Leaving and Staying
June 23, 2017Vox had an article last week titled “Those who leave home, and those who stay.”
It’s a data-based article about our habits of leaving or not leaving where we grew up. I personally find this interesting because I lived in NYC and in LA and in both cases only a handful people I knew were from there. And in the case of NYC, it was just one person.
For most of my time being wayward, I knew that one day I’d come back to Massachusetts, or, at the very least, New England. I wasn’t sure exactly when or how long it would take me, but I knew it would happen. I guess that puts me in the “Returner” camp. Though I’d consider the north shore of Massachusetts quite different from growing up near Worcester, it still falls under the two hour distance threshold.
Additionally, just under 12% of people in the US moved in the last year. That really nailed home how nomadic my adult life has been. I haven’t lived in one apartment or home for more than 20 months. Some of those moves were job-related, one was fire-related, some were interim moves while I looked for a more permanent location, and a couple were personal decisions.
I do think that it’s a common phenomenon for people to move to a big city when they are young and then move to a smaller metro area or suburb after, so that piece of data is not at all surprising.
More insular, more scared, more Trump
The data there surprised me. The percentage points were only a few off. Were there more people supporting Trump if they never left home? Yes. It wasn’t a stark difference however. And the support of people living more than two hours from where they grew up? That’s an even smaller difference between Clinton and Trump.
I suppose all of this is to say that the article presented the data as though it confirms the notion that we’ve got people who never leave home and are scared of the outside world and support Trump. And the people living in cities are more worldly and accommodating and support Clinton. Are the numbers there to support that? Only somewhat. It certainly doesn’t point to a great divide.
While a few percentage points mean the difference between losing an election and winning one, there are plenty of other areas that show a larger difference in demographics that explain recent outcomes.
