“Blue blight” is spreading across northeastern and west coast America, with scattered outbreaks in the interior of the country like Illinois and Colorado. It is up to voters to stop its spread.
“Blue blight” isnt a term-of-art yet. But, it will be.
Consider that Dutch Elm Disease wasnt a term familiar to Americans in the 1920s either. The devastating fungus arrived in the United States in the early 1930s, and notably impacted a handful of Elm trees in Cleveland, Ohio. By the end of the 1970s, the Elms that had defined the Courthouse Square of my hometown of Warren as well as my own street, and, indeed, all of northeast Ohio were almost all gone. The fungus spread far and wide beyond Ohio, leaving a trail of felled tree stumps in its wake. To this day it remains a threat to the remaining Elm population in the United States, even after it killed 3 out of 4 Elms across the country, and almost all of them in some places like northeastern Ohio.
CALIFORNIA CONTROLLER CANDIDATE SLAMS MASSIVE EDUCATION SPENDING DESPITE WORSE STUDENT RESULTS
The impacts of “blue blight” are becoming as visible as that of Dutch Elm Disease. Those impacts are most noticeable, to cite just two examples, in decreases in the quality of public education and declines in manufacturing jobs, even as state and local taxes rise. The second order impacts are now being felt across universities and colleges in states that are considered “blue.”
Kudos to the Wall Street Journals Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez for their August 29 article titled “Why Syracuse Cant Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills.”
Kudos as well to Mary Katharine Ham and Vic Matus of the “Getting Hammered” podcast for some interesting speculation, prompted by the work of Belkin and Fernandez, on how the smaller number of college students â just the demographics of the decade ahead â are going to be looking beyond their choice of college to the job market and cost-of-living in the area surrounding their future campus and factoring those variables into their enrollment decision. Ham and Matus commented that perhaps students are going to tilt south to states like Florida rather than north to New York if they are looking at life choices ahead.
Life choices as in “here are the jobs” and “whats it cost to live in that state long term?”
THE REAL REASON AMERICANS ARE FLEEING BLUE STATES FOR FLORIDA AND TEXAS
I checked the numbers that are available against their thesis and, indeed, the available stats back them up.
Using the data available from the Department of Educations National Center for Education Statistics for the years 2017-2022 (the latest available) “blue states” â those that voted for then Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 â experienced substantially faster enrollment decline in higher ed than red states.
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