There Goes the Neighborhood

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 29, 2024

 

For most Americans, “California” is a proper noun. But for millions of others, it’s a verb — and a menacing one, at that.

 

“Don’t California” is the ubiquitous, bumper-sticker-length warning to Golden State refugees. Not that the admonition has had its intended effect. Tennesseans blame California transplants for the rising cost of housing and their increased tax burden. Idaho residents blame them for their state’s sudden discomfiting density. Texans see the encroachment of faddish and prejudicial concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates as an unwelcome consequence of their state’s friendly business climate, which has allure for tech-sector entrepreneurs. And across the American South and West, longtime locals blame the blue-state exodus for shifting their local politics to the left.

 

What was a creeping suspicion now has a little more substantiating evidence, thanks to the latest Fox News poll of voters in the Sun Belt swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Across those four states, “Harris is ahead by 8 points among voters who moved to their state in the last ten years,” Fox’s report on its polling read, “while the much larger group of longtime residents prefers Trump by 1 point.”

 

The fact that locals with roots in their respective communities vastly outnumber transplants accounts for the overall closeness of the presidential races in these states. Trump is up over Harris in North Carolina by one point, while Harris leads Trump by one point in Arizona and two points in Georgia and Nevada — all within these surveys’ margins of error. Still, this discrepancy between transplants and natives could not be better exemplified by the Harris campaign.

 

It’s not hard to understand what keeps the California-as-a-verb crowd up at night. As a presidential candidate, Harris is a media creation. Her manufactured star-turn is as vacuous as any public-relations campaign, what with all the joy, the brisket recipes, the dancing. Participants in this bacchanal don’t dare risk being the first to stop clapping lest their waning enthusiasm proves contagious — the ensuing silence could be deafening.

 

Harris’s campaign has the feel of a carefully stage-managed illusion. The theatrical flare of it all masks a desire to export California’s dysfunction: maddeningly self-destructive energy policies and the blackouts that accompany them; high crime and homelessness; an inflated population of illegal migrants, lured to the state by the promise of government-backed benefits previously reserved to citizens; high tax rates, which somehow fail to cover the cost of already substandard public services; efforts to prop up constituencies that cannot compete in the marketplace, even at the expense of residents’ time and resources. The waste, the profligacy, the unnecessary complexities and inconveniences, the profound social stratification — there’s a reason why, despite its wealth, favorable climate, and vast resources, one of the state’s foremost exports to the rest of the country is people.

 

And they’re taking their politics with them. Of course, the Golden State isn’t the only contributor to this trend, but it symbolizes the ethos feared by the bumper-sticker crowd. Maybe Harris had a genuine change of heart and no longer supports the confiscation of firearms, the elimination of the private-health-insurance industry, a ban on fracking, a 100 percent transition to electric vehicles, and so on. Or maybe she’s just saying what she has to say to be welcomed in these new and unfamiliar environments.

 

Maybe she’s just like the new neighbors, who say all the right things but probably head into the voting booth to cast a ballot for the very same incompetence and civil disorder they fled.