Mountain West region becomes biggest Republican bastion
URL: usatoday.com
By Tom Kenworthy and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — Small-town politician Dan English is carrying around signs this fall as he campaigns for re-election. On them, a cryptic slogan: "Save the Last One." He means the last Democrat. Him.
English is the only Democrat to hold elected office in a region of northern Idaho that his party once dominated. He's the county clerk in Kootenai County, a booming retirement and resort area 25 miles east of Spokane, Wash. A decade ago, 13 of the county's 18 elected officials were Democrats.
Region's population swelling
The mountain states are the nation's fastest-growing region.
Population increases are the product of migration from other states, immigration from other countries and the number of births minus deaths.
State 1990 2001 % gain
Arizona 3,665,339 5,307,331 45%
Colorado 3,294,473 4,417,714 34%
Idaho 1,006,734 1,321,006 31%
Montana 799,065 904,433 13%
Nevada 1,201,675 2,106,074 75%
New Mexico 1,515,069 1,829,146 21%
Utah 1,722,850 2,269,789 32%
Wyoming 453,589 494,423 9%
Total 13,658,794 18,649,916 37%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
IRS, Census data used
To compile this report, USA TODAY analyzed:
Annual Internal Revenue Service data on county-to-county migration. IRS reports the number of households, people and income moving into each county from each county. It does the same for those moving out. To protect privacy, county-to-county flows of fewer than 10 households are summarized by region, so totals represent minimums. For details: irs.ustreas.gov
/pub/irs-soi/prodserv.pdf.
Annual migration data from the Census Bureau. Based on the IRS data, the bureau reports for each county how many people moved to or from the rest of the United States, but does not include origins or destinations. For details: eire.census.gov
/popest/topics/methodology/states.php.
Census 2000. It reports interstate migration from 1995 to 2000, listing origin as one of four U.S. regions.
Political party affiliation, as declared on voter registration forms compiled by states.
Interstate moves by drivers, which states track when they issue a driver's license to someone moving from another state.
"I'm the underdog, even though I'm the incumbent," English, 51, says. "This is the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the country."
English's status as a political endangered species reflects the dramatic change that has swept the mountain West in the last decade. A torrent of people who have poured into the region has helped shift its politics from a competitive two-party environment to one that is heavily Republican.
That wasn't supposed to happen. Many demographers and political analysts had predicted during the early 1990s that millions of newcomers and economic change — from a financial base of timber and cattle to one powered by outdoor recreation, tourism and high tech — would make the mountain states more moderate politically. Democrats and environmentalists dreamed of a "New West" transformed by cappuccino-sipping, biscotti-nibbling migrants with Range Rovers and Sage fly rods.
Instead the mountain West is now the most solidly Republican part of the nation. In 1992, Republicans held three of the region's eight governorships. Today, they hold all eight. In 1992, the GOP held a 23-17 lead in the region's U.S. Senate and House seats. Today, their lead is 31-9.
Nationally, the Republican surge in the mountain states helped the party take control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Now the region is a key player in the party's hopes of retaining control of the House Nov. 5 and taking back the Senate from the Democrats. The outcome of a close contest for a Senate seat in Colorado, now held by the GOP, could determine whether Democrats maintain control of the upper chamber. With the death Friday of Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., the Senate now has 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, one independent and one vacancy.
The eight mountain West states — Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho — gained at least 1.4 million more people from other regions than they lost from 1992 through 2000, according to data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service.
Many of the newcomers were affluent white voters from California. About 1.8 million more people left California for the other 49 states than arrived from them from 1992 through 1999. That was a time of tumult in the most populous state: an earthquake, a recession, drought, race riots, high housing costs and the arrival of a wave of immigrants. About four in 10 of the mountain West's recent settlers came from California.
The new arrivals strengthened the region's basic Republican tilt instead of diluting it.
No data track the political affiliations of people who move from one state to another. So there's no way to say for certain how many of the people who moved to the mountain West in the past decade are Republicans or vote that way.
But clues can be found in Census data, voter-registration lists, state driver's license records and Internal Revenue Service statistics that chronicle shifts of population and income among counties nationwide. A USA TODAY analysis of the data and interviews with dozens of demographers, political scientists, party officials and voters reveal a connection in the mountain West between the influx of newcomers and big Republican gains:
The Republican share of registered voters grew throughout the mountain West.
In the five states that register voters by party affiliation, the GOP either increased its lead over Democrats or cut their lead between 1992 and 2002. Metropolitan areas of Nevada, Arizona and Colorado — including Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver and Colorado Springs — were the leading destinations for people from other regions. The proportion of Republican voters in those high-growth areas climbed from 1992 to 2002.
In Arizona, which gained the most new residents in the period, Republicans increased their lead over Democrats from 45%-43% to 42%-36%, while the percentage of independent voters increased.
In Colorado, a Republican lead of 55,000 registered voters in 1990 today has more than tripled to 183,000.
In Nevada, where union-friendly Las Vegas had long given Democrats an edge, Republicans turned a huge perennial deficit into a virtual tie by 1996 and this year moved into a small lead. In Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, Republicans have cut the Democratic lead in voter registration from 12 percentage points to 6 in the last decade.
Though many of the people who come to Las Vegas in search of jobs tend to be Democratic, "it's a challenge to get them to vote," explains Terry Care, chairman of the Nevada Democratic Party. Those who come to retire, he says, are more likely to be Republican, and retirees vote in greater numbers.
California was the primary source of newcomers to the mountain states.
From 1992 through 2000, California lost at least 570,000 more people to the Mountain West than it gained from the region, according to IRS data compiled from tax returns. That was more than any other state. Californians moved throughout the region, to big cities, suburbs and small towns — Phoenix and Tucson, Las Vegas and Reno, Denver and Colorado Springs, Boise and Coeur d'Alene, Salt Lake City and St. George, Utah.
Other measures capture different slices of the flow.
According to the Idaho Department of Transportation, about 53% of the 111,000 people who turned in driver's licenses from other states after moving to Idaho from 1991 through 2001 and getting a license there were from California. In 1993 alone — the year after the Rodney King beating riots in Los Angeles — 11,212 Californians changed their licenses to Idaho. Just six people did the reverse.
The outgoing tide slowed during California's boom of the late 1990s, but even prosperity could not prevent it from losing more people to other states than it gained. Santa Clara County — home of Silicon Valley — lost a net of 3,300 people to the mountain West from 1999 through 2000, IRS data show.
Most of those people settled in metropolitan Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson. Much of the continued migration came as congestion and overheated home prices in Silicon Valley prompted residents to cash out huge gains and businesses to shunt jobs to less-expensive locations, including the mountain states.
Migration from California was heaviest from four Los Angeles-area counties. IRS data show that Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties accounted for about 60% of the state's net loss to the mountain states, the equivalent of 330,000 people. A fifth county — strongly Republican San Diego County — accounted for 8%. Most settled in the big metro areas of the mountain states, but a significant share settled in smaller metros such as Boulder, Colo., and Albuquerque.
"There was an emptying out of Orange County by people who were truly ticked about big government, high taxes and social turmoil," says Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster.
Conservative white voters flocked to the mountain states.
Colorado absorbed a large number of people with conservative values, overwhelming predictions that the state would become more Democratic, Ciruli says. The same phenomenon happened in other Western states. "We have a lot of people who have come from other states who were discouraged by high taxes and regulation," says Bob Fannin, chairman of the Arizona GOP.
Even in Western states that aren't growing as fast as others, new arrivals have tilted the electorate to the right, says Jim Sylvester, an economist with the University of Montana's Bureau of Business and Economic Research. Quarterly polls by the center show that new residents are "much more conservative" than natives, Sylvester says.
The nation added 6.2 million people of voting age in the 1990s who are white but not Hispanic. The mountain West accounted for one-third of that increase, although the region has just 7% of the nation's population. Arizona, Colorado and Utah, in that order, received the most.
At the same time, California had a net loss of 876,000 non-Hispanic whites of voting age. There is no gauge of how many of those voters are conservative. But analysts say that many of them were.
Not all the new voters in the mountain states were arrivals from elsewhere. The total includes young people who turned 18.
People moving into the region tended to be more affluent than people moving out.
The exodus from the four Los Angeles-area counties produced a net gain for the mountain states of $2 billion a year in household income, IRS data show. To the north, people leaving Silicon Valley for the region were more affluent than those moving the other way.
Thousands more people are moving from Chicago to Phoenix each year than are moving from Phoenix to Chicago. A comparison of people moving each way in 1999 and 2000 showed that those leaving seven counties in metropolitan Chicago averaged 22% more income than people going the other way.
The same pattern holds across the region. IRS data identified 29 counties outside the mountain West that lost people to fast-growing Douglas County, Colo., south of Denver, between 1999 and 2000. In 21 of those 29 comparisons, people moving into Douglas were more affluent than the people who were leaving.
The trend is visible in small towns, too. Hundreds of wealthy people are buying second homes and ranches in the area around Jackson, Wyoming, giving Teton County more new voters — 1,300 — than the rest of the state over the last four years. The result: a net gain of 865 Republicans and 23 Democrats in four years.
"We've had a lot of people move here from California who cashed out the equity in their houses and came into Nevada," says Care, the Nevada Democratic chairman. Are they Republicans? "Those who bring their money sure are," he says.
Upscale and suburban
The mountain West is the heart of what demographer William Frey characterizes as a "new suburban-like category of states that can be termed the New Sunbelt."
Frey, with the University of Michigan and the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., describes the new arrivals as "upscale folks" with "suburban economic values," who tend to be independents and Republicans. Among the transplants, he says, are three main groups:
People moving for traditional employment reasons, attracted to the mountain West by new opportunities as the region's economy diversifies.
Lifestyle migrants, fleeing California and other states because of the high cost of living, traffic, eroding schools and sharp increases in the population of foreign-born immigrants. "A lot of people coming in from California are coming in for 'urban dread' reasons," says Sylvester of the University of Montana.
Baby boomer empty nesters and retirees cashing in their equity in California's rich housing market and moving to mountain West communities with ample amenities but cheaper real estate.
Marc Racicot, national chairman of the Republican Party and a former governor of Montana, says the political shift has less to do with the mountain West's growth than with the "extreme positions" of the Democratic Party nationally. "I don't think it's the people who have changed out there," he says. "It's the parties that have changed."
The GOP hold on the mountain states has had national impact well beyond the fight for control of Congress. It has helped shape national policy on environmental and land-use issues that are vital in a region where the federal government owns vast tracts of land, ranging from 28% of all acreage in Montana to 83% in Nevada.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic members of Congress from the mountain West helped — and often led — efforts to enact landmark environmental laws. Among them were measures protecting endangered species, setting up a national wilderness system, changing the way forests and rangeland are managed and giving the public greater involvement in federal decision-making.
Today, many Western Republicans are pushing to scale back some of those laws and to expand oil and gas exploration and other commercial activities on federal lands.
In presidential politics, the mountain West was solidly Republican through the 1980s, but Democrat Bill Clinton cracked that dominance in 1992 and 1996. He won four states in his first campaign and three in his second. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore carried only New Mexico. In 2004, the West will have more national influence than before, gaining four electoral votes in the last Census. But its 41 electoral votes are still dwarfed by California's 55.
In Idaho, says Jim Weatherby, a political science professor at Boise State University, "people who are moving in for more cultural reasons than just economic reasons have reinforced the state's conservatism."
Marshall and Gail Thompson fit that profile. Natives of Southern California, they moved to Coeur d'Alene a decade ago from Orange County.
"Everybody we know here is from there," Gail Thompson says. The couple, who own a commercial printing business and describe themselves as conservative Republicans, began thinking of moving from California when their daughter was about to enter kindergarten. They found she would be in a class of 36 children. About 70% of them did not speak English.
"At about the same time, a guy walked into my shop and wanted to buy it," Marshall Thompson says. "I was getting tired of traffic, graffiti, dirty air."
On a visit to Coeur d'Alene, Marshall said they found "there was no graffiti, no trash on the roads, the sky was blue, the teenagers said hello to us on the street. How could we not love it?"
Kootenai County, in the state's panhandle, which stretches to the Canadian border, is one of three Idaho counties that rank high as a destination for people from other states. During the 1990s, its population soared by 56%, to 108,685. Three of the top four counties sending migrants to Kootenai were in California â€" Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego.
For much of its history, Kootenai was a Democratic bastion, thanks in large part to natural resource industries such as mining and timber in which unionized workers held sway. No more. According to Idaho Republican Party surveys â€" the state does not register people by party preference â€" Kootenai County is now the most Republican county in Idaho.
Though Idaho has traditionally been a good place for Republicans, it wasn't long ago that Democrats could claim some victories. As recently as 1991, Democrat Cecil Andrus was in his fourth term as governor, one of the state's two House seats was in Democratic hands, and the state Senate was evenly divided between the parties. Since 1994, however, no Democrat has won the governorship or a congressional seat and the state Senate is now 32-3 Republican.
How much of that shift is attributable to immigrants from other states?
"A ton," says Bob Nonini, chairman of the Kootenai County GOP. He attributes some of the shift to environmental policies during the Clinton administration that alienated some Democratic voters. But mostly it's immigrants from California, Nonini says. The transplants "are fed up with growth and taxation and crime and drugs, the things that have plagued that state," he says. "They've moved here for the best quality of life in the country: clean air, good schools, fresh water, and inexpensive housing."
Dave and Greg Palmer, brothers and computer business partners who came from California's Ventura County in 1991, exemplify the trend. They visited Kootenai County and immediately realized, Dave Palmer says, "This is the place we ought to be living."
Tired of California's high business costs and liberal social atmosphere, they have found the climate in Hayden, Idaho, much to their liking. Business deals — including the construction of the building housing their company — are done on a handshake. And for brothers raised by a career Air Force colonel who served as chief aide to the late Air Force general Curtis LeMay, one of the leading hawks of the Vietnam War era, the political climate is balmy.
"It's like a 40-year step back in time," Dave Palmer says. "People are so friendly and trustworthy."
Voters like these make it tough for English, the Kootenai County clerk trying to hold on as the sole Democratic officeholder.
"Everything ebbs and flows," he says. "As the last Democrat, you have to keep your sense of humor." |
