What the media have missed are deep socioeconomic trends driving parts of the country in divergent political directions.
Strong wage growth in blue-collar sectors helps red states, while a weaker stock market threatens high-income coastal economies.
These elements now constitute the Democratic Party's burgeoning financial base, allowing it consistently to spend more than the GOP in key congressional races, while the GOP still gains support in energy and other less heralded "Legacy" industries.
Any return to Obama's energy policy-or the even more extreme one enacted in California-could set back the economic recovery in much of the country, most notably Appalachia, but also across the energy belt that extends from the Permian Basin and the Gulf to the Bakken fields in North Dakota.
In the more conservative and blue-collar Inland Empire, or on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas, high energy costs pose an existential threat.
More Americans-contrary to the conventional wisdom of the media and the investment community-are leaving deep-blue metros like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to settle in suburbs and more conservative regions like Dallas, Houston, Nashville, San Antonio, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Orlando.
Waging political war against one or the other simply weakens our nation-just as the U.S. is reemerging, largely without media notice, as the strongest large economy on the planet.
https://www.city-journal.org/socioeconomic-divide-will-shape-midterm-elections
Strong wage growth in blue-collar sectors helps red states, while a weaker stock market threatens high-income coastal economies.
These elements now constitute the Democratic Party's burgeoning financial base, allowing it consistently to spend more than the GOP in key congressional races, while the GOP still gains support in energy and other less heralded "Legacy" industries.
Any return to Obama's energy policy-or the even more extreme one enacted in California-could set back the economic recovery in much of the country, most notably Appalachia, but also across the energy belt that extends from the Permian Basin and the Gulf to the Bakken fields in North Dakota.
In the more conservative and blue-collar Inland Empire, or on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas, high energy costs pose an existential threat.
More Americans-contrary to the conventional wisdom of the media and the investment community-are leaving deep-blue metros like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to settle in suburbs and more conservative regions like Dallas, Houston, Nashville, San Antonio, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Orlando.
Waging political war against one or the other simply weakens our nation-just as the U.S. is reemerging, largely without media notice, as the strongest large economy on the planet.
https://www.city-journal.org/socioeconomic-divide-will-shape-midterm-elections
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