Last year, for the first time in American history, the northeast surrendered its 250-year title as the financial and industrial capital of the United States. That title now belongs to the Southeast, America’s new economically dominant region, as measured by GDP. That’s in large part due to the massive growth of Florida, Texas and North Carolina. (Texas is technically part of the Southeast these days for reasons too complicated to explain here.)
Our new website at Unleash Prosperity, called VoteWithYourFeet.com chronicles the massive migration over the past 25 years of businesses, people and capital from the high-tax and heavy regulation zones of the northeast and the west coast, to the low-tax and light-regulation regions – the south and more recently to the mountain states like booming Idaho and Utah.
From 2020-23, the southeast gained a net 2.5 million more residents, while the northeast lost in net-migration from other states, almost exclusively people leaving the northeast, California and Illinois.
This declining influence of the blue states is embarrassingly amplified by what is happening in college sports. The South has won 17 of the last 20 national championships with the Southeast Conference gaining most of those titles.
Now look at this year’s “sweet sixteen” in the NCAA basketball tournament. Amazingly, 15 of the 16 teams that have still survived the first two rounds of the tournament’s first weekend of madness are located in states won by Donald J. Trump in November.
The survivors include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Auburn, Brigham Young, Duke, Florida, Houston, Kentucky, Michigan, Michigan State, Mississippi, Purdue, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Texas Tech. The only outlier was Maryland. Admittedly, Arizona, and Michigan are purple states but all the rest are ruled by Republicans and have a long history of low taxes.
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It wasn’t that long ago that the college basketball champion trophy resided in Westwood, California — with John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins stampeding over opponents in the 1960s and early 1970s mostly with home-grown Golden State talent. Then, in the mid-1980s, it was the rugged Big East with schools like Syracuse, Georgetown, St. Johns and Villanova bulldozing through the NCAA tournament with kids from New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In 1985 for the first and only time ever — three of the Final Four teams were from the same conference: the Big East. Now these teams have sunk into mediocrity.
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The one glaring exception is Connecticut, which won two straight national championships, but even this beast from the East failed to survive the opening weekend of the tournament.
The outlook for a blue state sports comeback anytime soon looks bleak. According to Rivals, a top recruiting database, 28 of this year’s top 40 high school basketball prospects were located in red states, with Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina producing the most gifted and talented athletes.
The regional disparity in football high school star recruits is even more pronounced. Amazingly, 75 percent of the Top 40 high school football seniors are from red states.
Not only are blue-state progressive policies chasing out businesses, jobs and capital, but now they are driving away young talent and turning blue-state America into sports wastelands.
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