“White flight” is the name given to situations in which white people move out of neighborhoods when minorities move in them. Gentrification is the opposite: white people flock to a neighborhood and push the minorities out. According to Addicting Info (AI), these two migration patterns could spell disaster for the Republican Party.
The demographics of the US continue to change, and therefore so does the overall map of who now lives where. Thomas B. Edsall of the New York Times wrote,
“The nation’s urban centers are changing rapidly. Blacks are moving, out into the suburbs or other regions of the country. Poverty is spreading from the urban core to the inner suburbs. White flight has slowed and in some cases reversed. Nationally, Hispanics have displaced blacks as the dominant urban minority.”
As AI pointed out, the GOP has managed to gerrymander districts across the country to the point that some candidates run unopposed. Candidates from other parties know they don’t stand a chance and aren’t willing to waste money campaigning for a seat they know they can’t win.
“This is how House Republicans received over one million votes less than House Democrats, but still hold a majority,” AI said. “But as minorities spread out into suburbs, it will be increasingly difficult, if not physically impossible, to effectively gerrymander them into a corner.”
White flight has been happening for decades, and probably won’t stop anytime soon. But, according to AI, as white people leave certain areas to move somewhere “they’ll be ‘safe’ from all that horrifying brown skin,” their migration will greatly reduce the number of Republican voters in “areas they absolutely must control [if] they’re going to keep the House, and they won’t be able to stop it.”
In the end, the racism and discriminatory viewpoints of the GOP are going to make it so that they have barely any minority voters. And if their core voting block congregates in only a few areas, they certainly can’t expect to win over the whole country. Since they’re not likely to change the party platforms they’ve clung to so tightly for so long, hopefully this will all spell good news for the Left and the country as a whole.
