In Brief: Remote Work Is Changing Political Demographics
At a time when people can work from anywhere, the country is becoming even more polarized.
We’ve noted on numerous occasions that people are moving away from high-tax, heavy-regulation states like California and New York and flocking to the freer, greener pastures of Texas and Florida. Political analyst Teresa Mull says there will be some lasting political consequences that that demographic shift.
As our nation navigates a “return to normalcy” in a post-Covid world, one return most workers won’t be making is to the office. And as an estimated 40.7 million American professionals plan to be working fully remotely within the next five years, expect the great political divide to widen as liberals and conservatives move farther apart, both ideologically and physically.
With working from home becoming the norm, “home” for many people is changing. “Anywhere from 14 to 23 million Americans are planning to move as a result of remote work,” an Upwork.com study taken at the height of the pandemic found. “[N]ear-term migration rates may be three to four times what they normally are.”
Where are workers moving to? Away from cities, for starters. A majority (52.5 percent) of the Upwork respondents reported wanting to move somewhere with more affordable housing, and even more (54.7 percent) said they were planning to move “beyond regular commute distances” (more than two hours away).
Mull cites Todd Savage, “who runs ‘Flee the City,’ a ‘strategic relocation’ real estate and consulting firm that markets property to ‘liberty-minded’ clients with a ‘desire to live free anywhere in rural America.’” He says the shift isn’t new, but it has accelerated in the last couple of years.
Savage said clients he works with are “simply tired of the tyranny” — soft-on-crime policies, “insane regulations killing small businesses” and immoral public schools — and are “choosing to flee to a state and locale that they see as a bastion for liberty in dark times.”
There’s a decided “preparedness element” to many of the movers, but that’s not the only kind of person who’s changing locations. Regardless, it’s going to have electoral consequences.
What does all this moving around mean for our country’s political landscape? Plenty of research exists showing how geography affects partisanship. Harvard researcher Ryan Enos noted in 2011 that people segregate themselves naturally, and doing so has political significance. According to Enos, “Who you live near can affect whom you vote for and how often you vote.” …
People, of course, already exhibit a penchant for moving to places that align with their political views: a Stanford study found “political party affiliation can change desirability of a residential location by as much as 20 percent.” But this tendency, combined with the current surge in remote work, points to an even wider separation between America’s political poles in places with a well-established political culture. When your job dictates where you must live, you’re forced, more or less, to grin and bear it, and as you do with the fussy, overly opinionated aunt who overstays her welcome at Thanksgiving, you find a way to “go along to get along” for the good of the order. With remote work, however, reaching “across the aisle” to find common ground becomes less necessary and less possible when “the aisle” is a thousand miles wide.
There’s “a chance … that people escaping progressive cities will … be moved to their senses,” Mull concludes. “We can always hope.”
