I am so country that the only time I ever visited a city I got vertigo and couldn’t look in any direction but down.

It wasn’t even a huge city. It was Charlotte NC.

When I was a kid I dreamed of going to a city and playing music and being a part of the culture.

The girls got to me though and I have instead repopulated a rural area. :p

I have 7 kids, 2 adopted, 5 biological.

My guitar is used almost exclusively to play Yellow Submarine and sing the family’s names in place of yellow. “We all live in little Abby’s submarine, in mommy’s submarine, in daddy’s submarine.”

My youngest thinks Beatlemania is still a thing. First thing every morning. “Daddy, I want my Beatles.” Sister comes in swinging demanding Pinkfong.

Solo converting to DINK here, and for me, after spending years in a city, basically while there's tons to do in a city, there's only a relatively small portion of it that I actually want to do.

Combine that with my love of outdoor hobbies which are all farther from me while living in a city...

And at this point, for me, it's more about finding the smallest city that offers me most of what I like about cities while being small enough that I lose as much of the negatives as possible, with bonus points for a city that's small enough for me to live on the edges, where I can have a house with a yard and a garage, while being within a 10 minute drive of city center, but also less than 30 minutes from outdoor recreation opportunities.

I'm also at the age where "stay home" is often my preferred choice of thing to do, so having a spacious, comfortable home where I can enjoy living is a major consideration. A 500 sqft 1BR that I share with a roommate or two ain't cutting it.

Different people like different things, and while cities provide a lot, there's also a lot they don't.

pollution, noise, lack of nature, and depending on the city crime and corruption

Nearly half the state population is in NYC alone. Expand that out to the nyc metropolitan area within New York, and you’re getting close to 3/4 of the state population.

It’s quite reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the folks that left New York were leaving NYC.

There are pockets of NY, outside of NYC, that are blue. The big areas that are red are mostly rural counties. But land doesn't vote, people do, so it doesn't matter if 1,000 people in a huge area vote red when 100,000 people in a small city vote blue.

You're right that NYC helps keep us blue, but they aren't the only ones. In 2020, NY voted for Biden over Trump 60.8% to 37.7%. If we removed NYC's counties, NY would have still voted for Biden, but at a much closer 52.4% to 45.9%.

Not alone. It would have to lose ~3% relative to other states to lose a vote. However, this is just one year and southern states are all gaining people at twice the rate New York is losing them, so theoretically a blue vote could be flipping to a red vote every few years just from the amount of people leaving blue states.

Note that when New York loses Congressional seats, the legislature will presumably gerrymander them such that the Republicans in New York are eliminated, so it shouldn't affect Congress at all.

The geographic majority of Washington state is red, but the state is consistently blue. Because land doesn’t vote.

Nice take.

I saw the map and had the same dismal overall reaction but this is a very valid point!

Spot on. Migration is a major factor in affecting political change anyway.

Some of these comments are so out of touch. The irony is that people who blanket support pro choice will go extinct as they abort more of their children over time or don't reproduce at all (the people above you in this chain). Conservative people don't abort (now by law) - their population will grow. Thus more anti-abortion laws will happen.

They don’t think it will happen to them.

Yknow despite literally all metrics of quality of life, health, and safety being even worse in red states than the already pathetic US average.

Why is it that every conservative leaning government worldwide is currently in a self destructive spiral while socialist societies are getting better and better in all measurable metrics?

Curious.

My guess is that they have the means (funds, paid time off) to travel out of state, if needed.

Having just moved from Texas to the north east, people in the northeast are clueless to how bad it actually is.