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About the author
Irwin L. Morris is the Kretzer Distinguished Professor of Humanities and the Executive Director of the School for Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His most recent book is Reactionary Republicans: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump's Victory (co-authored with Bryan Gervais).
Summary
As migration alters the southern political landscape, partisan battle lines will be drawn between the Democrat-leaning areas of growth and the increasingly Republican areas of decline and stagnation.
The Democratic Party is gaining support in the South, but the prevailing explanations of partisan shift fail to capture how and why this transformation has come about. In Movers and Stayers, Irwin Morris develops a new theory that explains the Democrats' renewed influence in the region and empirically demonstrates the influence of population growth. As Morris shows, migratory patterns play a significant role in politics, and urbanization is driving polarization in the South. Those who move to cities--the "movers" of Morris's framework--do so for jobs, and they tend to be progressive, young, well-educated Democrats. Their liberal views tend to be reinforced by the diversity of the communities in which they choose to live, and their progressivism fosters similar values among long-term residents. At the same time, "stayers" (long-term residents) absorb the consequences--or "community threat"--of this large-scale migration. While white stayers tend to become more conservative, the effects on voter behavior play out differently across racial lines. Both movers and stayers are altering the southern political landscape and polarization nationwide. Powerfully counterintuitive, Movers and Stayers provides a game-changing way of understanding one of the most confounding trends in American politics.
Additional text
Recent elections have shown parts of the South beginning to realign back to the Democratic Party. The realignment of parts of the South has significant implications for national politics. Morris is one of the first scholars to explore this incipient change in partisan loyalties. Using counties as his unit of analysis, this careful study makes a valuable contribution that charts how voters moving to urban areas differ from those who stay in rural communities. As Morris documents, these choices are transforming the region's politics.
