Jumpin’ on That Florida Bandwagon
Why I joined the mass migration to one of America’s most controversial states
The Big Sort. That’s what journalist Bill Bishop dubbed the geographical movement in America toward like-minded communities, creating homogenous pockets and voting blocks that sharpen reds and blues alike. Published in 2008, his book used demographic data and investigative journalism to explain the rise of “super landslide” counties (defined by a presidential candidate winning at least 80% of the vote), which have increased dramatically nationwide from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
Political movement, of course, is nothing new to the United States of America where “manifest destiny” justified westward expansion throughout the 1800s and promoted state-sponsored genocide of Native Americans across the continent. Post-Restoration Jim Crow Laws spurred the Great Migration from 1910–1970, during which some six million Black Americans moved away from the racial violence and injustices of the South, only to be met with housing discrimination, segregation, and violence elsewhere.
Notably because of this grim reality, recent decades have seen a direct reversal of that twentieth-century flight. Data from the Brookings Institution reveals five of the ten states that suffered the greatest net loss of Black citizens between…
