Some party heavyweights fear that talks on the legislation will fuel tensions between proponents and opponents within the LDP ahead of April elections.

Bollywood is filled with love stories about going against societal norms or familial expectations.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.

Many of DeSantis’s boosters are drawn to him as a potential Republican nominee because they believe that his record as the chief executive of an economically thriving state would position him to win back some of the college-educated suburban voters who have stampeded away from the GOP since 2016.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know DeSantis]

But DeSantis, through his escalating attacks on what he calls “woke” ideology, has signaled that if he runs, as most expect, he will seek the GOP nomination by emphasizing the same cultural grievances about racial and social change that former President Donald Trump has stressed. Those messages have enabled Trump to energize hard-core conservatives, but at the price of repelling many well-educated suburbanites.

With that approach, DeSantis seems destined to test a question that sharply divides strategists from the two parties: Will more voters accept Trumpism without Trump himself attached to it?

As DeSantis careens through a seemingly endless succession of culture-war firefights with targets including the Walt Disney Company, the College Board, LGBTQ-rights advocates, and Black historians, many Republicans are confident he can manage the challenge of  attracting enough social-conservative voters to win a primary without alienating so many socially moderate suburbanites that he can’t win a general election. The evidence, they say, is his landslide reelection victory last November, after pursuing an aggressive strategy of keeping Florida businesses and schools open during the pandemic. The election exit polls found DeSantis winning about three-fifths of Florida’s college-educated white voters in a year when that group provided crucial support to Democrats in many other states. (DeSantis also posted notable gains with Latino and Black male voters.)

“Based upon his support for reelection, you would have to think … his support for keeping the economy going, keeping schools open [during COVID] was sufficiently popular to overcome any reticence suburban voters might have had on the culture side,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told me.

But many Democrats are growing optimistic that DeSantis is overplaying his hand. While many see him as a formidable potential 2024 opponent, they believe he is advancing such a militantly conservative cultural agenda—built on ideas such as censoring how schoolteachers talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation and a potential ban on abortion after six weeks—that he will face the same resistance in white-collar suburbs that doomed socially conservative GOP gubernatorial candidates last fall in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“The exact things that DeSantis is doing to make himself a MAGA hero for the primary,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic communications consultant, “are the things that turn away the voters they are hoping to win back.”

DeSantis has ignited so many cultural confrontations that it’s difficult to keep track of them, but he has acted most aggressively on education. During the last Florida legislative session, he passed a trio of bills. One restricted how schools, universities, and even private employers can talk about race and gender; another (dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” law) banned schools from discussing sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade; a companion measure made it easier for parents to push for the removal of books from school libraries and classrooms.

Since then, DeSantis has threatened to block  an Advanced Placement class in African American studies unless the College Board removed subjects and scholars that conservatives opposed (including discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement and “intersectionality,” an academic analysis of how forms of racial, class, and gender inequity intersect), and has proposed stringent new controls over public higher education, including eliminating departments that promote diversity on campus and making the removal of tenured faculty easier. This week, after the College Board openly criticized his actions on the AP African American–history course, DeSantis suggested he may try to end Florida’s use of other AP tests and even the SAT. Those threats echoed his successful drive to strip the Walt Disney Company of special administrative privileges for its theme park in Orlando after the corporation criticized his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Jeremy Young, the senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, says that DeSantis’s measures to control instruction on college campuses are “unprecedented in the history of this country. It is an attempt to insert political agendas and political governance into every single aspect of the university.”

Jonathan Friedman, the director of PEN America’s free-expression program, says the breadth of Florida’s efforts to censor public-school teachers in K–12 classrooms is also unmatched. “The scale and scope of censorship in Florida schools has reached a point,” he told me, “where it is virtually un-trackable.”

DeSantis has been fulsome in his denunciations of “woke ideology” but stingy in his definitions of exactly what he considers that to be. The closest his administration has come to explaining the term was when his general counsel, in a court appearance last December, defined woke as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Friedman sees that vagueness as part of the governor’s strategy: By refusing to more precisely identify what concepts the state considers objectionable, he says, DeSantis has created a “chilling effect” whereby teachers self-censor in fear that “everything and anything” about race, gender, and sexuality “can become fodder for punishment.”

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

DeSantis’s efforts to control what Florida students are taught, and what materials they can access, have found a receptive audience in Republican-controlled states. PEN is tracking copycat bills in many of the other 21 states where Republicans hold unified control of the state legislature and the governorship.

The rapid replication of these ideas across red states signals the potential power of DeSantis’s agenda in a Republican presidential primary. In recent national surveys, Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive organizations who specializes in studying social attitudes, has found that the voters most attracted to limiting what students learn about race and gender are those who are already receptive to core Trump cultural messages.

For many GOP voters, “this is a psychological, not policy, threat,” Undem told me in an email. “The feeling is the other side is calling me racist, calling me and my country evil, and blaming me as a man for every problem … It’s about shame, guilt, and self-worth, and it’s existential—for them and their country. Obviously, that’s going to motivate Republican base voters more than crime policy or inflation.”

But in no state where Democrats control the governorship and the legislature have they felt pressured to offer their own versions of DeSantis’s measures to refashion education. This suggests that these ideas generate much less demand outside the red states. Friedman says PEN sees no evidence that any elected official “who doesn’t answer” to the conservative base feels “any pressure … to pass this legislation.”

How these ideas are received beyond the core conservative states may ultimately depend on the prism through which they are seen if DeSantis or another GOP nominee carries them into a general-election presidential campaign.

Republicans believe that the key to building political support for their education agenda is to frame these moves as an attempt to empower parents against an arrogant educational bureaucracy and other “elitist” forces, like Hollywood and teachers’ unions. It’s common for Republicans to argue that measures such as the “Don’t Say Gay” law don’t impose their values on others, but merely constitute a defensive pushback against the left’s attempts to “indoctrinate” students.

For many GOP strategists, the proof that these ideas appeal beyond the conservative base was Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia, a state that had been steadily trending blue, after he stressed “parental rights.”

Kristin Davison, one of Youngkin’s senior strategists, told me that his message was “not even so much about the curriculum as it was that these schools don’t want parents to have a say.” As these issues grow more prominent in national politics, she said, “I think you’ll see it play out in this philosophy that parents and families and teachers should be at the forefront of education rather than government and teacher groups.” Youngkin himself might run for president in 2024 on that theme.

Even Democratic polls have found a substantial audience for many of DeSantis’s specific initiatives. In the most notable finding, a poll last spring for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by a Democratic polling firm found that majorities of voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who argued that schools should focus less on racism and more on core academic subjects; backed a “Don’t Say Gay” law for the early grades; would give parents more control over curriculum; and would ban transgender girls from high-school sports (another bill DeSantis has signed). In that poll, not only did about four-fifths of 2020 Trump voters say they would support a candidate expressing each of those beliefs; so did about one-third of those who voted for President Joe Biden.

But other results in that poll—and in a follow-up survey the firm conducted for the AFT last December—suggest that the whole of DeSantis’s agenda may be less appealing than the sum of its parts. In both surveys, a significant majority said they worried less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. In the December poll, twice as many respondents said that schools are handling sensitive issues appropriately than said that schools are imposing a liberal agenda on students; likewise, a two-to-one majority said that providing schools with more resources was more important than providing parents with more say. In these surveys, and others, banning books ignited an especially forceful backlash. “Banning books is very likely to raise eyebrows and opposition among the narrow segment of voters who truly are swing voters,” Undem said.

Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster who worked on the two AFT surveys, told me that “even if voters agree with him on a couple specific things,” the larger implications of the DeSantis agenda are likely to turn off the suburban swing voters the GOP is hoping to recapture in 2024.

The key for Democrats in responding to DeSantis, Molyneux said, is to not “let him claim to be there speaking for parents; what this is really about is politicians coming in and deciding what is going to be taught.” DeSantis almost always makes his educational announcements surrounded by mothers, but Molyneux says he ultimately may be defined more by images of empty shelves in classrooms where books have been removed. “If this is about blanket imposition of political decisions about what is being taught, people will definitely trust teachers and principals way more than they trust politicians,” Molyneux told me.

Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book

Balancing potential messages for the primary and general election will likely grow only more difficult for DeSantis as the year unfolds. Trump has already released a pair of bristling videos staking out militant positions on censoring teachers and restricting LGBTQ rights (to combat what Trump called “gender insanity.”) This suggests that the GOP primary could see a culture-war arms race that tugs all of the contenders to the right and creates more hurdles with swing voters for the eventual winner. Another measure of that dynamic is DeSantis’s recent announcement that he would sign a six-week abortion ban in Florida, a significant reduction of access from the 15-week ban he signed last year.

In all of this, Democrats see DeSantis embracing ideas that will cast him, if he runs, as a threat to the values held by the coalition (particularly college-educated white voters, young people, and African Americans) that turned out in big numbers to resist the Trump-era GOP in each of the past three national elections. Based on the gubernatorial wins for DeSantis in 2022 and Youngkin in 2021, Republicans, in turn, remain confident that a message of empowering parents and prioritizing the economy can claw back a decisive slice of the suburban voters who found Trump unacceptable.

In the Democratic portrayal, DeSantis looks like an intolerant bully with authoritarian and bigoted inclinations; in the Republican version, he’s a buttoned-down, business-friendly manager imposing commonsense constraints on unaccountable forces threatening families. The picture that ultimately commands the frame will likely determine whether DeSantis can broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond its constricted boundaries under Trump.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

American teenagers—especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning—are “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. And everybody seems to think they know why.

Some psychologists point to social media, whereas others blame school shootings; others chalk it up to changes in parenting. Climate-change activists say it’s climate change. Atlantic writers like me blather on about the decline of physical-world interactions. These explanations aren’t equally valid, and some of them might be purely wrong. But the sheer number of theories reflects the complexity of mental-health challenges and suggests that, perhaps, nobody knows for sure what’s going on.

The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and mental health. From 2011 to 2021, the survey found, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, with the highest jump coming during the coronavirus pandemic. The share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the decade. (For teenage boys, the increase was smaller.)

Life is worse for LGBQ teenagers in almost every respect measured by the survey. (The YRBS did not ask about trans identity.) Compared with heterosexual teens, they are more likely to experience poor mental health; more likely to experience unstable housing or homelessness; more likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon in school; more likely to miss school for safety reasons; less likely to feel close to people at school; more likely to be raped; twice as likely to be bullied; almost three times more likely to have recently misused prescription opioids; three times more likely to have considered suicide, made a suicide plan, or attempted suicide; and seven times more likely to be injured in a suicide attempt.

This surge in sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts among teenagers has coincided with other behavioral trends that aren’t obviously bad. Reports of smoking are down. Drug use and drinking have declined. Bullying has not increased among boys; for girls, it’s declined slightly. Big-picture economic trends don’t have much explanatory power either. In the period when teen anxiety increased, joblessness, poverty, and child hunger mostly declined, and real disposable income mostly grew.

The inexorable rise of teen anxiety ought to be a national crisis. Mental-health services have become more available due to the rise of telehealth. The number of therapists is growing faster than the U.S. average for all occupations, as demand for counselors rises in high schools and colleges. More people are using mental-health services, yet outcomes for teens just keep getting worse. How can this be?

Last year, I offered four possible theories: the prevalence of social-media use; the decline of time spent with friends; a more stressful world of mass-shooting events and existential crises such as global warming; and changes in parenting that might be reducing kids’ mental resilience.

I still think the fullest explanation for teen anxiety may live in that causal stew. But this year, I want to lead with four questions rather than four answers.  

Is peak teen anxiety just another pandemic bubble?

Teen anxiety and depression grew more from 2019 to 2021 than during any other two-year period on record, raising the question of whether they might decline as most of the country moves on from the pandemic. Indeed, many pandemic trends that seemed like accelerations into the future turned out to be more like mini-bubbles. Crypto-asset prices went up in 2020 and 2021, and then came crashing down. Streaming looked like the future of entertainment for a few years, and now it looks like a money pit for many entertainment companies. We’ll have to wait another year or more for the YRBS to tell us if the reopening of schools and other physical spaces has lessened teen anxiety.

Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health?

The story seems simple from a distance: Teen anxiety increased during a period when smartphones and social media colonized the youth social experience. Offline time with close friends went down. Time spent alone staring into a virtual void went up. Sounds pretty bad.

But the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated. Perhaps the most famous and trusted study of the effects of social media on polarization and mental health is “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” When researchers paid people to deactivate their Facebook accounts, they found that online activity went down, offline activity went up, both polarization and news knowledge declined, and subjective well-being increased. Many participants who had been randomly selected to leave Facebook stayed off the site even weeks after they had to, suggesting that using social media may be akin to compulsive or addictive behavior. The researchers describe the effect of Facebook deactivation on depression and anxiety as “small—about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy.”

In a few years, the assumption that social media is making us crazy might look eye-bleedingly obvious, like a surgeon-general warning that sucking on cigarettes to pull addictive carcinogens into your lungs is, in fact, bad for your lungs. But the best evidence we have suggests that social media isn’t really like smoking. My guess is that it’s more of an attention alcohol—a substance that, in small doses, can be fun or even useful for adults, but in larger doses can cause problems for certain people. But maybe even that’s too strong. Just as academics now believe we overrated the danger of online echo chambers (in fact, social media probably exposes us to a much wider range of views than cable news does), we’ll realize that we unfairly blame social media for declining mental health.

“There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University, told The New York Times last year. I think we still need more high-quality studies and randomized trials to fully understand what’s happening here.

What do we make of the relationship between rising LGBQ self-identification and rising LGBQ anxiety?

Major progress has been made in terms of accepting gay, lesbian, and trans Americans in the past few decades. The Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriage; major institutions, such as the NBA and Disney, have stood up against bigoted laws; more television shows now depict gay and transgender characters in a positive, or appropriately complex, light.

Meanwhile, LGBTQ self-identification has increased markedly. According to Gallup, more than 20 percent of Gen Z Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That figure is several times higher than for any previous generation, including seven times higher than for baby boomers—many of whom now tell stories about how harmful it was to be in the closet during a more intolerant era.

But the state of mental health in the LGBQ community is dire, and it’s worsening faster than the national average. “Close to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and more than 50% had poor mental health during the past 30 days,” the CDC reported.

Liberal and conservative explanations for this phenomenon are irreconcilable. According to liberals, the election of Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of anti-gay and transphobic attitudes, which are now overrunning schools, most notably in Florida; wiping out whatever legal progress we might have celebrated at the national level; and making vulnerable teens feel like their very identity is being challenged by the country’s loudest politicians. According to conservatives who brand themselves as anti-woke, the real culprit is liberals’ obsession with victimization and identity.

The point of juxtaposing these interpretations is not to suggest that I find them equally convincing (I side with the liberal argument) but rather to show just how broken this front of the culture war has become. This is the tragic state of things: Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that the way their political opponents talk about identity is making teens want to kill themselves. America needs its best and least-biased sociology and psychology researchers to take up the question “Why is mental health deteriorating rapidly among a segment of the Gen Z population that is also growing rapidly?” Given that almost 25 percent of LGBQ teens attempted suicide in the past year, a convincing empirical answer could help save thousands of lives.

Why are Americans so mentally distressed even as they’ve become better at talking about mental distress?

It’s obvious, you might say: As anxiety rates have escalated, more people have had to build their own personal therapeutic glossary.

Or maybe something else is going on. In the past few years, a great deal of U.S. discourse has absorbed the vocabulary of therapy, with frequent references to trauma, harm, emotional capacity, and self-care. But the ubiquity of “therapy-speak” on the internet has coincided with the emergence of an internet culture that is decidedly anti-therapeutic.

Research from both the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Beihang University, in Beijing, have found that intense and negative emotions are among the most likely to go viral online. Anger and outrage seem to be aerodynamic on the internet not only because we’re drawn to the emotional meltdowns of our fellow humans, but also because demonstrating outrage about a topic is a good way of advertising one’s own moral standing.

Anger, outrage, and catastrophizing are exactly what modern therapists tell their patients to avoid. One of the most popular modes of clinical psychology is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which formalizes an ancient wisdom: We don’t often control what happens in life, but at the margins, we can change how we think about what happens to us. We can learn to identify the most negative and unhelpful thoughts and restructure them, so as to guide us toward better feelings and behaviors. In life, treating minor problems as catastrophes is a straight path to misery—but online, the most catastrophic headlines get the most attention. In life, nurturing anger produces conflict with friends and family; online, it’s an excellent way to build an audience.

Modern internet culture has adopted therapy-speak while repeatedly setting fire to the actual lessons of modern therapy. It’s a bizarre spectacle, like a hospital where fake doctors know the words for every disease but half of the surgeries result in sepsis. In the open expanse of the internet, we could have built any kind of world. We built this one. Why have we done this to ourselves?

Almost three months after Colorado Springs nightclub Club Q was the site of a deadly mass shooting, the venue has announced plans to reopen this year and restore its status as a beloved gathering place for LGBTQ residents.

In the telephone survey, 88.4% also said recent remarks hostile to LGBTQ people by an executive secretary to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida were inappropriate.

To passersby, the sight of two men embracing besides New Delhi's India Gate in 1986 might have seemed unremarkable. In a city where public displays of platonic male affection are relatively commonplace, it was photographer Sunil Gupta who attracted more attention at the time.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party will accelerate discussion on a bill that would promote understanding of sexual minorities, a senior lawmaker said Sunday.

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The left has long believed that Democratic states are the future, whereas Republican states are the past. But migration data show that red and blue might be starting to switch places.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

DEI is an ideological test. The death of the smart shopper The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden

State of Disunion

“Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire.” That’s been the theory long espoused by many on the left, my colleague Jerusalem Demsas wrote this week. But geographic trends suggest a possible reversal of this state of the union: Florida and Texas were last year’s top states for inbound domestic migration, with New York and California in the rear. And some red states may be better hubs for employment right now too: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that there are now more nonfarming jobs in Florida than in New York.

Jerusalem took a close look at Florida and New York, which together are a paradigm of a broader national trend of migration from blue states to red states. She found that the cost of housing is likely the single greatest factor behind the shift. “The top 10 metro areas for unaffordability are a sort of who’s who of Democratic cities: Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim tops the list, with New York–Newark–Jersey City rolling into the sixth spot as the first non-California metro,” she writes. The rise of remote work in the pandemic has also meant that one of New York’s main superpowers—“its gravitational pull on workers,” as Jerusalem puts it—has been weakened.

So what does this mean for blue states and their superstar cities? They’re far from dying, of course: “New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future,” Jerusalem reminds us. But evidence of a growing exodus does mean cities that have long been sitting comfortably need to put in some work to retain their residents—by, for example, improving basic amenities such as public transit.

And there are some selling points that more affordable red states might never be able to offer. “A healthy city attracts wealthy, middle-, and working-class people; it pulls newcomers into its orbit while leaving room for natives,” Jerusalem writes. “I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in this type of inclusive growth.” As Jerusalem notes, “We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more.” This is true in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation is forcing professors to change how they teach.

In short, the lack of affordable housing in blue-state cities means that some Americans have to “choose between liberal values and financial security,” Jerusalem argues. And that choice is made more stark by the fact that red and blue America can feel, to some, like two entirely different countries.

My colleague Ronald Brownstein has written about what he calls “the great divergence” between red and blue states. This widening divide is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America, he argues, with the GOP in particular hoping to impose its politics on the entire country. He wrote last year:

What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.

These new migration trends won’t do much to end the ongoing duel between red and blue America. “Although some predict that liberals moving to red states could moderate our nation’s politics, that seems unlikely given states’ tendency to preempt local policy,” Jerusalem told me. And that happens in both red states (on issues such as gun laws) and blue states (where state governments may hold localities accountable for housing failures), she explained.

For now, it looks like the divide between red and blue states will persist. But as long as cheaper housing and good jobs coexist in red states, blue-staters will keep on coming.

Related:

“Most important, we must not upset DeSantis.” America is growing apart, possibly for good.

Today’s News

The Pentagon downed an unidentified high-flying aircraft over Alaska at the order of President Joe Biden, a White House spokesperson confirmed. Russia launched multiple drones and several dozen cruise missiles in a “massive attack” across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force. The FBI reportedly found a classified document at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, according to a Pence adviser; a Justice Department official confirmed that a search took place.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: What (and whether) our world leaders read provides crucial insight into their minds and priorities, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

More From The Atlantic

Red Zeppelin Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes had to disprove a misconception. What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?

Culture Break

Tom Coughlin hugs Osi Umenyiora after the Giants' victory in Super Bowl XLII in 2008.

Read. “The Third Law of Magic,” a new short story by Ben Okri.

Or A Giant Win, a football memoir that offers a human counterbalance to the heroics and chest-thumping of the Super Bowl.

Listen. This Is Why, the new album from the band Paramore.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Jerusalem does great work dispelling the many housing and homelessness myths that persist among Americans. To dive deeper, start with her piece on why housing breaks people’s brains. “Anyone who’s been in a dumb recurring fight knows that the entire problem could be cleared up if everyone could just agree on exactly what was said or done,” she writes. “But you can’t, so you end up stuck in a cycle of relitigation. Housing-policy discussions are like that.”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

In a 2018 speech, Hillary Clinton claimed a partial victory in the presidential election she’d lost: “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And [Donald Trump’s] whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” Clinton was echoing a sentiment felt by many on the left, that Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire.

[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]

Red states do tend to be poorer, sicker, less productive, and less educated. But Clinton’s remarks ignored trends indicating a coming reversal of fortunes. Just a few days ago, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) issued a report on the most popular states for domestic migration. Using Census Bureau data, the association found that Florida and Texas topped the list last year, with New York and California bringing up the rear. This report followed another bit of evidence that red states, contrary to Clinton’s observations, are the ones moving forward: As the economics writer Joey Politano pointed out on Twitter, “For the first time ever, there are now more jobs in Florida than in New York,” according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The longtime economic dominance of blue states such as New York, California, Washington, and Massachusetts has rested on their ability to attract and retain newcomers. At the heart of a prosperous society is people, and lots of them.

So what happened? Although this story cannot be simplified to the fortunes of two states, looking at the paradigmatic cases of New York and Florida can illuminate broader dynamics.

I’m not the only one making the comparison. A recent policy brief from Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research outlined some key differences between the states. Florida’s population first surpassed New York’s sometime from July 1, 2013, to July 1, 2014. In 2021, Florida netted 4,200 people each week on average, whereas New York lost 6,800. Population doesn’t just drive the economy—it drives politics and culture. Since 1980, Florida has gained nine congressional seats while New York has lost eight.

Although many commentators attribute the shift in migration preferences to taxes—one recent Bloomberg article frames the NAR data in this manner—what’s largely driving the trend is housing costs. In fact, Census Bureau survey data consistently show that people move primarily for housing-related reasons, followed by family- and job-related reasons.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta tracks home-ownership affordability by metro area with an index that seeks to measure “the ability of a median-income household to absorb the estimated annual costs associated with owning a median-priced home.” The top 10 metro areas for unaffordability are a sort of who’s who of Democratic cities: Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim tops the list, with New York–Newark–Jersey City rolling into the sixth spot as the first non-California metro. Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach is No. 12. That’s not cheap, but Florida’s other major metros, including Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford and Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater, are ranked far better on the Atlanta Fed’s index.

In 2017, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded that almost 44 percent of all households and slightly more than 27 percent of renter households in the New York–Newark–Jersey City metro could afford a median-priced home in their area. In the Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater metro, those numbers were about 63 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

What you’re getting for your dollar may be better in Florida than in New York as well. According to 2019 data, New York has the oldest owner-occupied homes, with a median age of 60 years. The economist Na Zhao at the National Association of Home Builders notes that “newer owner-occupied housing stock is mostly concentrated in the Sun Belt states where 14 out of 15 states, with the exception of California (43), have median owner-occupied housing stock age below the national median (39 years).” Zhao plots housing age against population growth and finds a correlation between the two variables: The older the stock, the lower the population growth. Survey data from 2021 show that the median New York home was built in 1957; the median Florida home is a full 30 years younger.

These long-term forces help explain how Florida beat New York. Another big factor is the coronavirus pandemic, which temporarily nullified and perhaps permanently weakened office life, thus undermining one of New York City’s greatest historical advantages: its gravitational pull on workers. A cursory look at the jobs graph showing Florida overtaking New York reveals that the former recovered quickly from the pandemic while the latter has failed to bounce back. A May 2022 report from the New York State government confirms that “less than 71 percent of the City’s pandemic-induced job losses have returned,” and that New York City lags behind both the state (82 percent) and the nation (95 percent) in restoring those jobs.

Housing costs plus remote work could result in lasting damage to New York’s prosperity—even if the losses are relatively small and the shift to work-from-home is only partial. When workers leave the state, they take their demand for various goods and services with them, affecting health-care workers, day-care providers, the hospitality industry, and so on. The same thing happens to a lesser degree when workers simply stay in their living room—which many of them now do. A January survey found that just 52 percent of Manhattan’s office employees are at their desk on an average weekday. Before the pandemic, only 6 percent of employees worked primarily from home. According to an Eno Center for Transportation report, New York’s subways used to log 5.5 million daily trips in 2019; they are now averaging just 3.5 million on a typical weekday.

As population declines, policy makers lose tools to retain and attract families. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that San Francisco recorded its lowest population in a decade in July 2022; the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two years. Cities can enter a sort of doom loop, where declining revenues from taxes and user fees lead governments to cut important government services such as trash collection and public schooling, which can then further erode the city’s population and revenues.

This race is New York’s to lose.

Blue states aren’t doomed or dying. At any rate, high housing costs generally reflect very high demand from lots of people to live in a particular area; New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future. But even relatively small changes (minorities of workers working from home or moving away) can still lead to acute crises for cities, as the economist Adam Ozimek recently pointed out.

“The clearest indication of success at growth is a constantly rising urban-area population,” the sociologist Harvey Molotch wrote in his 1976 paper “The City as a Growth Machine.” At the time, looking back at the politics of the 20th century, he observed that cities were focused on attracting more and more people. But even then, Molotch noticed an “emerging countercoalition” of anti-growthers. This loose coalition would go on to successfully curb population and economic growth in our nation’s most productive job centers, frequently by instituting strict housing policies meant to reduce the construction of new units. These policies led to skyrocketing prices as workers continued to agglomerate in these places even as local and state governments refused to adequately plan for their arrival.

[Derek Thompson: Superstar cities are in trouble]

Blue states and, in particular, their superstar cities got too comfortable. They coasted for decades on the knowledge that firms and workers were being pulled inexorably toward their downtowns. Their leaders thought they didn’t need to work on basic amenities such as high-quality public transit. But given the realities of remote work and these cities’ relative unaffordability, that mentality just won’t cut it.

Urban dynamism is not simply a function of geography or the built environment. Neighborhood character does not arise from architectural quirks or accidents of history well preserved. What makes cities “optimistic, diverse, dynamic” and forward-moving is people: people of all types who choose to live there, create there, build businesses and grow families there; different sorts of people who come into contact with one another and produce interesting foods, ideas, art, and ways of living together. A healthy city attracts wealthy, middle-, and working-class people; it pulls newcomers into its orbit while leaving room for natives. That’s the type of city that produces the sense of “character” that makes people want to call it home.

I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in this type of inclusive growth. We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more. Many Americans are being forced to choose between liberal values and financial security. Reversing that dynamic will require blue states to prioritize affordability. But until rent prices near good jobs in New York or Washington or Massachusetts can compete with rent prices near good jobs in the Sun Belt, Clinton’s pronouncement will seem more incorrect by the day.