Why don’t Tom Steyer or George Soros move black Mississippians to Pensacola or Atlanta?

[SlackerInc]

@foolsguinea

As someone who still lives in Missouri, I don’t want to see it turned even whiter. It seems like your proposals would be as follows:

1. To take Mississippi, the state with the highest proportion of blacks, 5 points higher than Louisiana, and bleed some of them to concede it completely to Jim Crow.
2. To completely concede Missouri, a former bellwether state turned heavily GOP through years of work by the right wing, and give the likes of Rusty Limbaugh and Roy Blunt a bigger cushion against the large minority of voters who turn out for Democrats every election.

If we could manage the scale, these would be brilliant political power plays, yes—for the Conservative Movement, not for progressives, Democrats, nor moderates.

:mad:

You either don’t understand how gerrymandering works (in which case you should look up “packing and cracking”), or you have a delusion about these states’ potential to once again become purple that is in no way supported by the data.

@k9bfriender

If you are going to move them anywhere, move them into a low populated state like North Dakota.

Black Mississippians are not going to be able to handle living in ND. I live right next to the ND border, so trust me on this.

@k9bfriender

Personally, I am a fan of Amazon or Microsoft or one of thems opening a corporate headquarters with hundreds of thousands of jobs to be had to right about here.

Moving a million people into that spot would flip 3 states pretty solidly, as there are less than 3 million total people living in those three states combined. Maybe even pick up a representative or two.

Just paying people to move is stupid, expensive, and is unlikely to get anything like what the OP wants. Moving people into an already highly populated state even less.

OTOH, creating economic incentives for people to move is much cheaper and far less patronizing. Advertise jobs with good pay and benefits, as well as paying for relocation expenses. You may end up paying more than en employee is worth, but in the OP’s scenario, you are just straight up supporting an individual for the purpose of them voting in your favor.

(1) Do you know that Microsoft already has a campus in Fargo? It definitely enriches the local culture, but the politics are still fucked.

(2) Seems like you didn’t really read the OP, a common pattern ITT:

@SlackerInc

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.

Did you stop reading after the first sentence of that paragraph? :dubious:

@k9bfriender

It seems you could really just go out and buy votes for far, far less.

:eek: Okay, first off I’m not out to advocate something illegal (because unethical). Where do you get the idea that votes can just easily be “bought” on a massive scale? If what you really mean is spending tons of money on blanketing people with ads, that is clearly getting less and less efficacious as people harden into their ideological camps.

@CarnalK

You seem to be under the delusion that everyone disagrees for some politically correct reasons.

Izzat right? :dubious: Then I’m sure you can cite the post where I expressed this idea you say I “seem” (weasel word) to have. In reality, that in no way resembles anything I think: I am, to be sure, no fan of political correctness—but I don’t even know what the PC angle would be in this case.