The new political reality of the increasing trend of "work from home"

    

      I have always been interested in reading predictions for the future.  Growing up I remember waiting for the first Parade Magazine of the year for Jeanne Dixon's predictions for the upcoming year.  She claimed to have predicted the Kennedy assassination.  Of course, that was after the fact! Anyway, we always kept the copy of her predictions to then read again on New Year's Eve to see how much she got right.  She was always careful enough to make predictions with a high probability of being correct.  Predictions for major earthquakes in parts of the World that were earthquake-prone were common.  Political turmoil in the Middle East was another example.  We stop reading her predictions after seeing that she missed more often hit on a correct specific prediction.

     Our current pandemic has the potential to cause some significant changes that seem easy to predict.  The one I will be watching is how the "work from home" changes where we decide to live in the future.  If you can easily live where you want and still have the job with a company in a far off location then where will people choose to live?  Not having to commute to a job will have significant consequences in population trends.  The Baltimore Sun this morning had an article on how outlying counties in Maryland that were safely Republican are now trending more politically blue.  People are moving farther from the blue cities and carrying their political voting patterns to the traditionally Republican counties.  This happened in Howard County with the development of Columbia in the 1960s and '70s.  I still remember the time in the 1970s when Howard County had two Democrat clubs, one conservative (Ellicott City) and one liberal (Columbia).  Now over 70 percent of the votes in Howard County went for Biden this year.

     So what happens when those working liberal city dwellers start to be able to live in the mountains or beach towns that used to be solid Republican areas?  You don't have to wait till retirement age to live in these outlying areas any longer.  Look at nationally what has happened to Arizona and Colorado.  Or in Maryland with Frederick or Charles counties.  You maybe can have your city-based job and your acre lot without the commute.

     This new reality has caused the Republican party to become less democratic as the population demographics move in favor of the Democrats.  Thinking that the Democrats stole an election takes less of a mind shift than recognizing the new political realities.  Voter suppression and gerrymandering on the part of the Republicans will only get more dramatic and cause political turmoil with each election defeat.  What Trump has delivered to the Republican Party is only the culmination of the drift to the right of the Republican Party since Nixon's Southern Strategy of the 1970s.  Demographics and new pandemic work/life realities spell trouble for that strategy and Republicans in the future.  As for me, I want to live long enough to see national health insurance in the United States and have us join the rest of the modern world.