Forget the presidential election. The real contest about the future direction of the country has already taken place, and it’s the red states that are clearly winning.
What we are witnessing is not so much a national ideological triumph, in the manner of the Reagan era, but a grassroots shift in economic, social, and, ultimately, political power from one set of regions to another. This continues a pattern congruent with American history since the first settlements pushed out from the Atlantic coast, expanding all the way to the Pacific. Even today the wealthiest states, not adjusted for costs, remain perched on the Northeastern or Pacific coastlines.
Today’s shift is not a repeat of “manifest destiny” associated with the old adage “go west, young man,” but more like a call back to the South, and even some places in the country’s vast center. These areas are still catching up with those areas that flourished in the last half of the twentieth century. But over the past four decades, income and job growth in places like Texas and Florida were 50 percent or more above New York and California.
In recent years, the gap between regions has narrowed. Texas, Nevada, Florida, and Arkansas experienced the nation’s highest personal income growth; in contrast, ultra-blue California ranked last, followed closely by Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Sunbelt states dominate the list of fastest job creators while California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Oregon rank toward the bottom. Overall, in the past decade, the six fastest growing Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee—added more to the national GDP than the Northeast, the traditional economic powerhouse.
Follow the Carbon
In an era where the media and investors obsess over the latest craze, be it bitcoin or artificial intelligence, the states that have done best also tend to retain energy-dependent industries, such as agriculture, resource extraction, and increasingly manufacturing. The movement of some lower-tech manufacturing like textiles was largely based on low wages and employer-friendly labor law, but the current shift has as much to do with regulatory policies common in blue states.
Until the recent wave of climate-related regulations, much heavy industry and high-tech manufacturing remained in states like California and New York. But the ascendancy of draconian climate regulation has had a strong impact on blue collar jobs, a traditional source of upward mobility. The best areas for industry, notes Site Selection Magazine, are in the Southeast and Utah, while California has lost almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 according to the Census of Employment and Wages. Oil and gas, once a major industry in the state, is now slated for extinction, while construction and logistics growth have been slower than in competitor states.
A half century ago, California and New York were industrial dynamos, along with the Upper Midwest. Over the past decade, Orlando, Austin, and Las Vegas have led the charge while manufacturing has declined steeply in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. New industrial growth is taking place primarily in the South and Southeast, and in red states like Indiana and Ohio, including the preponderance of new EV and battery plants. For example, the supply chain shortage has made producing silicon chips—a California invention—a priority; yet virtually all the new planned semiconductor facilities, employing thousands of workers, are being built in Texas, Arizona, and Oregon.
Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Dallas skyline, by Carol Highsmith via Flickr.
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