Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 417: What Makes Us Red and Blue?

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Episode 417: What Makes Us Red and Blue? · Words & Numbers

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Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is words and numbers
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brought to you by the fine people at Khaki, the Center for
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American Culture and Ideas. Ant it's a brand new year,
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surely you'll have something interesting to say when I ask
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the question What's new and exciting in your world this
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week? Well, it's a new year, and I
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talk about economics as part of my new job.
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I pay far closer attention to forecasts than I have in the
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past. And I can tell you that the
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forecasts I've seen, and I look at them on a spectrum, so I can
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see the people in the middle, the pessimists, the optimists,
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even the pessimists are not seeing for as far as their eye
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can see, which is about the beginning of 2026, are not
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seeing a recession. Now, you put a big footnote
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there that that's assuming that Black Swan events don't occur.
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You don't get a tsunami or, you know, outbreak of civil war in
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some major country or things like that.
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But putting aside stuff like that, even the pessimists don't
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see a recession. However, if you take that as the
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good news, the bad news is the average forecaster is seeing an
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economy that grows slower in 2025 than it did pre COVID.
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Which means probably slower than inflation.
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Well, that's the other interesting thing, and I'd like
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to come back and do a larger episode on this.
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I've mentioned in the past, I suspect that we're in a new
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place where baseline inflation is going to be higher than what
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it was prior to COVID, and all the indications are there.
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I think the Fed moved too quickly and cutting interest
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rates, and you kind of see that in the numbers and the Fed
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coming back and now saying things like inflation seems to
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be uncharacteristically stubborn.
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Well, yeah, that's because I think they gave up the fight too
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soon. But nonetheless, yeah, we're not
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going to see a recession, We're not going to see things going
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gangbusters like they did average prior to COVID, and
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we're going to see inflation run a little hotter than normal.
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Right. But the point I'm getting to is
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that if inflation runs faster than economic growth, it's
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really not that great. Yeah, well, when I say economic
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growth, I'm talking about inflation adjusted.
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So the economy will be growing faster than inflation, just not
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as fast as we were used to before all the nonsense.
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So if everything goes according to plan, we should be out in
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front of this for a change. Yeah, we'll be in front of it.
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Not as far as we'd like to be, but we'll be in front of it.
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And related to today's episode, you and I have talked for a long
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time about what we considered to be the largest threat to the US
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economy coming down the Pike, which is the debt.
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And I'm increasingly adding a second to that.
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That's population stagnation. And you're seeing this not just
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the United States, but you're seeing it in developed countries
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across the planet. Their population is just
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stagnating. Russia, for example.
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I read somewhere recently and don't quote me on this because
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the number seems extreme. I read that Russia has lost
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700,000 troops in the Ukraine war in total.
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I can't imagine that's right. That number seems way too high.
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Well, it's high enough, aunt, that they're importing North
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Korean soldiers. OK, granted, but whatever
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quantity of soldiers Russia has lost, whatever that number is
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Russia which has a near 0 population growth rate, same as
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the United States. You lose people in war, you
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don't get that back. That becomes a permanent
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reduction in your population. Yeah, and the data that I'm
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seeing is up to 120 thousand Russian dead.
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Really, it's probably worse when you stop to think about it for a
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second, right, Because these are all men in a very specific
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demographic group. This is going to have a ripple
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effect later. It puts war in a new light.
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I don't think we've ever had a situation in human history where
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populations weren't growing. You know, sometimes faster,
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sometimes slower. But to be in a developed
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country, your population growth is 0.
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War takes on a whole new meaning here.
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It becomes a permanent problem, or I should say the reduction in
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population becomes a permanent problem.
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I've got something less interesting, I guess, or more
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interesting depending on how you look at things.
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Do you happen to remember Ant when we talked about net
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neutrality and then we talked about net neutrality again and
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we talked about net neutrality again.
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I think that's how many times we did it.
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We did. And every time people are losing
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their minds that it's going to be the death of the Internet and
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every time nothing happens. Well, a federal appeals court
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struck down the FCC rules, I think, once and for all.
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So now I think we're officially done with net neutrality.
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We've been on both sides of this line so repeatedly that you have
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to know that this is a nothing. Yeah, this is a giant nothing
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that the best thing to do would be to get the FCC the hell out
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of this because what has the FCC ever gotten involved in that?
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We all said wow, thank God for their involvement and here we
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are. I just wanted to point out one
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more time that here we are. But this is an interesting thing
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because I read this in, in the court's ruling against the FCC,
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they cited the Supreme Court overturning the Chevron
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doctrine. And we had Clark on some time
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ago, Clark Neely to talk about the Chevron doctrine.
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This is one of the things he said that is going to change the
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face of regulatory rulings into the future.
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I don't know what role Chevron played here.
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I just caught the headline and I said, you know what?
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Here we are. Let's just maybe forget about
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this from now on. But this, of course, brings us
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to the foolishness of the week. And for this aunt, oddly, I want
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to go to the East Coast, to the great state of New York, a place
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where I once lived. I'm not too sad that I don't
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live there anymore, given how these things go.
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But the governor in New York won.
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Governor Hochul has declared that there is to be no fracking
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in the state of New York forever and for all time.
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OK. And so Republicans take over the
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State House, which might be forever given how things tend to
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work. But here's the thing.
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New York is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of
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natural gas. A trillion that could be
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unlocked with simple fracking. Pennsylvania, another state
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controlled, as you well know, by a Democratic governor.
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They frack right away. And energy in Pennsylvania costs
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roughly half what it costs in New York.
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Yeah, well, here's the interesting question.
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To what extent do the natural gas fields in New York State
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bump up against the Pennsylvania line?
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Because some enterprising drillers are going to just set
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up shop right along the Pennsylvania line, taking all
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that sweet New York State natural gas.
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Yeah, that seems not to be the issue.
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The issue seems to be that the gas in New York is shared with
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Canada. Oh, really?
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Which makes it even more interesting.
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And does Canada allow fracking, do you know?
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Who the hell knows what those crackpots do up there, but they
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could. Even if they don't, they could,
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at the drop of a hat, decide that that's what they're going
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to do. And New York will be out on the
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tiles when that happens. Yeah.
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And you know, one asks the obvious question.
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What do you think you're sitting on top of a goldmine?
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This is a money printing machine that New York is sitting on, and
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they refuse to take advantage of it as a matter of policy.
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Well, this isn't going to end well for the people of New York.
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NY is already an incredibly expensive place to live, and
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everything that New York could do to work against that type,
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they should be doing. And yet here a completely
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obvious thing that they could be doing and they just choose not
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to. And New York is, I believe it's
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a second state for out migration.
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California being first. People are leaving.
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They've had enough of it. And as they do, New York State's
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tax revenues are going to decline.
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That's right, because as we've covered here before, it's not
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the poor who leave, it's the tax base.
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Yeah. We give a special shout out to
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our Patreon sponsors who help us keep the lights on.
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If you'd like to contribute, go to patreon.com/wordsandnumbers.
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This week, I'd like to talk about population density and the
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tendency of high density areas in the United States to vote
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left and low density areas to vote right.
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And in preparation for this discussion, I pulled together a
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heat map of the United States, Two of them, one showing
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population density and the other showing the votes from the year
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2020. But it shows, you know, red,
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blue, how people voted down to a county level, and then the other
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map showing population density. And if you compare the two, it's
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not one for one, but it is remarkably close.
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The high density areas are voting Democrat.
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The low density areas are voting Republican.
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It's not as people tend to think, a coastal thing, that the
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coasts are uniformly vote Democrat.
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It does tend to be the case that high density areas are on the
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coast. But when you break it down again
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by county and you look at low density areas on the coast, know
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they're going Republican, it's very clearly a density issue.
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So my question is what's going on there?
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And there's at least two possible answers.
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One being that people of a more liberal bent are attracted to
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high density areas. The other that I tend to lend
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more credence to is the reverse. As a area becomes more high
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density, it tends politically more to the left.
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And you see that in, for example, Texas, areas over time
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in Texas that had become higher and higher density have shifted
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slowly from red to purple to blue.
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So you're the political scientist.
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Tell me what's going on here. Well, I think there's a lot
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going on here and I think it probably resists the kind of
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easy analysis that you just offered, right?
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I think it's going to be both of the things that you mentioned.
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It's not one or the other. And I think we've talked about
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this before, right? This mirrors a problem.
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If you want to call it a problem, it mirrors an issue
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that we've had in the United States since the time of our
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founding, right? Where on the one hand you've got
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the urban interests and on the other hand you've got the
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agrarian interests. And they broke down into two
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different political parties pretty quickly.
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And they were both large enough interests that they had to be
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accounted for, right? You couldn't say, well, we're
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going to break in favor of this or in favor of that.
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There was just no way to do that sort of thing.
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And I think what we've seen in the United States over 250 odd
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years is that that sort of thing has continued.
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And when you talk about the heat map that you took a look at
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earlier, most people I think have seen that county breakdown
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of the most recent election, which if anything was more
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pronounced than it was four years ago, which was again more
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pronounced than it was four years before that.
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So we are seeing a bit of a consolidation around these sorts
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of tendencies. Now, what it all means in the
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end, I don't think I know, right?
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But you know that there's an issue when you've got one party
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of the Democrats who are very interested in doing away with
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the Electoral College, right? Very, very interested in doing
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away with it. Why?
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Because it gives more political power to things other than the
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cities. If we did away with the
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Electoral College tomorrow, 10 or 12 major cities would
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determine the presidency every single time, right?
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Which is clearly why the Republican Party will never let
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go of the electoral. College.
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Yeah. Now let me put a footnote there.
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I tend to think you're right. Your statement, 10 or 12 cities
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would determine the outcome. I went back and looked at
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historically presidential elections and asked how many of
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them would have gone the other way, other things equal, if the
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popular vote had decided the outcome versus the electoral
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vote. And the answer is very few of
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them. And those that would have gone
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the other way, we're pretty close.
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But here's the thing, you've said this before, I want to
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underline it. If we went by popular vote, it's
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not the going by popular vote that makes the difference.
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It's that that changes the incentive of the politicians.
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They will campaign differently. And that will cause what you
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just said, that the 10 or 12 largest cities will decide the
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president. It also changes the behavior of
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the electorate as well, right? So if I'm a Republican living in
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California, I might never vote. Right.
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What's the point exactly? Yeah.
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If I were a Democrat living in Utah, again, what's the point?
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You know, you can't just point back and say this is what would
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have happened. We absolutely don't know what
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would have happened. Common sense tells me what would
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happen. And that would be that the
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city's would rise to a heretofore unknown and
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unknowable level of influence in American politics.
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And that was a problem at the time of the founding that had to
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be dealt with, right? So when we think of it now as
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something other than a problem that has to be dealt with, we
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stand to stride the founding of the country.
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And I think that's always a very dangerous thing to do.
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Now, I did a little digging on this one myself.
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I'm kind of curious about population density in all manner
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of things, and it's hard to get a sense of the partisan
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breakdown versus the ideological breakdown of cities.
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And those might not be the same thing, at least not exactly.
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But if you look at conservatism, how many conservative cities do
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we have? The answer is probably fewer
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than a dozen. You're looking at things like
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Mesa, AZ, Oklahoma City, Colorado Springs.
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It's certainly not big cities. Yeah.
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Not New York, not Atlanta, not Boston, not anything in
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California outside of, say, Fresno, which is probably right
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on the line. And cities that we think of as
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being very conservative, comparatively speaking, are
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actually right on that center line between liberal and
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conservative. And here we're talking about
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places like Wichita, KS, Nashville, Corpus Christi,
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right? These sorts of cities.
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If we were considering these things, these places in a
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vacuum, we wouldn't consider them conservative at all.
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But because we put them in the population of American cities,
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now all of a sudden we do. That probably doesn't do us a
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whole lot of good. I want to propose a hypothesis,
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and I have lived my adult life in some of the lowest density
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middle of nowhere West Virginia. We lived in a community of 50
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people and it was the largest collection of humans for an hour
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drive in any direction, right? Extremely low density.
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And now I live in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, and the
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population of Fairfax County rivals the population of the
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entire state of West Virginia. And I've noticed something about
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myself. Myself, as much of A wannabe
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anarchist as I am, I found myself thinking more in terms of
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government since I've moved here.
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And I'm asking the question why? The only thing I can point to is
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the following. In a low density area.
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When I lived in this little village in West Virginia, if you
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had a problem with your neighbor, you could go and talk
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to your neighbor. And if your neighbor was not
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amenable, you could talk to your other neighbors and through
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social pressure, you could get whatever problem it was that
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needed fixing fixed. But in a high density area, you
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have two problems. One, if you've got someone whose
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behaviour is bad, however you wanted to find bad, it's now
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impacting far more people than it would impact in a low density
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area. And there's a much lower
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probability that you know the person, that you can go and say,
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hey, I need you to cut this out, or that you're able to talk to
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other people who know the person.
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Bring social pressure to bear. None of those social tools seem
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to work in a high density area. And that leaves me only with
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turning to government. Now, that doesn't justify
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turning to the federal government, but it does somehow
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explain turning to government, at least to the local level.
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You've overlooked another thing, right?
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You're 30 years older now than you were then, and people have
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this tendency to become, I hesitate to say, more
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progressive, but they become more liberal over time, really.
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I thought it was the reverse. Really.
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Well, I mean, you see amongst college students, they're being
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so liberal until they get a job and start paying taxes.
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Oh sure, sure. And let me be clear, I'm
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removing those lunatics from the entire equation.
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OK. I don't take all that seriously
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what 18 to 24 year olds believe. Deep in their hearts, they don't
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have enough experience to believe much of anything but
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people, as they go from 30 to 40 to 50 to 60, they become, I
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think, a lot more tolerant of one another.
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They become interested in the sorts of things that they would
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never have been interested in when they were 20 years younger.
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Before we go too far, given that so many of our listeners are in
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the 18 to 24 year bracket, let me say something in their
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defense, which is, and I'm with you 100%, that 18 to 24 year
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olds lack the wisdom that comes with experience.
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But I have found that they do bring to the table, when they
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bring their idealism, the ability to remind those of us
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who are older of things that we once held dear and to revisit
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them in light of the wisdom and experience we now have.
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And I think without young people's idealism, those of us
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who have the experience and now are in a position to make
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decisions that the 18 to 24 year olds can't without them become
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somewhat moribund, somewhat set in our ways.
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That might be right to at least some degree.
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I'm sure it is right? I don't know to what degree I
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would follow that all the way down.
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I don't know that I would take it as far as you just did, but I
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would take it at least halfway down the road you just walked.
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I remember when I was a young man and I believe some goofy,
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right? And I'm sure that in 20 years,
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if I should happen to live that long, I'll look back on my life
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now and think, well, I believe some goofy.
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You tend to change over time, and I'm fine with that in the
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grand scheme of things. Ask yourself this.
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And I would ask young people to ask themselves this too.
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Who would you rather running everything, younger people or
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older people? Just by and large?
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And if you say younger people, you're a crazy person.
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Do older people get many things wrong?
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Yes, indeed they do. Do they get more things right
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than they did when they were younger?
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Yes, they do. But I don't know where this
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plays right. I don't know about demographic
20:18
shifts in the city versus rural areas in the United States.
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Are the cities getting older? Do people move out of cities?
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I don't know that to be true. The people who want urban living
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tend to want urban living their entire lives.
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They tend not to shift back and forth.
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And it would be easy to say, well, you know, a lot of big
20:41
government types, just they gravitate towards the cities and
20:43
they stay there. But how many small government
20:47
types do you find out in the country?
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And, and notice I'm not asking about Republicans and Democrats.
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I know you find more Republicans per capita out in the sticks,
20:57
but are they small government types?
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And given how much welfare flows to that part of the country, I
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don't think they are. We always just overlook that
21:05
sort of thing. So I think there's two things
21:08
going on. I think there's a partisan
21:10
difference and an ideological difference.
21:13
And they're not the same difference.
21:14
They overlap to some degree, but they don't overlap nearly
21:18
perfectly. But that's very interesting.
21:20
Interesting, I hadn't considered that.
21:23
Well, think about it in this way.
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Think about that. Last election we just had is
21:28
Donald Trump and the whole MAGA movement.
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Is that a conservative movement? I don't know anybody who would
21:34
say yes. Not seriously.
21:37
It's a movement. It's a Republican movement, but
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it's not a conservative movement.
21:42
It has conservative elements, but it's a populist movement.
21:46
And that took up the entire red portion of the map.
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Now, how does the conservative liberal divide play?
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I don't know. But it's not blue and red.
21:57
You see what I'm getting at? It's always way more complicated
22:00
than it first appears to be, especially when it first appears
22:04
to be a binary difference. So just taking a side trip for a
22:09
moment, is it your opinion that there's a change under foot that
22:13
the Republican Party is ceasing to be a party of conservatives
22:18
and becoming a party of populists?
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I would say yes, in fairness, members of that party would say,
22:25
well, not so fast. You know, you can redefine
22:28
conservatism to a point. And look, we have redefined
22:31
conservatism over the years, just as we've redefined
22:34
liberalism. You know, what was once liberal
22:37
is now conservative. What was once conservative is
22:40
now unfathomable. You know, I don't know what
22:43
labels we want to put on these things because these are
22:46
breathing political movements that never really take a firm
22:50
stand in the ground, right? They just keep moving over time.
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Do we want to keep using the words liberal and conservative?
22:57
I mean, I'd rather not. To me, it's populists and
22:59
progressives right now. It's not liberals and
23:01
conservatives at all. For our listeners, what does
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this mean to be a populist? Populism is the ability I'm
23:08
going to speak in terms I'm comfortable with, not terms that
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our listeners are going to be comfortable with.
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Populism is the ability of a demagogue to grab upon the worst
23:17
instincts of the populace, whip them up into a lather, frighten
23:21
them, and move forward with that.
23:24
And in my mind, that's what Trumpism is.
23:28
You get a perfect example of this when he talks about how we
23:32
must keep immigrants out and we had the recent terrorism, the
23:36
truck plowing over people in. New Orleans.
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In New Orleans just a few days ago as we record this, and Trump
23:44
came out and whipped up his base saying this, This is why we must
23:48
keep the immigrants out. But it was a natural born
23:51
American. It had nothing to do with that.
23:53
But try to tell that to the people who we whipped up, if you
23:58
ask them in a month, was that an immigrant?
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A good solid number of them are going to say yes.
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And that's why we need to keep those bastards out, right?
24:06
This is populism at its worst. We typically think of Andrew
24:09
Jackson and now we think of Donald Trump, and we think of
24:12
populism in the United. And, you know, the progressives
24:15
on the other side are every bit as ridiculous.
24:17
I think these are just reconstituted Marxists.
24:20
When it comes right down to it, you're looking at these two
24:23
groups of people, neither of which is particularly helpful,
24:27
right? It makes me for the days of
24:29
honest liberals and honest conservatives.
24:31
I miss them both. Going back to this issue of high
24:35
density areas moving to the left, and my own experience of
24:39
at least coming to understand a little bit more about what
24:42
they're thinking must be none of that I see as a problem until
24:48
you do away with federalism. Because as long as you have
24:52
federalism, let the cities be as blue as they want to be.
24:58
Let them make whatever rules they want to make, but they
25:01
apply to the cities. Let the states do the same
25:04
thing. The problem comes when they try
25:06
and impose their will on everybody else.
25:09
Well, yeah, in the electoral sense, right?
25:11
When we talk about things like, oh, let's move to a popular
25:14
vote, that's exactly what you're saying will happen.
25:17
That's exactly what would happen.
25:18
But let's be careful because I think we haven't really had
25:22
federalism since 1870 or so, not in the way that it was designed.
25:27
We haven't had it because of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments
25:31
to the Constitution, which are the Civil War amendments, right?
25:35
And we had those amendments for a perfectly good reason.
25:38
The federalism we had allowed slavery.
25:41
Well, you really can't have that, can you?
25:45
And you certainly can't have it in the wake of a Civil War, the
25:48
bloodiest war in human history to that point, which was
25:51
dedicated in no small part. Don't believe the hype.
25:54
The Civil War was about slavery, right?
25:57
So anything that happens after the Civil War has to preclude
26:01
the possibility of slavery, even if it's only intellectual, even
26:06
if it's not going to happen again, given political history,
26:10
you still have to make sure that you nail it down.
26:13
And that's what we did. Well, when you do that well,
26:17
then certain things are also of necessity, lost.
26:20
And we ended up with a radically nationalized system compared to
26:25
what we had previously at the time of the founding.
26:27
If you read The Federalist by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay and
26:31
essays in support of the Constitution, you see that they
26:34
speak of the United States as being or as aspiring to be
26:39
partly national and partly federal.
26:41
And we've lost the federal element, right, when States and
26:45
counties and cities and towns simply become administrative
26:50
subdivisions of the federal government.
26:52
It's nationalist. At that point, we're left with
26:55
the observation that where we have population density, we have
26:59
people who are left of center. Where we have sparser
27:03
populations, it becomes far less left of center.
27:07
And I don't know that that matters all that much, except to
27:11
say what we're looking at is a brilliant political architecture
27:17
designed 250 years ago, give or take, that foresaw this very
27:21
problem and solved it to the extent it could be solved.
27:24
Now, everybody wants everything to be solved perfectly all the
27:28
time. That's not going to happen
27:29
politically. You're going to have to do the
27:31
best you can do. And I think federalism as it was
27:35
and is, is more or less as good as it's ever going to get.
27:40
So you should probably just take a deep breath, put your feet up
27:43
and say, let's move on to the next issue.
27:45
It's. Funny listening to you.
27:47
What's coming back is memories of conversations along these
27:50
lines we've had in the past, and the thought that we broke the
27:54
country with slavery in the Civil War.
27:57
So many times when I ask you about some problem that exists
28:01
now, you point back to some change that was necessary
28:05
because of slavery in the Civil War.
28:08
Sure. And when you've got a country
28:09
premised on the assertion that all men are created equal at the
28:13
exact moment that you're enslaving a bunch of human
28:16
beings, you've got trouble. It turns out there was no
28:20
peaceful answer to that trouble. The Civil War was, in fact, the
28:24
price we paid in blood for our own misbegotten behavior.
28:28
Well, OK, so be it. But understand that that carries
28:32
with it all kinds of baggage that never really goes away.
28:36
You know, whatever we do now, we have to look back to that
28:39
problem and always ask the essential question, would this
28:43
have permitted anything approaching that?
28:45
And if the answer is yes, you can't do it, because that's our
28:48
heritage and we just have to be better than that.
28:51
And sometimes that means taking what we think might be the best
28:54
answer to a problem off the table.
28:58
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
29:00
numbers. Until next time.
29:02
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
29:06
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
29:09
week, can't take it. Easy.
29:10
See you next week, James.