The Great Migration That Broke Florida
I spent the morning pacing the kitchen, breaking the map down in my head because the numbers simply didn't add up. Was it the voting machines? Was it some ghostly echo of the year 2000, resurrecting hanging chads in the back of our collective psyche? Was it simply a string of uninspiring candidates offering dry technocratic white papers to a populace running on raw adrenaline? Then I looked at the rest of the country. Across state lines, balance was shifting, sane coalitions were holding the line, and political gravity seemed to operate by the standard laws of physics. Then I walked out my front door and looked down my own street. The mystery evaporated. Every single person I have met who moved onto my block, into my subdivision, or into this corner of the state since the pandemic is an ideological exile from somewhere else. They arrived by the U-Haul load from suburban Long Island, the exurbs of Chicago, rural Pennsylvania, and Orange County, California. They didn’t come for...