Last Call For The Blue Wave Heads To The Red Suburbs

Millennials are moving away from the big blue cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco because they can't afford to live there.  But as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson notes, they're moving to bluer urban areas of red states, and that's starting to affect voting patterns in places like NC, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

These movers are U-Hauling to ruddier states in the South and West. The five fastest-growing metros of the past few years—Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Orlando, Florida—are in states won by Trump. The other metro areas with a population of at least 1 million that grew by at least 1.5 percent last year were Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; Tampa, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. All of those metros are in red or purple states.

It’s not just liberals moving to the South. After all, movers to Florida are often retirees who fit squarely in the Fox News demo, and some of the people moving from California to Texas are conservatives. But today’s domestic migrants are often college graduates of the exceeding liberal Generations Y and Z. “The current migration to these suburbs is mostly people in their 20s and 30s, or Millennials, who are more diverse and liberal than the rest of the population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. According to his research, Americans ages 20 to 40 are three times as likely to move as people ages 50 to 70.

This drip-drip-drip of young residents trickling down into red-state suburbs is helping to turn southern metros into Democratic strongholds. (Of course, migration isn’t the only factor pushing these metros leftward, but more on that later.) In Texas, Democrats’ advantage in the five counties representing Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin (the “Texas Five” in the graph below) grew from 130,000 in the 2012 presidential election to nearly 800,000 in the 2018 Senate election.

In Arizona, from 2012 to 2016, Democrats narrowed their deficit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, by 100,000 votes. Two years later, in the 2018 Senate election, the county swung Democratic, with Democrats gaining another 100,000 net votes.

In Georgia, from the 2012 presidential election to the 2018 gubernatorial elections, the four counties constituting most of Atlanta and its suburbs—Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett—increased their Democratic margin by more than 250,000.

What’s remarkable about these changes isn’t just their size, but their resemblance to Trump’s 2016 margins. Trump won Texas in 2016 by 800,000 votes. He won Arizona by 90,000 votes. He won Georgia by 170,000 votes. If these states’ biggest metros continue to move left at the same rate, there is every reason to believe that Texas, Arizona, and Georgia could be toss-ups quite soon.

As noted above, migration isn’t the only reason southern metros might be shifting to the Democratic Party: Longtime residents may be switching parties in response to Trump, for instance. Republicans have likely hurt themselves by moving further to the right to galvanize their white exurban and rural base, even as their support has thinned in the suburbs and among working-class white women.

But domestic migration is key. Just look at Texas. CNN exit polls for the state’s 2018 Senate election showed that Beto O’Rourke was buoyed by recent movers, winning more than 60 percent of those who had moved to Texas within the past 10 years. At current migration rates, the “Texas Five” counties could easily add another 200,000 votes from 2016 to 2020, putting more pressure on Trump’s margin in the state. A September poll conducted by Univision and the University of Houston found the top-six Democratic presidential contenders all leading Trump in Texas.

Outside of national elections, the blue flood of the Sun Belt could have other political implications, such as more showdowns between blue cities and red states. As The Atlantic’s David Graham has argued, North Carolina’s GOP-led general assembly has waged war against liberal cities such as Charlotte—for instance, by reversing a local ordinance that banned discrimination against LGBTQ people. This sort of state-city showdown could become a regular feature of southern politics. In the past six months, both the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer have run features bemoaning the Californication of northern Texas, with the former noting that “conservatives fear these domestic migrants will bring with them a liberal ideology that would disturb the Texas way of living.”

In 2020, the big three presidential battleground states are no longer Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Florida, NC, and Wisconsin.  Pretty soon, maybe by 2024, that's going to be Florida, Texas, and Georgia.

But don't count out Rust Belt states either.  Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and yes, even Ohio, remain important states that Democrats are going to have to find a way to compete in.  But they're starting to get a hand from people leaving California and New York for places like Columbus, Philly, Detroit, Madison, and the Twin Cities.  Even Iowa and Kansas are getting bluer.

Turns out blue megatropolis areas and their terrible housing markets are actually the thing Democrats needed to be competitive in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt.  Who knew?

But don't worry too much about California.  Their Republicans are heading for the hills anyway.

Spies Like Us, Con't

I can't help but notice that as the Trump regime draws closer to possibly bringing charges against former FBI Director Andrew McCabe for his role in the Mueller probe, we get more and more leaks detailing just how much damage against the US intelligence community Donald Trump is personally responsible for with his criminal relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.

The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.

Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.

“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.

American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.

The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017. The asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

In other words, Putin and the Russians were running a long con against the US for nearly all of the Obama administration, with the intent of ultimately manipulating the 2016 presidential election so that Obama's successor in the White House would be their man, someone who would have every reason to hate and distrust American federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Donald Trump was the perfect choice.  And Trump has waged war on the FBI, CIA, and NSA better than Putin ever could have expected in order to protect his own criminal actions.

Yes, Obama's "reset" with Russia was a massive mistake, and the one thing Mitt Romney was right about in 2012 was that Russia was indeed our biggest enemy.  The Snowden operation did untold damage to our intel capabilities and its success was directly responsible for making the 2016 election operation possible.  That failure is absolutely on him.

But as Obama fought to try to close the barn door after those horses got loose and clean up the messes in a post-Snowden era, remember it was Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, that Vladimir Putin wanted in the White House, and he got his way.  And Trump has made sure that everything Obama tried to do to prevent another Snowden was reversed.

What all this means is that Trump has made everything with Russia worse.  Oh yeah, they helped him become president, too.

Meanwhile, Here In Bevinstan...

Cincinnati is down to its last abortion clinic, and the legal fight to keep it open rages on, but with the Trump regime defunding Title IX money for Planned Parenthood, the area is already losing two clinics that didn't offer abortions. 

Now we find out a Kentucky man planned to blow up the abortion clinic in Cincinnati and was stopped by police.

A Kentucky man accused of threatening to blow up a Planned Parenthood facility in Cincinnati was ordered held on $100,000 bond Monday after police found a "homemade destructive device" at his home. 

WXIX-TV reports Daniel Kibler was arrested Sunday after police searched his home in Independence. He is charged with possession of a destructive device, terroristic threatening and eight counts of wanton endangerment. His arrest citation says Kibler admitted to creating the destructive device and storing it in his home he's shared with his wife and seven children. 

A judge revealed during Kibler's arraignment on Monday that the business he allegedly targeted was a Planned Parenthood office in Cincinnati. 

Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio President Kersha Deibel said in a statement Monday that the facility was open to serve patients needing care. 

"We are here for our patients today and we will continue to be here for our patients, no matter what. For the women, men and young people we serve, the care we provide isn't about politics — it's about their well-being, and we remain focused on ensuring our patients are able to access that care safely."

Surprise, more violence by the anti-choicers, egged on by Trump and his ilk.   Stochastic terrorism at its finest, right here in the Bluegrass State.

StupidiNews!

• The White House continues to direct all House Judiciary Committee subpoena targets to refuse to talk to congressional investigators, asserting executive privilege over Corey Lewandowski and two others.
• The Manhattan DA's office has subpoenaed eight years of Donald Trump's federal tax returns in the NY state criminal investigation into Trump's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
• Hong Kong city administrator Carrie Lam says she will begin "dialogue sessions" with protesters this week, but stated again that protests and violence in the city must come to an immediate end.
• China is siding with its Asian rivals over oil prices as the world waits to see what the Saudi and US response will be to Saturday's Abqaiq oilfield attacks.
• Netflix has won the streaming war for exclusive rights to Seinfeld starting in 2021, beating out Hulu's current $180 million deal.