Steve Sailer discusses how California has moved from the Republican to the Democratic column while Texas has moved the other way.

My quick story about California and Texas is that Californians are more liberal than Texans on economic issues and particularly on social issues, with the differences largest among upper-income people. This translates into changing voting patterns because, as Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder have discussed, ideology, particularly on social issues, has become more important in voting in recent decades. Forty years ago, Texans were still more conservative than Californians (I conjecture) but the connection between conservatism and Republican voting was not so strong.

Beyond this basic pattern, other things were going on, including racial politics--the association of the Democratic Party with African Americans--and changing populations: ethnic minorities and liberals moving into California, and conservatives moving into Texas. Sailer's story based on house prices fits in here--in particular, middle and upper-middle-class families moving out of California (or not choosing to move there) because they want more space--and, as I have said, the story makes sense to me--but it doesn't work on its own. It needs to be fit into the larger picture of polarized political parties and ideological voting.

Which is where Nolan's work on partisan polarization comes in. As Nolan has emphasized, rich and poor are further apart than they used to be economically, which may be one reason that rich and poor remain distinct politically in the United States. In most European countries, rich and poor don't differ much in how they vote (as we discuss in chapter 7 of Red State, Blue State).