Portland, ME) to move there.
Well I feel like to be honest the ones that it would appeal to the most would be those who are not financially well off and even then I’m sure most would not move unless there was some guaranteed amount of money they would receive maybe even a contract I mean people aren’t going to uproot their whole lives, on the assurances of this elusive billionaire who given his age could drop dead at any moment. If this opportunity appeals most to people who are poorer these are also probably the ones that are less likely to vote, it just comes off to me like attempting to buy votes.
How about doing the math? Make it real easy round numbers. Give someone $100k to uproot to a completely new city that’s at least 4 hours drive away, stay for minimum 1 year, register to vote, etc. . A billion dollars will cover 10,000 voters.
A billion dollars is a helluva lot of money to me. It’s not so much for a big project. George Soros is worth $8B according to Forbes, and a lot of that probably isn’t in ready cash. George, as rich as he is, can’t afford to relocate tens of thousands of voters, or even ten thousand migrants in a caravan.
Job creation ain’t cheap on a large scale. Just as General Motors.
The right wing demonize Soros. The Koch Brothers, who actively throw their money behind conservative causes are worth more like $112B. Pot kettle black
Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to convince 11% of the white population to not be racist dicks, or at least, to not help racist dicks get elected? Propaganda efforts can be notoriously inexpensive.
OK, let’s forget the suspect legality of only recruiting black Mississippians. Have you crunched any numbers? The last Governor’s election was decided by a 34 000 difference. So assuming a charitable 60% voter turnout and unanimous Dem votes, that’s about 57 000 adult age people you want to house and employ.
That white population was racist dicks a hundred years ago. They were racist dicks when they gave LBJ single digit percentages while he racked up a historic landslide in the rest of the country. They were racist dicks when they repeatedly reelected Trent Lott. They were racist dicks this month, when they elected a woman who was even more open about her segregationist sympathies than Lott was. I think you are being unreasonably optimistic about their potential for change. In part, BTW, I think that’s precisely because the state’s black population is so unusually large. White Mississipians understand, quite correctly, that unless they show incredible white solidarity on a level no other state can match (and only Alabama and Louisiana can approach), blacks will consistently control the levers of power in that state.
So the effort is only worth doing if you can make the entire difference on your own? I guess I’ve been wasting my time doing GOTV all these years then.
About 30 years ago, some socially conscious do-gooders in then-99%-plus white Dubuque, Iowa thought the town needed some diversity, so they moved some black people up there from the St. Louis area. As one could imagine, they were people that St. Louis really didn’t want either, regardless of their race, and it caused all kinds of problems. There was a classic “Donahue” episode about this; I later worked with a guy who knew the KKK wannabes who harassed the black kids and said the whole family were a bunch of lowlife criminals.
This would just be another form of gerrymandering. People can and should live wherever they want.
ETA: A decade later, I did some relief work in that town. Wanna hear something scary? The second day I worked there, I saw a black person, and noticed that they were black. :o That’s how homogeneous the town STILL was.