In this election season, we’re seeing a hollowing out of the purple, as the red and the blue continue their expansion.
Almost everywhere. Even among real estate agents.
Consider Flee the City, “A real estate firm for the vigilant” based in Sandpoint, whose website prominently features such central terms as “American Redoubt,” “Strategic relocation” and “bunkers — safe rooms.” Note the way the name was crafted: not about coming to the beautiful country of lakes and mountains (which Sandpoint certainly has) but more the imperative to get out of the city while you still can.
Its clients, the site says, share a “Desire to live free anywhere in rural America … ultimately providing for a common defense from tyranny.” You get the idea. It’s part of a national trend, another marketing effort to appeal to conservatives who want to escape liberal areas. Flee the City and its counterparts aren’t reaching out to a liberal marketplace, but to a very conservative one that they didn’t create but whose fearful attitudes are central to the appeal.
In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much of a comparable liberal marketing effort.
Bonner County (of which Sandpoint is the seat) was mostly Democratic back in the 1980s and some decades before — never liberal, but overall moderate politically, a lot like Kootenai County to the south then was. Since, those counties have become destinations for people looking to move from more populous areas, especially the California coast and around Seattle and Portland, who are looking for — what exactly?
The Flee the City language suggests that safety fears and a desire to move back to an imagined past are big parts of it. Of course, the Idaho Panhandle really isn’t significantly more or less safe than the larger communities on the coast, and physically they are about the same — a neighborhood in Post Falls looks not a lot different from, say, one in Kirkland, Wash. The Idaho communities have moved politically far more to the right, however. And culturally and demographically, they are less diverse. Owning rural property, Flee said, “gives you the freedom to be you,” but that freedom is likely to feel comfortable only if you fit into certain categories.
Bonner County has been growing, and clearly importing people. Its population in 2001 was 37,088; in 2020 it was 47,100.
In a fine Associated Press article about all this, Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad (who is running as a Democrat for governor) said the trend “pushes Idaho more and more into a playground for extremism.” It quotes a resident of nearby Bonners Ferry saying it “feels like it’s been overrun with white nationalists” who carry guns very visibly and seem to be preparing for war.
Check out the Panhandle legislative delegation as it has evolved over recent decades and, yes, there seems to be no clear end point to how far right it may go.
Watching this from the vantage point of a small town in western Oregon, there’s also something else to put it into perspective.
One of the sources for this Bonner County influx is the Portland metro area, which as a whole was moderately liberal back in the 1980s or so but has moved steadily to the left.
Did the departure of conservatives to places like Idaho contribute to that? Probably, but only a little. Consider these numbers for Multnomah County (which mostly is the city of Portland), and where voter registration by party is required to participate in any primary election, meaning that (unlike in Idaho) registration is a fair measure of actual local support for the parties.
In September 2001, Multnomah registered 181,455 voters as Democrats and 89,747 as Republicans. (The other counties in the metro area are more balanced.) That’s about 2 to 1.
In September 2021, the numbers were 290,001 Democrats and 59,861 Republicans — 5 to 1. The number of Republicans shrank and those of Democrats exploded.
I don’t know offhand of any Portland real estate firms specifically advertising for a clientele looking to move to a more culturally and politically liberal area. Maybe they don’t have to.
