Democrats are losing the working class, one moving truck at a time by 6ixStringJack

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Democrats are losing the working class, one moving truck at a time

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Saturday, April 11, 2026 13:22
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Friday, April 10, 2026 1:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/4522020/democrats-losing-w
orking-class-housing/

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Friday, April 10, 2026 4:00 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in_focus/4522020/democrats-losing-w
orking-class-housing/

The article is worthless because it didn't include a price tag (which motivates almost EVERYONE and explains almost EVERYTHING in America), but I will:

AI Overview
Housing in Blue California is significantly more expensive than in Red Texas, with median home prices in California often 2x to 2.7x higher than in Texas. As of 2025, California's median home price is projected to exceed $900,000, while Texas offers comparable or larger homes, often for under $400,000. (Apparently, AI is unaware that housing in Baytown, Texas, where I live, is less than $250,000) It is a trivial exercise left to you to explain why poor working-class people would move away from a high-priced housing state. By the way, apartment rent in California is also 2x to 2.7x higher than in Texas. The article writer seems completely unaware that poor working-class people do NOT usually own houses, even in Texas.

*********** The article follows ***************

Democrats are losing the working class, one moving truck at a time

By Tiana Lowe Doescher | April 9, 2026 2:11 pm

Democrats touting wealth taxes in states such as California and Washington are quick to blame tax-fleeing millionaires for escaping to Republican states. But dig into the data, and something far more dire is happening for Democratic Party prospects. The blue state refugees migrating to red America are not the comically wealthy, but the ordinary working-class and young folks who can no longer afford the Democratic degrowth agenda.

Let’s consider four new data findings separately and then find the meaning in tandem.

First, the research team at FinanceBuzz dug through the latest census data dump to conclude that while a near-record one-third of all adults younger than 35 still live with their parents, it’s not distributed equally. Whereas fewer than 1 in 5 adults younger than 35 still live with Mom and Dad in Wyoming and both Dakotas, nearly half of those do in New Jersey, Connecticut, and California.

Now let’s look at some California-specific data. A Cotality analysis found that while 7% of all homes that transferred ownership nationwide did so via inheritance last year, that figure was 18% in California and at least 20% in the counties of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Napa. The Public Policy Institute of California used the state’s Finance Department data to discover that residents without a college degree were twice as likely to leave the state as college graduates. Over the past decade, the PPIC ascertained that the Golden State lost fewer than 2% of its higher-income adults and 1% of its college graduates but more than 10% of its lower-income population and 8% of its noncollege population.

For a final snapshot of moving patterns, let us turn to further census analysis from the Center for Christian Virtue and the Institute for Family Studies. The 2026 Family Structure Index found that since 2019, 370,000 families composed of married parents with children have moved from blue states to red states, and while fertility rates fell across the nation in that time, the 5.4% decline in red states was still less than the 7.8% decline in blue states.

The folks at the IFS and the CCV tie all these stories together for us somewhat neatly with a bow. Using a regression model to compare the influence of the home price-to-median-income ratio on a state’s fertility rate, the FSI concludes that a full 25% of a state’s fertility rate could be explained by housing affordability.

Much has been made about the looming disaster for Democrats in the next decade’s census, with a good deal of the blame deservedly going to the party’s disastrous tax-and-spend policies. The fact that 10 blue states, including the obvious candidates of California and New York, are trying to pass exit taxes to cordon in wealth as weary residents try to flee for friendlier governments indeed gives the game away. In the short run, Democrats are panicked over the loss of revenue to fund their policies, and in the long run, they’re apoplectic over a projected loss of 11 seats in the House of Representatives and Electoral College votes, which Republicans are slated to gain.

Throw in President Donald Trump‘s early success at reversing former President Joe Biden‘s open border and his first year of mass deportations, and the population projection has become even more dramatic. Three in four of the nation’s counties experienced absolute population decline when accounting for both domestic and international migration. But again, that decline disproportionately disfavors urban bases in bluer states. Los Angeles County lost more than half a percentage point of its population, and Queens and Brooklyn lost just shy of half a percent of their populations, while the rosy metros of Ocala, Florida, and Myrtle Beach and Spartanburg in South Carolina rose by 3.4%, 3.2%, and 2.8%, respectively.

“Geographically, many of the fastest-growing counties were in states along the southeast coast of the United States in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia,” the census concludes. “Among counties with populations of 20,000 or more, nine of the top 10 fastest-growing counties were in the South, as were 45 out of the top 50.”

The Left’s love for high taxes is nothing new and nothing secret. But its policy decision to obstruct new housing construction to maintain the artificially inflated prices of existing housing stock is indeed a more novel and less explicated development. Nobody else likes new taxes, especially when they go to progressive absurdities such as California’s Medicaid-for-illegal immigrants or Minneapolis’s “Quality Learning Center.” But blue-state refugees cannot afford the housing crises created by their governments’ obsession with local zoning and environmental regulations.

One way we know this is because blue state refugees are saying it outright. That PPIC study found that a plurality of residents leaving California cited housing as the primary reason. More importantly, the revealed preferences of these residents concur with what they say. Half of California’s refugees buy a home in their new states compared to a third of California’s new incoming migrants. Similarly, Boston University found that 70% of the states Massachusetts refugees move to have better housing affordability. And the Fiscal Policy Institute reports that in the top 20 counties where New York City refugees move to, savings on housing costs are 15 times greater than tax savings.

It’s easy to yell at theoretical Gen Zers to log off TikTok and Tinder and go actually ask someone out to get on with their adult lives. It’s a little different when you consider the specific headwinds.

If you’re an adult younger than 35 in California, you are more likely to be living with your parents, 39%, than you are to own your own home, 15.5%. If you do get to own a home, it is more likely to be an inheritance, 18%, than a purchase of a new build, 7.7%. For maybe a third of all the Golden State’s Gen Zers, the only way to get married and start a family is literally to leave.

Loyal Washington Examiner readers already knew that the housing crisis, which is almost exclusively driving economic discontent with the Trump administration, is one fueled by Democrats at the local level, as the census found that states with Republican governors issued almost 30% new housing permits per capita than states with Democratic governors in 2024.

Trump has found himself in a rhetorical bind, trying to convince boomers that he can keep their home values inflated while simultaneously pressing for new housing supply to lower costs. The loudest right-wing voices online aren’t helping, lionizing aesthetic traditionalism while vilifying urban density — not just because of Democratic tolerance for disorder, but opposing walkability and city life as ends in themselves.

But voters look at what Republicans do, not what they say. And the fact is that for the next generation of young folks who want the American dream, home ownership and children included, the tide only goes from left to right.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 10, 2026 5:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Yeah. No shit.

It costs a fortune to live in a shitty blue state.

Thanks for getting AI to confirm that for us.

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Friday, April 10, 2026 9:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

$250k for Baytown sounds pretty low to me in 2026.

You also don't live in Baytown. We won't tell everyone where you actually do live though.

Promise.

ETA: Well I'll be... you must have googled that figure beforehand. Good for you. You're learning...

Looks like it's right under $250k at $241k or so.

I wonder why it's so cheap. I don't live in a blue state shithole, and houses all around me have been going for around $300k even with the high interest rates. Outside of being in the vicinity of Chicago and the Lake that you'd sooner die than try to swim in, there is literally nothing special about being here in the middle of Dead-Trees-Half-A-Year nowhere.

I'd much rather live in Baytown.

But believe it or not, Jack doesn't make new friends very easily. Still got some roots up here and really ain't considering straying too far from this little spot on this giant rock that I've spent all of my life on outside of that one 5 day trip to the East Coast and back.

Didn't even see the ocean while I was out there. That's a shame...

Going on 50 years old and I've still got to take it on faith that there even is an ocean.

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Saturday, April 11, 2026 8:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why are real estate prices high in Blue Massachusetts?

Not for any of the reasons from the article. I strongly suspect the article writer had a political agenda:

AI Overview
Real estate prices in Massachusetts are exceptionally high due to a chronic, severe shortage of housing inventory — a deficit of over 220,000 homes — combined with intense demand from booming tech, biotech, and education sectors. Limited land availability, strict zoning regulations, high construction costs ($350–$400+ per sq. ft.), and homeowners staying put due to high interest rates have created a supply crisis that keeps prices at record highs.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, April 11, 2026 12:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why are real estate prices high in Blue Massachusetts?

Not for any of the reasons from the article. I strongly suspect the article writer had a political agenda:

AI Overview
Real estate prices in Massachusetts are exceptionally high due to a chronic, severe shortage of housing inventory — a deficit of over 220,000 homes — combined with intense demand from booming tech, biotech, and education sectors. Limited land availability, strict zoning regulations, high construction costs ($350–$400+ per sq. ft.), and homeowners staying put due to high interest rates have created a supply crisis that keeps prices at record highs.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The only reason there are housing shortages in Blue states is because of Democrat policies. And we're not even going into the fact that there are housing shortages because we have over 30 Million illegals that you let in. We're just talking about how it's prohibitively expensive to build a house anywhere in Blue shitholes. Everybody knows this, including Ezra freakin' Klien, so don't bother disputing this fact. Nobody wants to hear shit out of you.

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Saturday, April 11, 2026 1:16 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The 'affordability economy' has created a housing market nobody predicted: Prices collapsing in the Sun Belt, soaring in the Rust Belt

by Shawn Tully | April 11, 2026

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-affordability-economy-h
as-created-a-housing-market-nobody-predicted-prices-collapsing-in-the-sun-belt-soaring-in-the-rust-belt/ar-AA20DpSr

U.S. housing is experiencing a historic “reversion to the mean.” In other words, the formerly sizzling metros have gone cold, and the unsexy plodders are back in vogue. That point comes through vividly in the new market snapshot just released by the highly influential American Enterprise Institute Housing Center. The AEI data, compiled by co-directors Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter, shows that housing prices nationwide edged up a puny 1.1% in the twelve months ended in February, the slowest rate of appreciation since the AEI started collecting numbers at the start of 2012. (The think tank started reporting the year-over-year changes in 2013.) It gets worse: The AEI is projecting that for the first three weeks of April, the trend will go negative, and by the end of this year, single family houses on average will be fetching 1% less than at the start of 2026, with drops of 2.0% to come in both 2027 and 2028. Obviously, those numbers are trailing the current course of the CPI, so the the lesser dollars you’d get selling your house in 2028 would take a second hit from today’s high inflation.

Those startling stats mark a stunning reversal from the post-pandemic boom. From 2013 to early 2020, home price appreciation (HPA) consistently registered at between 5% and 7%. Then, the Fed supplied the rocket fuel by slashing interest rates, sending mortgage costs plummeting from around 4.6% in late 2018 to 2.6% at the start of 2021. Prices took a moonshot as buyers could pay much more for the house and still comfortably make the monthly payment due to the bargain home loans. By early 2022, HPA was roaring at an annual tempo of roughly 18%, triple the pre-pandemic number.

The bounty flowed mostly to the Sun Belt and a suite of glamorous western cities, notably Denver, Seattle, Portland and Boise. Florida, Texas and California led the way. According to the AEI figures, from Q4 of 2019 to Q2 of 2022 when the upswing peaked, Las Vegas average prices went from $308,000 to $448,000 (+45%), Miami from $350,000 to $450,000 (+50%), Phoenix from $293,000 to $470,000 (+60%), Dallas $264,000 to $432,000 (+64%), and Austin from $297,000 to $593,000 (+100%). By comparison, the Rust Belt, and the Midwest overall, lagged behind, after already trailing at a far slower pace in the pre-pandemic days. In that fabulous span for the sprinters of the south and west, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis and Kansas City each gained only between 25% and 33%.

From Cape Coral to Kansas City, America’s housing market is undergoing a historic reversion to the mean—and the data couldn’t be more striking.

The AEI report features tables displaying the five metros that have registered the highest HPA from February of 2025 to February of 2026, and the cities that have fared worst. You could almost cut and paste the “best” performers from February of 2022 into the current “worst” column, and vice versa. Topping the laggards: Cape Coral, Fla. at a 9.6% drop, followed by North Port, Fla., Memphis, Tucson, and Palm Bay, Fla., all between -3.8% to -6.1%. The biggest winner was Kansas City at +8.6%; Pittsburgh (+5.8%) and Cleveland (+5.9%) also made the top five.

All told, 28 out of America’s 53 largest metros saw price decreases through February, including all in Florida, California and Texas. The entire Rust Belt as a bloc made the plus column as Louisville rose 3.4%, Grand Rapids 5.1% and Milwaukee 5.6%. Stalwarts such as Chicago and Philadelphia (each +4%) that never got pricey to begin with are now reaping the benefits of being shunned in the pre-pandemic world.

The report notes that a big increase in supply is pummeling the south and west. Forty-three of the 53 cities are carrying over seven months of supply, meaning at the current rate of sales, it would take that many months for everything listed to find a buyer. That ‘for sale’ level is considered the lowest tier for a buyers’ market, meaning that eight in ten metros, shoppers have gained the edge. Among the most swamped: Miami at almost a year’s inventory, and Austin, Tampa and Houston all approaching eight months.

It’s likely that the markets that shrank most in the past year will continue to lead the downdraft. “We’ll see more of the same,” says Pinto. The reason: Prices in places like Cape Coral and Phoenix flew so high that those sunny locales became unaffordable for a broad swath of buyers, especially first-timers. The sharp drop in mortgage rates to below 3% from mid-2020 to early 2022 enabled folks to pay big numbers for their ranch or colonial and not cut back on dining out or cutting short the trip to Disney World. Now, the former hotspots are suffering from a confluence of still elevated prices, and home loans that are almost twice as expensive in the 6.5% range. Put simply, prices must fall still further in these metros for shoppers to cover the monthly nut. Another issue: The costs of owning a house in a Cape Coral or Memphis simply got too high versus choosing an apartment, and over time, rental costs exert a kind of gravitational pull on housing prices, yanking them earthward following a big surge.

“Eventually, once the hotspots are back to more normal levels,” says Pinto, “they’ll come to the fore again because people want to move there. The Sun Belt is always going to be the Sun Belt.”

Meanwhile, the Midwestern and eastern cities are witnessing a level of buying and home price appreciation they haven’t enjoyed in many years. “Homebuyers are looking to live in these more affordable cities,” says Pinto. We’ve entered the “affordability economy.” The housing tide is shifting, and for now, the edge has gone to the stodgy old-timers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, April 11, 2026 1:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

That's not an argument against any of my points, boy.

That's just a story about how millions of people are leaving blue states, wrapped up in a pretty bow so stupid people like you don't catch the real meaning.

Why Are Americans Fleeing Blue States for Red States?

https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/why-are-americ
ans-fleeing-blue-states-red-states

Quote:
From July 2024 to July 2025 (the latest numbers available), blue states like California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts hemorrhaged their most valuable resource—people—at an alarming rate.

These were the five worst states for net domestic migration, meaning more people left those states than moved in, for a combined net loss of 477,000 in just 12 months. Since 2020, these five deep-blue states have cumulative net losses reaching almost 3.7 million people in total. That’s a lot of one-way U-Hauls.

By contrast, the top-five destination states from July 2024 to July 2025 were North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona—all red. The Census Bureau numbers clearly show people are fleeing blue states for red states, and that’s been the pattern for years, including the entire decade before 2020.

You can deny it all you want, until the next Census numbers come in. Hopefully, by an emergency Census that is done before the next Presidential election. Especially after SCOTUS removes non-citizens from the Census for both state representation and federal funding purposes.

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