The controversial Senate candidate’s roots have a homegrown appeal.
As a former resident of Alabama, I can attest that people there are friendly and welcoming. As a student of the state’s history, I can also attest that they seem to be more prone than people in other states to vote for politicians whose chief selling point is resentment and fear of others — of whom Senate candidate Roy Moore is the latest example, and George Wallace the most famous.
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In trying to explain why this might be, I started assembling demographic and economic data. I realized pretty quickly that it would be easy to combine it all to paint Alabama as a poverty-stricken, poorly educated, benighted backwater. But I didn’t want to do that — partly because it seems rude, especially coming from someone who was treated so well by the state,
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but also because it didn’t seem to explain much. New Mexico scores quite low on most of the same metrics that I looked at (median income, economic growth, educational attainment), yet as far as I can tell, it has a very different political culture. So I settled instead on a single demographic measure that doesn’t seem quite so laden with judgment: the percentage of people living in a state who were born in that state. Yes, a higher percentage of outsiders does convey a certain openness, which seems positive. But does anybody really think that Nevada, with the lowest share of homegrown residents (26.4 percent), is thus superior to the rest of the states? I can remember that when I moved to Alabama from California in 1989, I found the deep-rootedness in the state of most of the people I met there to be one of its many appealing characteristics.
Sure enough, Alabama does score quite high in the born-in-the-same-state rankings. But it’s not at the top, and it has some interesting company:
It’s probably worth noting that in every one of the 10 states listed above, Donald Trump got a higher percentage of the vote in 2016 than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And in the 10 states with the lowest percentage of residents who were born there, Trump did worse than Romney in eight (and was basically dead even in a ninth, New Hampshire).
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I don’t necessarily want to equate a vote for Trump with „resentment and fear of others“ — that was clearly one of his selling points, but he had others. It does jibe, though, with British journalist David Goodhart’s divide between „anywheres“ and „somewheres,“ which I summed up a few months ago like this:
Alabama is clearly a state dominated by somewheres. It’s also been that way for a really long time. Here’s the top-10 list from 1980:
And here’s the list from 1930:
I have the list from 1900, too,
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but I’m not going to bother making a chart because it’s the same 10 states as in 1930, just in slightly different order. The constants have been Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana, four Southern states that have largely missed out on the big waves of in-migration that transformed previously quite similar Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
Interestingly, Alabama is no longer such an anomaly. In 2016 it experienced a slightly higher rate of in-migration from other states and abroad than the rest of the country, with people born in other Southern states making up the majority of the inflows but those born in foreign countries, the Midwest and California also figuring prominently. Another decade or two of this, and Alabama is going to fall out of the born-in-state top 10. Those past decades of low inflows still have a big impact, though. Nationwide, for example, the percentage of the population that’s born in state generally declines or at least holds even with age — which makes sense, given that older people have had more time to move. Not in Alabama!
Older Alabama residents are likelier than younger adults in the state, and much likelier than older residents of other states, to be living in the state where they were born. And whaddya know: Alabama voters 65 and older appear to form the core of Roy Moore’s support. As a 70-year-old native of Gadsden, Alabama, he’s one of them. Among somewheres, that counts for a lot.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net
