New Hampshire turning 'blue'

According to the Christian Science Monitor,

The Republican Party in New England's only "red state" may be going the way of the Old Man of the Mountain, the craggy icon of independence that crumbled a few years back in a rock slide.

In the last election, Democrats took both seats in Congress for the first time in nearly a century and both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1874. Democratic Gov. John Lynch won a second term with a record 74 percent of the vote, and lawmakers recently authorized same-sex civil unions and a smoking ban in bars and restaurants.

The "Live Free or Die" state is becoming "Blue Hampshire." The Granite State, said a blog for the conservative National Review, is "trending alarmingly Granola State."...

The shifting political landscape is mainly a product of demographics. New Hampshire is the fastest-growing state in New England, growing more than 6 percent since 2000 as the Massachusetts suburbs sprawl northward, baby boomers retire to their second homes, and vibrant high-tech and healthcare industries draw affluent city dwellers from across the country.

Call me paranoid, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this story was "immigration, anyone?" The article doesn't mention the i-word, so I looked for some other sources.

According to FAIR's page on New Hampshire, between 2000 and 2006, the foreign-born population of New Hampshire grew from 54,154 to 65,465, or from 4.4% of the population to 5%. That, taken together with the fact that the majority of foreign-born persons are not naturalized and thus not eligible to vote (or at least, aren't supposed to be able to vote) indicates that the problem is probably not with immigration to New Hampshire directly.

However, look at who is moving to New Hampshire. "Affluent city dwellers from across the country" who work in high-tech and health care (when did that phrase become one word?) industries, people who are, in the words of a pollster quoted in the story, "highly educated, liberal Democrats." While this group no doubt includes large numbers of left-wing whites, it is well-known to anyone who has worked in the high-tech or health care industries that there is one population group whose representation in those fields is much higher than their proportion of the U.S. population: Asians.

And how do Asians vote? According to a blogger at the disturbingly named asian-nation.org (is the USA an Asian nation now?) they vote Democratic.

As reflected in my article on the 2004 Elections, national-level aggregate data tends to show that in terms of political affiliation among those stating a preference, about two-thirds of all Asian Americans lean Democratic and the other third identify with the Republicans.

But as reported by Politico.com, new data from a Harvard research team shows that among young Asian Americans, the percentage who lean Democratic is much higher:

The Institute of Politics at Harvard University recently released data from an online survey of 2,525 18- to 24-year-olds. Among the survey’s more notable statistics are those concerning party affiliation among Asian-Americans: 47 percent identify themselves as Democratic, 15 percent Republican and 39 percent independent — making them more Democratic than any other ethnic group except African-Americans in the survey. . . .

So, while I suspect that the spread of the Boston exurbs means that white liberals are the main source of Democratization of New Hampshire so far, there is no doubt that Asians play a role. And the vast majority of those Asians would not be here if we had not had, for the past 40 years, an immigration policy which regards all peoples in the world as equally worthy to come to America, and permits massive amounts of chain migration through family reunification provisions.

What a tragedy, to see the "live free or die" state forced to throw its lot in with the socialist left by a bunch of recent transplants who have no love for or long-standing connection with New Hampshire. Wasn't this the state of the Free State Project, whose goal was to have libertarians move there en masse and try to create a society with a drastically reduced government? According to the website 8,142 people have joined so far, while the Monitor says that there have been 145,000 "newcomers" to New Hampshire in the past 6 years. So much for that. Can New Hampshire's vestiges of traditional self-sufficient America be saved, or will it become the latest fatality in the left's push for a unified bureaucratic socialist state?