Red County And Blue County Realities

The realities of life in conservative leaning (red) parts of the United States are different than in liberal leaning (blue) parts of the United States. Roughly speaking, these distinctions play out not so much at the state level as at the county level. This post explores some of the differences in lived realities for people in blue counties compared to red counties that helps to explain their stark political differences in the U.S. as part of a more cohesive narrative that can help build understanding about their true causes. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is far from comprehensive.

Economic Productivity and Population Density

Per capita GDP in blue countries is roughly twice what it is in red counties. This is huge!

The population density in the inhabited parts of blue counties is much higher than the population density of red counties and "purple counties" which are evenly balanced between liberal and conservative leanings, tend to have intermediate population densities which are often suburban.

Ski resort towns and other counties with tourism based economies (e.g. greater Las Vegas) often have low population densities when crudely comparing permanent residents to the land area of the county, but have large swaths of land where no one lives with small dense resort style housing areas which house many seasonal residents in addition to permanent residents.

The link between economic productivity per capita and population density isn't accidental. One of the most consistent empirical laws of economics is that higher population density leads to greater productivity which makes it possible to pay higher wages and necessary to do so in a competitive employment marketplace. It holds true across cultures, across geographical regions, and across thousands of years. It has been true all of the way back to Jericho and Sumer and the Nile River Valley and the Indus River Valley to the present. It was true in the pre-Columbian Americas in North America, in Mesoamerica, and in South America.

Transit and Electric Vehicles

Public transportation is more cost effective and provides better service in higher population density blue counties than in lower population density red counties.

Red counties also have longer average motor vehicle trips than blue counties, because people are spread out further from each other, and longer average trip lengths (and longer peak monthly and annual trip lengths) disfavor all but the very latest electric vehicles relative to gasoline and diesel vehicles.

Housing, the Cost of Living, and Wages

The cost of living is much lower in red counties than in blue counties. This is mostly driven by lower housing costs in red counties (both renting and owning) than in blue counties relative to median wages, and by lower business real estate costs in red counties relative to blue countries that indirectly impact retail prices.

Lower housing prices in red counties mean that homelessness is much less of a crisis in red counties than in blue counties.

The pressure to increase the minimum wage is greater in blue counties where the cost of living is higher than it is in red counties where the cost of living is lower. A "living wage" in a blue county is higher than the "living wage" needed to maintain the same standard of living in a red county. 

Slower home price appreciation in red counties than in blue counties also means slower property tax increases over time.

Lower home prices in red counties also mean that red county homeowners who have owned their homes for many years have much less wealth in the form of home equity than blue county homeowners who have owned their homes for comparable periods of time.

A lower cost of living also places less pressure on red county residents to set aside savings that build wealth, than blue state residents who know that they need to save money to be able to afford a security deposit or down payment for a home, to afford education for their children which is critical for a blue county child's future income, and to afford other major purchases. Of course, lower incomes also make it harder to save money.

But with little home equity if they sell their homes, and less savings, and a higher cost of living in blue counties relative to incomes for less educated and less skilled worker wage premiums in blue counties, many residents of red counties are basically trapped there. They can't afford to move to a blue county even if they'd like to do so. The jaws of the trap are even tighter for red county residents with no blue county residents who are no longer working and are on fixed incomes.

Blue counties have higher housing costs because their populations tend to grow faster than the housing supply as people move their for their larger number of jobs that pay better than in red counties. 

About half of red counties, if not more, are losing population while their housing stock remains more or less the same, and even those red counties that have growing populations are growing slower than blue counties, so it is easier for the construction industry to increase the supply of housing enough to keep up with the slowly growing population. Moreover, in many red counties, populations have been declining, stagnant, or at least below the national average, relentlessly, for decade after decade pretty much starting in 1960s and almost every decade since in the last sixty years. Indeed, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has declined for almost every single decade from the 1790s until into the 2000s. These long slow declines undermine even hope for an eventual recovery or stabilization.

Since housing prices in red counties seem likely to fall, or at least only keep up with inflation, this also makes investing in maintaining and improving homes in red counties a bad investment. In contrast, in blue counties with every soaring real estate prices, keeping a home well-maintained and up to date with renovations and improvements can yield disproportionate returns, causing the existing housing stock in blue counties to be in better shape and more up to date.

More educated and skilled workers make much more income in blue counties than in red counties, which more than makes up for the higher cost of living there. Less educated and skilled workers also make more income in blue counties than in red counties, but not enough to make up for the higher cost of living there.

Tighter economic circumstances and economic stagnation in a community, also fosters zero sum game thinking, and eats away at empathy as taking care of your own becomes your priority. All potential forms of competition, from international trade, immigration, female workers competing with male workers, and non-white workers competing with white workers, all starts to look like a threat in this mindset, whether or not this is true. And, older white men without college educations, in particular, who are the core of the MAGA movement have seen their demographic's economic prosperity decline in relative terms to lots of other groups (even if it has not actually meaningfully declined even after adjusting for inflation and their own costs of living are low), through events taking place mostly in their own lifetimes.

Fertility

It is more expensive to raise children in a blue county with its higher cost of living, than in a red county. So, families in blue counties are smaller, with fewer children in response to those realities. Blue county children are also more likely to need and benefit from expensive higher education (which red county voters don't want to support funding for since higher education confers a much smaller benefit to them than it does to the children of their blue county peers).

The expansion of economic opportunities for women also greatly increase the opportunity costs for all women, in blue counties and red counties alike, of having more children. This opportunity cost has caused the number of children per woman per lifetime to fall particularly fast for less educated women who previously weren't qualified to be teachers or nurses, and had few options other than being house wives, but can now work in a variety of less skilled jobs previously held predominantly by men.

This has made the "trad wife" ideal unattainable for most families, but especially those consisting of non-college educated couples with lower incomes who need two incomes just to support themselves and one or two kids. But when women are less economically dependent upon their husbands and often have steadier and better paying work than their husbands, then families are less tight economic glue holding them together, and a provider man's position as "head of the household" is undermined.

Nostalgia

In a red county that has been stagnant or in decline for half a century or more, nostalgia for the "good old days" can be intense. High school educated people used to have incomes proportionately much closer to those of college educated workers and managers, even if the absolute buying power of those workers hasn't actually fallen, and this has gotten steadily worse since the early 1970s. In contrast, blue county college educated men have seen uninterrupted prosperity (and a lot more men have college educations now than in the 1970s). Women have seen their access to higher education and to more remunerative employment in non-traditional professions soar. Minority members are much less shut out of the top levels of the career ladder than they were in the 1960s even if they haven't reached parity, improving in relative terms. High school educated men have stagnated, in part, because of the structure of the economy (it is important to recognize that the two and a half decades after World War II were a remarkable one time only exception that can't be reproduced for the most part, and not the norm), and in part, because the average was being pulled up by smart, socially functional men who had no access to college educations then and now have gained college educations leaving their less bright and more difficult peers behind in a new economy. 

Civil rights aren't a zero sum game, but it is easy for a high school educated man prone to feeling aggrieved for economic reasons to see it that way, and women and minorities have secured a lot of civil rights that they once lacked. 

Smaller and less stable families for all but billionaires or near billionaires, it seems, has also undermined and narrowed the role of men as fathers of many children, something was was commonplace for middle class men in the Baby Boom era (although people forget that this time period was also one with much higher poverty rates than those of today until the "War on Poverty" rebalanced the status quo a bit).

The patriarchy has weakened, and they are the heirs of the patriarchy. So, of course, they yearn for the good old days, even though that was facilitated by key factors that can't be recreated with new policies.

Unions

The union narrative of the left is that unions brought us the weekend, the 40 hour work week, overtime, workplace safety, employer provided health care, and more. And, this isn't wrong. But it is incomplete.

Unions facilitate turning the economic power of workers into concrete economic gains for them in an efficient manner. But this facilitation and negotiation and political action related role only works at times when the demand for the labor of the unionized workers is great and the supply is smaller.

When there is a glut of less skilled, less educated workers, because the economy has been transformed to be less labor intensive, through automation, for example, and because other countries long ago restored the manufacturing capacity that was destroyed in World War II and no longer need to import manufactured goods to the same extent, unions don't provide workers with much in the way of concrete benefits because they don't have much to negotiate with. 

Likewise, part of the shortage of workers during the Baby Boom was because women left the work force en masse to have kids (a desire deferred during the Great Depression and World War II which were times of great scarcity), reducing the supply of workers and leaving the men who  re-entered the work force after World War II in greater demand with more economic power. This also won't recur. The many men who died or were seriously injured in World War II also shrunk the supply of able bodied adult male workers in the U.S., which is certainly not something we would like to repeat.

This, in a nutshell, is why private sector labor unions have declined steadily until just a few years ago (when worker economic power and demand was near a prolonged record high also accompanied by prolonged record low unemployment). For decades they couldn't deliver. And, since the labor market is weaker in the less productive red county economies, unions are even less effective in red counties than they are in blue counties.

Employers never like unions, but in red states, there isn't an intense worker desire to protect unions because they provide minimal benefits there, so the legal balance has tipped against unions in red states with things like "right to work laws", while in blue states, where the strong economy gives workers more power and unions more to bargain with, the balance between unions and management legally and politically has been more stable, because unions in blue states can deliver more to workers who therefore have a more intense desire to support them politically against employer attacks.

Religion

Being religious provides few economic and educational benefits to college educated upper middle class people, and can be a hinderance. And, it provides only modest economic and educational benefits to working class girls. But it provides great economic and educational benefits to working class boys (both black and white).

Religiosity is also strongly associated with uncertainty in life, especially economic uncertainty. Less educated people, on average, are at much higher risk of unemployment and prolonged unemployment during their working years. Farmers and fishermen are also subject to great uncertainty in their economic prospects due to factors like weather and the availability of fish from year to year than even "middle skilled" workers in blue counties and "urban farmers" (who work in truck gardens or indoor marijuana grows).  So, people in red counties are more likely to see religion as more important in their lives even controlling for whether they are religiously affiliated or not.

Red counties (especially in the South, in Utah, and in other Mormon dominated counties) have a far greater percentage of Christians with far less denominational variation than blue counties. Red counties are far fewer religious non-Christians (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists) than blue counties do. So, religious diversity is not part of the everyday experience of residents of red counties.

Family Stability

The same economic instability and uncertainty, and lack of economic prosperity that makes red county residents more religious also dramatically influences their family stability.

The biggest predictor of whether a cohabiting couple will not marry, or whether a married couple will divorce, in basically every culture, is whether the woman in the couple earns more in the cash economy than the man. And, men without college educations, who make up a disproportionate share of men in red counties, are much more likely to have sustained periods of unemployment and to have mediocre earnings that have been stagnant, adjusting for inflation, for decades, than men with college educations (or even "mid-skilled jobs" and some college) in blue counties.

Also, high school educated women who leave the work force to have kids for a while receive few, if any, economic penalties to their earning capacity when they return to the work force, while college educated women who do that see their earning capacity when they return to the work force plummet. And women in red counties are much more likely to obtain some level of post-high school education than men. Indeed, programs to help women improve their education and skills often succeed in improving the economic well being of women, while programs to help men do the same rarely attract interest from men or have much of an impact.

As a result, couples with high school educations are failing to marry (the average high school educated couple has a child two years before getting married while the average college educated couple has a child two years after getting married and does so at an older age), and getting divorced when they do marry, at unprecedented high rates (in white couples echoing trends that started to appear with black couples without college educations in the late 1960s, as discussed for example, in the Moyihan report at the time).

In these breakups and divorces, where the inability of the man in the couple to be the stronger economic provider in the relationship is a key cause of the breakup, the man also has little if any ability to pay child support and alimony, or to provide a significant property division settlement (i.e. the legal rights a woman gains from being married).

The economic struggle that high school or less educated couples have to stay employed and earn a decent income after decades of wage stagnation for high school educated workers, also makes these families much more vulnerable to situations where they neglect or abuse their children, often resulting in a termination of parental rights or just child protective service intervention.

Both unstable couples, and neglect/abuse situations, means that many red county children often grow up without their father as part of the household for prolonged periods of time (echoing the experience of African-American children half a century earlier).

These trends are also exacerbated by the trend towards assortative marriage. There are fewer marriages in which one member of a couple is college educated and higher earning and the other is not college educated and has lower earning capacity. In part, this is because people have long tended to marry people of similar IQ, but now higher IQ women obtain college educations, while historically, this was much less common.

So, red county families are vastly more fragile than blue county families. This has led to a perennial state of moral panic in red counties about masculine identity and "family values" which when viewed as a moral problem prompts an attack on perceived sources of immorality and lost of masculine identity, which has led red county men to try to express their insecurity about their masculinity by trying to display that in ways other than being an economic providers, and by scapegoating LGBT people.

In contrast, college educated couples, who are much more common in blue counties, are much more likely to marry before having children, and have divorce rates that are falling to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Higher Education

In blue counties, higher education programs at all levels from certificates to associate's degrees to four year college degrees greatly increase your earning potential and pay for themselves in as little as a year or two, and usually in less eight years for all but the least qualified students in the least technical programs.

In red counties, higher education programs other than four year college degrees are a net money loser even at low community college tuitions when living at home, and even a four year degree can take as much as twenty-four years to pay for itself with higher earnings.

This is fundamentally because urban areas with healthy economies have productive ways to utilize the skilled and abilities developed in college, while rural and small town economies don't have jobs that productively utilize what someone learns from a college education.

See here and here.

Immigration

Blue counties have greatly disproportionate shares of immigrants and, in particular, disproportionate shares of immigrants who are settled residents of their communities rather than migrant workers living semi-nomadic lives. Due to their familiarity with immigrants in their daily lives, residents of blue counties are much less afraid of immigrants, who they know from experience to be good community members (at least to the same extent or more than native born members of the community) and who they know from experience are not disproportionately likely to commit crimes.

Red countries have a disproportionately smaller share of immigrants, who are often limited primarily to medical professionals and migrant farm workers. Due to their lack of familiarity with immigrants and the lack of a healthy economy, red county residents are much more likely to fear immigrants. Attitudes towards immigrants and globalization is also influenced by the reduced likelihood of red county residents to have had any higher education (as discussed above), or to have travelled abroad or to have lived in very different places within the United States (as discussed below).

Travel and Migration

Residents of red counties are much less likely to have a passport or to have traveled abroad than residents of blue counties. They are also less likely to have spent significant amounts of time living in places in the United States other than the vicinity of the place that they grew up, and even when they have lived elsewhere are likely to have lived somewhere else quite similar to the place that they grew up.

Studies of cousin marriage have shown that people in cousin marriages are less economically successful on average, primarily as a consequence of being less likely to leave the community where they grew up to move to larger cities.

Race

Some counties are overwhelmingly white, and those counties tend to be red counties that are rural or small town settings, especially in Appalachia, the rural Midwest, and much of the mountain states. The main exceptions are in New England (e.g. rural and small town areas in Vermont and Maine and Western Massachusetts) and counties defined by college towns.

Counties that are majority non-white tend to be blue counties even if they are similar to red counties in other respects, these include most of New Mexico and parts of Southern Colorado, counties with Indian Reservations (from Oklahoma to Arizona to North Dakota), and much of rural Hawaii and Alaska.

Quite a few red counties, however, are biracial. They have a white majority, and a non-white minority, usually black in the South and the Rust Belt, usually Hispanic in the Southwest, and sometimes Native American in countries near Indian Reservations and in Alaska (in the case of Alaska Natives) that don't actually have Indian Reservations or Alaskan Native communities. Few red countries, in contrast, and many blue counties, are genuinely multiracial, with significant numbers of people from more than two races or ethnicities.

Age, Health Care, Disabilities, and Credit

Residents of red counties tend to be older than residents of blue counties (except that Mormon dominated red counties tend to have younger residents).

Blue counties have more specialized and higher quality medical care available, and more medical professionals per capita than red countries which have a greater need for medical care due to their older populations. Blue states also tend to have fewer people who are uninsured since unlike some red states, they don't intentionally turn away free federal funds for Medicaid expansion and mostly don't provide state funding for health care beyond the federal minimum contribution. 

Red county residents have less interaction with medical professionals, especially medical doctors, than blue county residents, and a greater proportion of medical doctors in red counties are foreign born than in blue counties, which can impair the quality of doctor-patient interactions and communication.

Red county residents are less likely to have good health care outcomes following trauma incidents and strokes than blue county residents since they are less likely to reach a trauma center or top quality hospital during the "golden hour." More generally, red county residents have less first hand experience with what top quality modern health care can accomplish, on average, than blue county residents.

Red county men in the work force are much more likely to be employed in jobs with highly elevated rates of occupational injuries (like farming, fishing, timber work, mining, and construction) than blue county men in the work force.

A greater proportion of workers in red counties have physically demanding jobs that make it far more common for these workers to become disabled or forced to retire at younger ages than in blue counties.

Higher percentages of the population that are uninsured, and general lower levels of economic security among high school educated people who are more common in red counties also mean that average credit ratings are much lower in red counties than in blue counties, and that a very substantial proportion of the population in red counties have money judgments outstanding that can cause their wages and bank accounts to be garnished and their property seized, which can build animosity towards the legal system, and distrust of law enforcement officers who enforce judgments and of financial institutions in red counties. In blue counties where economic prosperity is more often uninterrupted and adequate health insurance is more common, in contrast, credit ratings are higher, money judgments are much more rare, and trust in the civil courts and financial institutions is much greater. Lack of health insurance also breeds justifiable fear of interactions with the medical establishment which can lead to financial ruin for many red county residents, while it rarely has that effect for blue county residents.

Self-Respect and Fragile Self-Esteem

The non-college educated white men at the core of the MAGA movement have taken immense blows to their self-esteem in many cases, and if they haven't have seen friends and neighbors who have.

The fact that they didn't go to college or went and didn't graduate brands them as a failure. They have failed to be reliable and prosperous economic providers. They have often failed to hold together intimate relationships and marriages. They have often failed to fulfill the expectations of society for fathers. They are often reliant on government payments, perhaps disability payments or SSI or Social Security, even if they earned them, rather than earning money from meaningful work.

In the MAGA heartland of West Virginia, 20% of the state's entire GDP consists of federal spending in the state less federal taxes paid from the state, and this is true of basically every county. Even if some of this is subtle, like Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage, or a Social Security disability pension that was someone's only option to survive, a disabled man of working age who worked in physical labor all of his life, still sees receiving this support as a blow to his sense of self-respect which leaves his self-esteem as something fragile to prop up by means other than being an economic provider. Receiving government aid can feel bad even when you need it and it makes you better off because it is a constant reminder of your own failures.

Cursing the federal government and claiming you can be independent of it, reality be damned, can help compensate for the blow to one's self-esteem and self-respect that flows from being dependent upon it, even though it is counterproductive (at least in the short term) to do so.

Veterans, Hunters, Dangerous Animals, Law Enforcement Response Times, Firearms, And Crime News

Men in red countries are much more likely to be military veterans, than men in blue counties.

Men in red counties are much more likely to have engaged in recreational hunting than men in blue counties.

The higher proportion of men in red counties who are military veterans and/or have engaged in recreational hunting, means that men in red countries are much more likely to be gun owners than men in blue counties, and in particular, are much more likely to own firearms other than handguns.

Due to lower population densities in rural America, where the vast majority of counties are red counties, the average red county resident is a much greater distance from the average law enforcement responder than the average blue county resident, and as a result law enforcement response times to 9-1-1 calls are longer in red counties than in blue counties. Encounters with dangerous wildlife are also much more common in red counties than in blue counties. These circumstances creates a greater perceived need to own firearms for self-defense and the defense of others in red counties than in blue counties.

Also, while blue county news reporting typically covers a whole metropolitan area, resulting in a constant stream of news about violent crime, red county news reporting is typically hyperlocal, covering only a portion of the county around a small town, resulting in fewer reports of violent crimes near the people reading it, even though their crime rates per capita are actually higher. So, red counties tend to be perceived as less crime ridden than they are, while blue counties tend to be perceived as more crime ridden than they actually are. This interferes with the ability of people in red counties to see the connection between their high rates of firearm ownership and lax gun control enforcement and the rates of suicide and homicide and police use of firearms that they experience. In contrast, the connection seems stronger than it is in blue counties, because there is so much crime to cover in a populous metro area that only the most serious violent crimes which often involve firearms, receive news coverage, creating the perception that this is the most typical kind of crime in blue counties even though this isn't the case.

Messaging And The Last Seven Weeks

Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).

Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.

The Race Is Close

Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.

Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.

Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.

This makes no sense.

If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.

The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.

- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.

- Wages have been rising.

- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.

- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.

- Crime rates are at close to record lows.

- The teen birthrate has never been lower.

- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.

- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.

Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.

- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.

- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.

- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.

- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.

- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.

- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.

- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.

- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.

- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.

- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.

- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.

- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.

- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.

- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.

- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.

- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.

- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.

- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.

- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.

- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.

- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.

- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.

- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.

- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.

- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.

- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.

- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.

- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.

J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.

- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.

Biden's departure should help.

- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.

- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.

Walz helps his ticket.

- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.

Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.

- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.

- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.

- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.

- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.

- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).

- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.

Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?

* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.

* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.

* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.

* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.

* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.

* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.

Trump's Messaging

- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.

- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.

- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.

- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.

- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist. 

-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.

- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.

- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.

New Colorado Laws

Many Colorado laws take effect on July 1 each year. This year is no exception:

Twenty-one new laws that the legislature passed this year will kick in at the start of July. Among them are laws covering the state plumbers board, creating a new Colorado Disability Opportunity Office and adding gender identity to the state’s protected classes in bias-motivated crimes.

Several laws passed in previous years will also go into full effect Monday, including a measure approved in 2021 that allows Colorado consumers to opt out of having their personal data sold or used to generate targeted advertising. 

Another bill passed in 2021, which banned single-use plastic bags at checkout lines at the start of this year, has another provision taking effect Monday that will allow local governments to enact even stricter plastic bag limits.

Here are six other new laws set to go into effect: 

Occupancy limits . . . 

House Bill 1007 prohibits local governments from limiting how many unrelated adults can live together in an apartment or housing unit. For college towns like Boulder or Fort Collins, that means cities generally can’t cap how many roommates can live together, except for health and safety reasons. Roughly two dozen Colorado cities and towns had occupancy limits, though only a few — including Fort Collins — actively enforced them. . . . 

Sexual assault cases . . . 

House Bill 1072. . . . It blocks defendants and defense attorneys from using what a sexual assault victim was wearing as evidence of consent in court. The new law also tightly limits how the victim’s previous sexual history, including with the defendant, can be used in court. . . .

Limit on poison

Sodium nitrite is a preservative used often used in curing meats. But in higher concentrations, it can be fatal when ingested by people, and it’s increasingly been used in suicides here and elsewhere in the United States. That’s made easier by the availability of the higher-potency substance for purchase online or in sporting good stores. Starting Monday under House Bill 1081, those higher potencies will no longer be available in Colorado except for approved commercial purposes. . . . 

Fewer guns in sensitive spaces

One of several gun-reform bills passed this year, Senate Bill 131, prohibits the open or concealed carrying of firearms in public or private schools, on university and college campuses, and in child care centers. The new prohibition also covers certain government buildings and the state Capitol. . . .  The bill . . . does allow local governments to opt out of its provisions. The Douglas County Board of Commissioners did so in May. 

Elections protections . . . 

House Bill 1147, requires political ads and messaging to prominently disclose when they include a “deepfake,” meaning an artificially generated picture, video or voice that replicates a real person. . . . 

House Bill 1150, extends existing criminal penalties and fines to people who participate in attempts to organize false slates of presidential electors. Essentially, that means anyone who attempts what a group of lawyers and officials tried in 2020 in support of then-President Donald Trump will face specific criminal liability in Colorado. . . . Colorado’s new law takes existing crimes like perjury or forgery and expands them to include a person seeking to participate in a false elector scheme.

Sharing A Country

The Temptation Of Secession 

There are days when I wonder if secession, which was a moral imperative to stop in order to end slavery during the U.S. Civil War, wouldn't make sense now when slavery is no longer an issue.

The Republican Party and Democratic Party are more deeply divided from each other than any post-Civil War division in the U.S., although gridlock in the federal government has masked these divides a little. The Americans in Red States live in different cultures and realities from Americans in Blue States. Republican are why we "can't have nice things" in the United States politically.

Unity Prevents Military Conflict

National unity brings quiet, unappreciated benefits as well. The mainland of the North American continent is divided between just three countries whose vast inequalities in power have arguably contributed to lasting peace.

Since the U.S. Constitution was adopted, the War of 1812, the Indian Wars, and the U.S. Civil War have been the only significant military conflicts fought on the territory claimed by the United States on the mainland.

The U.S. has been involved in armed conflicts around the world very frequently in its history, from Tripoli and the Barbary pirates, to many conflicts in Central America and Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine (continuing through Grenada, Panama, and peace keeping in Haiti), to more recent military engagements in Europe in World Wars I and II, to the Pacific in World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and in the Middle East and its vicinity as far as Somalia and Afghanistan. Indeed, national unity is one of the reason that the U.S. has had the military resources available for expeditionary military action all over the world.

Critically, after the U.S. Civil War in 1865 more than 159 years ago (and Reconstruction that followed) and the final stages of the Indian Wars in the late 1800s, there has been almost no fighting which has taken place in the continental U.S.

There have been only two episodes since the U.S. Constitution wad adopted in 1789 of foreign invasions that reached U.S. soil: the War of 1812 and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, which was 82 and a half years ago. And, the invaders in each of those cases: Britain in the War of 1812, and Japan in World War II, are now close U.S. allies.

If what is now the United States in the mainland of North America had been balkanized, at a minimum, each of the balkanized states would have had to have devoted considerable military resources to defend themselves from each other. In all likelihood, they would have fought some major conventional wars against each other in the mainland of North America.

For example, in World War II, of the Lincoln had not forced the Confederacy to rejoin the Union in the U.S. Civil War, the Confederacy might have sided with the Axis powers, while the Union might have sided with the Allies, leading to far more military conflict on the North American mainland and near the Atlantic Coast of North America.

Unity Secures Human Rights

National unity has also thwarted or resulted in remedies for the worst human rights abuses of the American South and other backwards places in the U.S.

The North has forced the South to protect the civil rights of African Americans, has forced the Southwest to protect the civil rights of Hispanics, and has forced Red States to protect the rights of women, children, and of Native Americans and immigrants, more than states in these regions would have otherwise.

How Does Migration Tip The Political Balance?

These questions aren't just "top down" matters to mandate from on hight. The way that the political divisions in the U.S. play out are profoundly influenced by choices made and lobbying from businesses, especially big ones, by civil society organizations, and by the internal migration and political activism decisions of individual people and families.

On one hand, if blue state people migrate to a red state, they can change the politics of that red state, shifting it to be first purple and then blue. 

Multi-state and multi-national businesses can also lobby against policies that make it untenable for them to continue to operate in a red state.

On the other hand, migration can further the political divisions between states. If conservatives migrate from blue states to red states, and liberals migrate from red states to blue states, this can solidify red state-blue state political divisions. 

Many businesses can, if they don't like red state or blue state policies respectively, move elsewhere. For example, many tech companies are moving away from Austin or choosing not to expand to Texas, because of bad red state politics and laws.

Migration from blue states to red states has tipped Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado to the left. Migration of liberals to big cities in other states, especially from the rust belt and farm communities, has tipped Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa to the right. 

Migration of retirees to Florida and Arizona has been a mild right leaning political influence since retirees are more conservative than the general public, but balanced by the fact that retirees still aren't assimilated members of Southern culture or the culture of the rural Old West.

There has been a lot of net migration from northern states to the South and Southwest, especially out of the Midwest and Great Plains, and to a letter extent out of the Northeast, although even then, the migrants to the South and Southwest are largely sticking to big cities that are culturally bluer than other place in those mostly red states. This trend may be running its course, however, as "natural" disasters and global warming and increasingly bad conservative policies in these states make them unattractive.

It isn't clear which trends will predominate in the longer run.

Florida seems to have crossed a tipping point from being almost a northern state in the South, to being crazy conservative. Virginia and North Carolina are being pulled by D.C. related suburbanites in Virginia, and tech oriented development in both states, from being firmly red states to purple states. The shift left in Georgia has been driven by professionals and managers moving to Atlanta which is a regional economic hub.

Ohio is vastly more conservative and economically depressed than it was when I grew up there, and there have been shifts to the right all across the rust belt.

Beyond Geography

The U.S. Civil War failed to end once and for all the underlying political and cultural divisions that remain dominant in U.S. politics today, even though it did effectively end slavery itself and largely took succession off the table as a political tactic.

The trouble is that as the meme quoting General Grant above predicts, is that the current first order political, moral, and cultural division in the United States only sometimes breaks neatly along state lines.

Red states still have "enlightened" enclaves, like Austin in Texas. Blue states like New York and Colorado still have large swaths of conservative, mostly rural areas. 

Secession isn't an easy solution to a divide that runs along urban-rural lines as much as it does along state lines, even if it was an available political tactic. And, honestly, while the U.S. Constitution doesn't specifically provide for the possibility, I don't seriously doubt that Congress and states seeking to secede could by mutual agreement authorize a "divorce" that would let some states secede.

One of the reasons that there is an urban-rural political divide is that highly skilled and educated workers receive much higher economic premiums for their abilities in big cities than they do in small towns and rural areas, making the higher cost of living in urbanized areas worth the price. 

In contrast, less skilled workers without college degrees receive much smaller economic premiums in big cities over small town and rural areas. But they still have to contend with the same higher cost of living that the highly skilled and educated workers in big cities do.

Of course, the mere fact of living in a place with higher population density and greater diversity also seems to influence people's political views causally. 

Every U.S. state of consequence needs big cities to function, however, and this leaves many even very red states with comparatively liberal urban centers.

Generational Shifts And The Long Run Culture War

Juxtaposed against the regional shifts are the generational shifts. Across the U.S., younger voters are much more liberal on most social issues, and are less religious, than older voters. 

The left has been pretty much consistently winning in the culture wars since the Civil Rights movement. Absent political tactics that can thwart the political will of the people in a conservative direction, the U.S. will eventually, almost by default, drift to the left over time.

Joe Biden, a long time drug warrior, is taking the lead in decriminalizing cannabis at the federal level.  Many red states have legalized either medical marijuana or both medical and recreational marijuana.

Mass incarceration is easing in red states as well as blue states.

The original segregationists (Biden himself started his career on opposition to public school desegregation plans in Delaware), no longer advocate for de jure segregation or bans on interracial marriage, although they now oppose affirmative action and DEI programs that exist to counteract and remedy racism. In the 1960s, in contrast, even Martin Luther King, Jr. was reluctant to press for interracial marriage.

About 85% of Democrats and 75% of independents, and large shares of young people even if they identify as Evangelical Christians, support same sex marriage, even though less than half of Republicans do (down from a narrow majority a few years ago), although conservatives are vigorously trying to make transgender people into scapegoats and are fighting a rear guard action to keep gays in the closet. Not all that many years earlier, even liberal Democrats were afraid to push for more than half-measures like domestic partnerships and civil unions.

The percentage of Republicans who have no religion is higher than the percentage of Democrats who did not that many years ago (white Protestant Christians are now increasingly scarce in the Democratic party coalition). The overall ranks of the non-religious have surged.

Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision was a huge setback for reproductive rights and have left us with a country deeply divided on abortion, which pregnant women are moving with their feet to overcome. But grass roots voters in state initiatives are pushing back on that, for example, protecting abortion rights in Kansas, and legislators in Arizona backtracked from the reinstitution of a very strict archaic abortion law that Roe v. Wade had invalidated.

Likewise, the U.S. Supreme Court starting with its Heller decision has taken steps backward on policies to end gun violence with gun control.

Of course, generational political divides can't be addressed with secession.

Sharing A Country

Federalism is one way to find compromises in countries with geographically based political division. But federalism doesn't provide a very good solution to balancing the needs and desires of big cities v. rural areas and small towns, or those of older and younger generations.

How do people who are so starkly divided in their view of the facts of reality, their norms, their culture, and the policies that they prefer balance their competing needs in a way that is tolerable for all involved?

Our federal institutions encourage politically segregating migration as a solution, but we don't have great power sharing alternatives. 

In theory, one could devolve law making further by vesting more power in more local governments, as the Swiss do, and less in state governments. But this isn't a great solution in the case of many laws because the underlying reality involves huge intrastate and interstate ties with everyone having to share a single national or statewide context for the most part. 

Also, while Swiss do well enough with three dozen cantons with authority similar to that of U.S. states in a country the size of a typical U.S. state, that overcomes small scale divides with compromises, carving the U.S. into several hundred states with state-class authority doesn't seem like a viable solution.

The difficulties involved with the necessity that people share a country and the states that they are in across political divides when we have few institutions to support that is part of the reason why the current political situation is so volatile. 

How Will The Future Look And Feel Different?

This trend will be one of the biggest visual differences between life in the late 2020s and 2030s and the period from about 1980 to the twenty-teens – in addition to the shift to now ubiquitous cell phone presence, the relative absence of roaming tweens and early teens roaming the streets when school isn't in session, fewer people carrying disposable coffee cups, and more men with beards, that have already happened.

Other pervasive change in how life feels in the late 2020s and 2030s will be a great increase in the number of people living in central cities relative to office space, more protected bike lines in cities, and the rise of recycling and compost bins. 

Fashion

Ever fewer men wearing neckties and business suits. More men and more women are wearing short sleeves in the workplace as air conditions are set to less chilly temperatures during hotter summers. Watches are returning, but are smarter now, monitoring your health and sleep.

Younger adult women are much less frequently wearing bras, other than sports bras while exercising, especially in casual settings, and have been doing that for a while. Women and girls who would have worn one piece bathing suits in the 1980s often wear two piece bathing suits that providing varying degrees of coverage now. Adult women's panties have also been trending towards being more skimpy. Yoga pants and tights for women increasingly substitute for jeans, slacks, shorts, or a skirt, without anything over them. 

Contrary to many people's conventional wisdom, however, more affluent countries and communities tend to become more gendered in dress and education and professional roles as people feel more free to put self-expression over economic priorities, not more androgynous.

Food

Diners and diner-like restaurant chains like Perkins and Village Inn are fading away. Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle have become common place. Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and vegan food has entered the urban American palette, as Mexican and Chinese food did before it.

The remaking of a shared, cosmopolitan American establishment culture diet is has been ongoing for some time now and continues. This is a question of multicultural integration, of changing lifestyles, of food economics, and of health. 

We know we have an obesity problem, and we seem to be homing in on an overemphasis on simple carbohydrates, too many "ultra-processed" foods, and a more sedentary lifestyle as some of the main culprits behind this, although it is still somewhat puzzling and intractable trend that we don't really understand well. Old conventional wisdom, like the importance of a low fat diet, hasn't stood the test of time.

Drugs

Marijuana dispensaries are now pervasive and common place and are on the brink of becoming much more mainstream since the federal government is likely to reclassify it from a Schedule I Controlled Substance under federal law to a lower schedule which will end the punitive taxes of Internal Revenue Code § 280E on dispensaries and will allow marijuana firms to use banks, declare bankruptcy, apply for federal patents and trademarks, and avail themselves of the federal courts. About half of the states have legalized THC at the state level, almost all of them have legalized CBD at the state leve, and the rest will probably follow suit quickly when marijuana is rescheduled at the federal level.

Other formerly illicit drugs are also gaining respectability in medical niches that will become a part of people's daily realities. Ketamine is now available as a fast acting, short term antidepressant and is also being widely used as an anesthetic used by first responders in trauma cases. LSD and peyote are being explored as PTSD treatments. A significant small percentage of older children, adolescents, and adults routinely take amphetamines for ADHD.

Semaglutide drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are proving to be wonder drugs for Type II diabetes, obesity, addiction problems, cardiovascular diseases, and even enhancing executive function in people with ADHD that have surged to widespread use very rapidly despite their very high sticker price.

Surprisingly, the religious moral crusade against drugs, like the anti-gay efforts of religious conservatives (as distinct from anti-transgender efforts), seems to be a war that religious conservatives have largely conceded, at least on the political front. 

Six months away from the 2024 election, no prominent Republican politician has made the war on drugs an important part of their campaign, and this is not a drum beat which conservative media outlets are pounding any longer. There has been sharp rhetoric aimed at Latin American drug cartels with a strong xenophobic bent, an instinctual desire to crack down on the fentanyl trafficking that is behind so many drug overdose deaths, although this has finally plateaued. But few political arrows have been aimed at U.S. drug users, or harm other than opioid addition by mostly white and often working class Americans, that drugs themselves, as opposed to foreign drug cartels as sources of organized crime, have caused to the United States.

Moral resistance to marijuana legalization has been undermined by the legalization of marijuana in about half the U.S. states without any clear and shocking ill effects. Indeed, marijuana legalization has coincided with a dramatic decline in illegal opioid use by minors despite a relentless surge in adult opioid overdose deaths fueled mostly in recent years by growing illegal distribution of fentanyl, often by dealers who don't disclose that fentanyl has been cut with other drugs from heroin to meth, in non-laboratory conditions.

Red states have softened overly punitive incarceration sentencing for drug offenses as much or more than blue states have, despite their strongly conservative politics, in part, to save on the staggering costs of having the world's highest incarceration rates that has been mostly financed with state tax revenues. Red states have lagged in legalizing marijuana, but his seems unlikely to persist and all or almost all of them have already legalized  CBD cannabis products, which are more medicinal than psychoactive. Bipartisan federal legislation has mildly relaxed sentencing for drug offenses.

Demographic Trends

This said, however, the global demographic transition that has emerged hand in hand with economic development all over the world in every religion and culture that has experienced economic development shows no signs of abating. 

The average age of marriage has risen a lot hand in hand with a larger share of women attending college and weaker economic prospects for couples who don't have college degrees. The percentage of men and women who never marry has surged, as women choose not to and men can't find partners to marry as a result (and as more men who don't have college degrees can't fulfill a role as a primary economic provider for their families). Couples who do marry are increasingly close in age. Men and women are having children later in life. A large share of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried mothers, although many of those mothers are cohabiting with the fathers of their most recent child at the time. 

While divorce rates for college educated couples have plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, divorce rates for couples without college degrees have reached unprecedented levels despite falling marriage rates (with a majority of these couples having a first child before rather than after getting married). This is driven mostly by the economic stagnation experienced by men without college degrees as the economy has developed greater intellectual requirements in a modern, automated and computerized work environment in a sophisticated complex bureaucratic society. Black families started experiencing these trends in the 1960s and have reached the most extreme realization of them, with children raised by unmarried mothers becoming the norm. But working class white families and Hispanic families are following suit thirty and forty years later. Strong social welfare systems have also made this pattern viable and the norm for lots of middle class Northern Europeans. 

These factors combined have led to a marked drop in the total fertility rate (roughly speaking the number of children per lifetime per woman) almost everywhere worldwide outside of non-elite families in sub-Saharan Africa, and outside of Gaza and Afghanistan. The decline has been seen in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, in East Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, among Protestants and Catholic alike.

There have been subcultures, especially among religious conservatives, pushing "tradwife" traditional housewife roles and pro-natalist agendas. But the Mormons are real the only organized movement that has had any success in implementing this agenda. And, they have seen their share of Americans decline by a third over the last fifteen years to a mere 1.2% of religious adherents in the United States. 

It is unclear if the Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, and other ruling of an ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court will turn the tide. Courts and voter initiatives in several Red States, and a handful of dissenting GOP legislators in Arizona, have restored some or all of the abortion rights that Dobbs took away. Abortion drugs for some early term pregnancies, and interstate travel from states where abortion is banned to those where it is legal have caused the number of abortions carried out to decline far less than was anticipated in the wake of Dobbs. Even Donald Trump has bucked the Republican grass roots by taking the position that abortion laws should be decided on a state by state basis and not strongly advocating an anti-choice position. All of this suggests that Republican efforts to roll back the clock of reproductive rights and women's rights may not be the major step backward turning point that it seems once the dust settles over the next few years, regardless of who wins the Presidential election.

East Asian total fertility rates have fallen to the lowest levels because all worldwide, because the factors delaying marriage and child birth are present there in spades, but out of wedlock births remain extremely rare there. Out of wedlock births are rare there, in part, because neither the social safety net nor family law rules provide nearly as much support and protection to single mothers there, and because abortion is less taboo there.

For example, in Japan, much of the social safety net provided by government in Western Europe is provided by large corporate employers, to whom single parents have no access, there.

Concretely, in people's daily lives, this means smaller families, more only children, fewer siblings, far fewer families with three or four or five or more kids (especially, in couples that have not recently immigrated from countries where larger families are common) and far fewer cousins, aunts, and uncles, although longer life spans mean that more children know not just their grandparents but their great-grandparents well. In working class America, it means that lots of kids are raised by single mothers with little contact with with their fathers or father's side of the family during their childhoods. Part of the reason that housing supplies are tight in many areas is that smaller households required more distinct housing units to house the same number of people, as typical family households now have three or four, instead of four to six family members. This trend toward smaller families muddled somewhat by complex blended families resulting from fragile marriages and even more fragile cohabitations that produce children.

It will be interesting to see if polygamy laws change anywhere in the U.S. as this becomes an issue of Muslim immigrants and leftist polyamory advocates, and not just vanishingly few Mormon fundamentalists in a handful of distinct geographic places.

Shrinking families make community and government safety nets and support more important, and reduce the relevance of nepotism and clannishness in American life. This is also impacted by the fact that Americans are among the most mobile people geographically in the world. Less than 59% of Americans age 25 or older live in the state where they were born, far less comparable mobility levels in any country in Europe, and especially in Western states there is even more mobility. Less than 20% of people aged 25 or older in Nevada were born there and more of these adults in Nevada were born outside the United States than were born in Nevada.

Race

Interracial couples, married and dating alike, are no longer as striking, and mixed race children are much more common. Interracial marriage rates of native born Hispanics, Asian-Americans (including East Asians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians), Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans are all very high, and interracial marriage rates for whites (who have few non-white prospective marriage partners in some parts of the U.S.) and blacks, while lower, are at record highs. Jewish outmarriage rates to non-Jews are also very high.

The U.S. is basically seeing shrinking proportions of purely white European stable proportions of black Americans, and a rapidly growing share of mixed race, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian Americans, as well as African immigrants, who are starting to blend into a "brown" plurality that is not starkly internally divided by race or deeply separated from or antagonistic to white Americans, in a manner similar to how Catholic immigrants, especially from Ireland, Italy, and Spain were assimilated into a pan-ethic white American identity. 

The cultural divide in the U.S. between native born black Americans and those of other races is higher, but not as high as it has been for most of American history since the abolition of slavery in 1865 that was replaced by de jure and de facto segregation until long after the victories of the Civil Rights movement a century later. The emergence of significant ethnic populations that are neither black nor white has helped bridge the cultural racial gaps between blacks and whites in the United States.

Homosexuality And Transgender Realities

Homosexuality and same sex couples are unremarkable, and not that controversial. A conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court established a right to same sex marriage, and there are a number of high profile politicians and celebrities who are gay or lesbian. They haven't abandoned this fight entirely, but they have deemphasized it.

The Christian conservative right has diverted its current efforts to scapegoating transgender people instead focusing on homosexuality, which is more common, more mainstream, and easier to understand.

It isn't clear how successful and sustained the religious conservative scapegoating of transgender people will persist. Those targeted don't have much of an ability to fight back on their own, and have broad but not very intense support from much of the rest of the political left, which is impotent at the state level in many Red States.

Housing, Land Use, and Remote Work

 

Land use regulation reform and New Urbanism seems to be finally hitting their stride in response to an affordable housing crisis, with state laws forcing major liberalizations of zoning regulation of residential development density in states including California and Colorado, and local municipal reforms in cities like New York. We're seeing more townhouses, more midsized apartment buildings, more conversions of office buildings to residential use, and more apartment buildings with first floor retail. 

Accessory dwelling units (i.e. "granny flats" and "tiny homes" on existing single family home lots) that are built as extended family housing or rental units are being legalized in more places and need just a little nudge to take off exponentially. Parking requirements are being dispensed with, especially near major transit lines and in walkable developments. 

There hasn't yet been much restoration of pre-zoning law land use patterns like single occupancy hotels and boarding houses, but the legal authority to do that kind of development is quietly being put into place. The same legal developments are also laying the groundwork for another round of cooperative housing with shared kitchens and common areas in basically an owned boarding house arrangement that flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s before the governance and social interaction issues associated with them took the shine off of them. But the less ambitious project of having single family homes with multiple unrelated households in them, either by subdividing them physically or just having the room tenants share a house like college students is also supported by these land use reforms and is already quietly becoming more common.

We are still working out the remote work issue. But the pandemic gave videoconferencing the boost it needed to become a part of every day work life and extended family interactions. The percentage of office workers who work remotely at least part of the time has surged, although probably less than half of them are fully remote workers. A pandemic generation that attended school remotely makes this way of working a lot more familiar.

Religion

Plenty of people still attend church with some regularity, but it is no longer socially assumed that everyone does, even in the South and rural America. It is also increasingly no longer assumed that everyone is Christian. 

"Nones" and Muslims make up a growing share of Americans, while almost all forms of Christianity have a decreasing percentage of Americans who adhere to it (apart from some definitional arbitrate as Evangelical Protestant denomination adherents rebrand themselves as non-denominational Christians).

About 30% of adults view themselves as "not religious" and almost half of young adults identify that way, in a dramatic growth over the last half century.

Muslims have become much more common due to immigration and to a lesser extent due to native born African-American converts, and are increasingly a visible presence in daily life. Halal food offerings are now almost as common as Kosher ones, and institutions like schools now have to be conscious of Muslim holidays and holy days (although public calls to prayer five times a day, which are pervasive in Muslim majority countries, are absent).

Mormons have resisted the trends of late marriage, fewer marriages, less stable marriages, and fewer children, more than any other faith in the U.S. But while natural growth from these natalist attitudes has helped to keep the number of Mormons declining as much as mainline Christians, white Catholics, and white Protestants, neither natural growth nor a massive missionary effort deeply ingrained in this faith, have been enough for them to increase the share of Mormon adherents in the overall population much. For example:

Between 2007 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Mormon has dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.2 percent (according to an independent tabulation of election survey data) - a percentage decrease of one-third over 15 years.

Via Wikipedia.

Communication, Transportation and Energy

Other look and feel changes in daily life already happened a while ago. 

Landline phones are almost gone. Fewer and fewer people read dead tree newspapers. Broadcast and cable TV have already been replaced by streaming to a great extent. Satellite radio and apps like Spotify have gradually undermined major radio stations that used to be a pervasive sound track to almost everyone's life.

Paper checks and postal money orders sent in the mail are becoming a thing of the past, while cash apps have started to become mainstream even though they are somewhat uncommon. Invoices and appointment reminders now come via email and text rather than snail mail. Email and texts have also increasingly replaced letters. Court documents are now usually e-filed and the service has been made available to non-lawyer litigants in many cases. Tax forms are usually e-filed too, and sooner or later, the IRS will cast aside the fax machine - a technology that is increasingly used by no one else - in favor of secure online portals. 

Parcel post from the postal service has increasingly lost market share to private delivery services as online shopping has led to a resurgence in package deliveries. Homes increasingly have front porch video streaming, in part, to deter porch pirates who steal those parcels. Quality photography and videography from cell phones, pervasive security and laptop cameras, dash cams, and body cameras, cheap and small tracking devices, cell phone GPS and Wi-Fi locator technology, and digital payment systems have made a well documented surveillance society an every day reality.

As typing has replaced dead tree writing, cursive writing has waned as well and will soon go the way of the slide rule. Voice operated computer system are already common in big business phone systems, where they compete with international call centers in India and the Philippines. Dictation, now done by computers instead of secretaries, is making a gradual return. And, real time voice to voice language translation is on the brink of becoming commonplace - it is already widespread as a cheap and fast way of doing text to text language translation.

Most cars are now keyless and manual transmission has virtually vanished from the United States. A modest but growing share of vehicles are plug in electric. We are on the brink of widespread use of self-driving vehicles, although we aren't quite there yet. When the do arrive, this will have a profound effect on the long haul trucking industry, as robots replace humans on our interstate highways (probably with greater safety).

Smart phones, GPS, and computer networks with AI features, have already enabled ride sharing that has effectively restored decentralized, thinly regulated taxi service to much of the U.S., and has facilitated easy scooter and bicycle and e-bike rentals. Online real estate sharing services like Airbnb have vastly increased the supply of hotel and bed and breakfast type services on a decentralized basis, with vacationers now as likely to stay in an online brokered short term rental of a private home as they are to stay in a hotel.

Life in 2024 is full of battery charging. Laptops, smart phones, smart watches, headphones, toothbrushes, shavers, cars, and even device and home backup power systems, all have batteries that must be regularly recharged with customized power charges, and can even pose fire hazards on commercial airline flights. But this part of daily life will soon make some subtle but noticeable changes. Spurred by the demand for better electric car batteries, several new game changing battery technologies for electric cars, like solid state batteries with different raw materials will enter the marketplace in the mid- to late-2020s. The new batteries will store several times more energy than existing electric vehicle batteries, will have longer lives with less depletion in capacity as they are recharged repeatedly, will recharge more quickly, will cost less, will have less of an environmental impact, and will be safer. This will make electric vehicles in every context where internal combustion engines (ICEs) running on gasoline or diesel fuel more competitive vis-a-vis ICE vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, construction equipment, farm equipment, military vehicles, boats, and even propeller driven short haul aircraft and drones. It will make electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers and snow blowers more attractive via existing two stroke engine models. It will mean that laptops and cell phones and smart watches and headphones and toothbrushes and shavers that used to have to be charged daily will be able to manage with a couple of rounds of charging a week.

Supersonic commercial airline flights across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are on the brink of returning after the supersonic transatlantic Concorde flights from New York City to Paris and London were discontinued after a couple of decades of limited and unprofitable service.

Intracity passenger rail has experienced a minor resurgence over the past few decades although this trend may have neared its peak for a while. There are a handful of intercity high speed passenger rail corridors in the U.S. which are built or in progress, although few meet the standards of Western Europe, Japan, and China, and it will still be many decades before this really becomes an feature of American life for most people.

Modern heat pumps are replacing air conditioning and gas forced air HVAC systems in homes. Home and business solar panels are now common and meet a decent share of household electricity demand, sometimes feeding energy back into the grid. Trains full of coal to deliver to utility power plants are a lot less common, while large utility company wind mills to generate electricity are common worldwide.