“People who stay in their home (rural area) are actually very different than people who decide to leave it. And so if you say this rural area is becoming more conservative, often, what you're just saying is the people who did not leave are more conservative than the people who left.”

Housing affordability also impacts mobility. For example, the South and the Sun Belt are building more housing, resulting in lower rents that are attracting new residents.

“At least here in Spokane, however, we also have a bloc of elected officials who are enacting pro-housing policies like a citywide upzone and abolishing parking minimums, and there is a lot of public support for these measures. If I had to guess, this is due to many people either moving back to town after getting priced out of the bigger cities we moved to in our 20s, or people who came from bigger cities moving here because it's marginally more affordable. There is a 'climate refugee' aspect here too, as I've met a number of people who left California due to wildfires and have now been enabled by remote work improvements to move to a more affordable location (it's not that much less risky, but that is what it is if you're committed to living in the West).”

Scholars have captured a potential impact of geographic mobility on geographic sorting: ‘Super landslide” counties (where the winning candidate received at least 80% of the vote) increased from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.

In 2020, Biden won 18% of counties with only a Cracker Barrel, and won a whopping 95% of counties that had only a Whole Foods.

Those considered “Moderate Democrats” before the civil rights realignment were socially conservative Members of Congress in districts with non-college-educated white voters. Now, this category largely represents white collar suburban districts, and think Left-wing economic proposals go too far.

“Right now, we are personally seeing rural communities, many skeptical of government and media, concerned about censorship and media manipulation. These anxieties transcend traditional left-right divisions, creating an emerging coalition of libertarians, privacy advocates, and civil rights organizations who see algorithmic control as a fundamental threat to personal freedom. At the same time, traditional political divides, such as those between urban and rural communities, may lose relevance as economic inequality becomes paramount in the majority of lives. In our outreach, we already encounter rural voters who, despite voting Republican, share frustrations with the economic system that align more with progressive labor and housing movements.”

“I think that the Left pays too much attention to disparities on an individual basis and not enough on a regional basis, and the Right doesn't pay attention to either. So if you look at the economic picture…one reason it doesn't feel better is that it's been concentrated in about 30 or 40 metro areas, and the rest of the country is not doing that well. Now, because people move into those metro areas, you can still have a rise in living standards, but the erosion of many of these communities is awful.”

“I think that the Left pays too much attention to disparities on an individual basis and not enough on a regional basis, and the Right doesn't pay attention to either. So if you look at the economic picture…one reason it doesn't feel better is that it's been concentrated in about 30 or 40 metro areas, and the rest of the country is not doing that well. Now, because people move into those metro areas, you can still have a rise in living standards, but the erosion of many of these communities is awful.”