LA hasn't plague of locusts, but of pessimism

Louisiana doesn’t suffer from the plague of locusts realignment theory, but from a plague of pessimism that poses a challenge its Republican majority must address.

Looking back at a midterm election that broke decades-old reliable modelling of partisan outcomes, one hypothesis to explain focuses on the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic’s tendency to have some individuals, argued disproportionately likely to vote for Democrats, move from areas with surplus Democrats to those with a relative paucity, in order to escape restrictions typically imposed more heavily in states run by Democrats.

A corollary to this not so event-specific is that policies, such as higher taxation and more wasteful spending and transfer payments, in Democrat-run states increasingly burden individuals, particularly those producing more economic benefits for society, so to escape these some people – including especially those who ironically backed politicians that delivered those very policies they now seek to avoid the consequences of – move to places without such policies. More bluntly, that subset are locusts who degraded their former environment now taking wing to more pristine ones to do the same if they can help it. After all, they and their families always can move on while the less advantaged stuck there have to suffer their damage.

So, according to the idea, enough of this disproportionately Democrat crowd decamped to dilute Republican strength in various states, and just at the right time after the census to confound reapportionment. One piece of surface evidence supporting this is that GOP House of Representatives candidates received 51 percent of the vote and will comprise about the same of the next Congress, reversing a decades-old trend where Democrat proportion received trailed their actual proportion of winners within the chamber and featuring some elections where despite having a majority of the national vote had a minority of chamber seats.

But that notion has a serious empirical problem. One could cherry-pick certain states where expected GOP statewide wins turned into narrow losses, like Arizona and Nevada, to sustain it. However, several glaring exceptions stand out to negate it. No state benefited more from a pandemic bonus of new residents than Florida, as well as from demographic trends over the previous decade, yet no other state saw such a dramatic shift away from Democrats and towards Republicans. And the theory also discounts that displacement works the other way; in New York, a marked exodus from New York City not only out-of-state but to other parts of the state created an environment where Republicans had their best performance in two decades. In fact, flip GOP House gains in either state and Democrats retain control of the chamber by the narrowest of margins.

Merits of the argument aside, Louisiana – which according to it should be ripe for Democrats to make gains in the House because at least Republican Rep. Julia Letlow’s Fifth District has only in practical terms a narrow Republican advantage – may operate to the same ends for a different reason. Here, the persistent net out-migration of mobile residents of the past several years disproportionately includes the middle class – at present the most reliable base of Republicans. These are not locusts who have depleted their environment and now want out, but instead are folks tired of banging their heads against a state that won’t right-size its government and thinks boosting its transfer payments will trigger prosperity, whose residents’ economic prospects for those not wealthy or who depend upon government largesse noticeably are dimmer here relative to other states.

So, they disproportionately leave. It’s not a plague of locusts in action, but a plague of pessimism, and rightly perceived when Louisiana compared to the rest of the country since Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards took office has at best treaded water in the rear, if not slipped further behind in many ways. And if this trend continues this may leave an excess of Democrats part of a recipe that never can become a majority without significant agenda alteration but numerous enough to stifle the fundamental changes needed to ameliorate the problems of a century of liberal populism.

This makes more than ever imperative that state Republicans in next year’s state elections offer the right candidates who articulate then make the right policies, which has happened in only fits and spurts in the Edwards era. Falling further behind as has happened over that period isn’t an option, and if the desperately needed reversal happens beginning in just over year, perhaps soon the plague of pessimism will be replaced by the possibility of a future plague of locusts.