Where you live and whom you vote for have never been more closely tied. Mapped election results over the past few decades show the red middle has grown redder and the blue coasts bluer.
But when it comes to settling down in another party’s territory, a report by apartment-listing site Zumper shows registered Republicans are more liberal about living among Democrats than the other way around — with one caveat.
To conduct the survey, Zumper asked 1,500 people from across the country, “Would you move to an area that did not match your political leaning?”
Democrats were less inclined than Republicans to lay down roots among people on the other end of the politician spectrum, as 40 percent said they would not move to a red area and only 27 percent said they would.
Republicans, however, were game to mix with the left, with 43 percent of GOP voters saying they would move to an area that did not match their politics and 36 percent saying they would not.
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Jeff Andrews, report author and data analyst at Zumper, said Republicans’ openness to liberal enclaves makes more sense if you split them into two camps — upper-middle-class and wealthy constituents who prize low regulation in one, and low-income, rural voters who favor identity politics in the other.
“A wealthy Republican who works in finance might prefer to live in New York City, despite its blue leaning,” Andrews said, pointing to job location and the perks of living in a cultural hub as factors. Plus, higher earners could afford to relocate.
The lasting popularity of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Republican Club speaks to that cohort’s existence. Just last month, the group sold out its 118th annual dinner honoring Forbes Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes with the Ronald Reagan Award in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Reagan Tax Cuts.
The Silk Stocking District on the Upper East Side is also routinely the top-donating area to Republican campaigns.
Similarly, in San Francisco, where just over 6 percent of voters are registered as Republicans, some ballots were cast for Donald Trump in 2016. The votes were concentrated in the city’s richest areas — Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff, among them, the San Francisco examiner reported.
In New York, there are likewise Republican pockets within the cities’ tight-knit communities, such as Brooklyn’s Hasidic and Russian Jewish enclaves. Brighton and Manhattan Beach elected a Republican City Council member this year for the first time this century.
Still, Republican openness to relocation knows some bounds, the report found. For many, Covid-19 protocols were a critical catch.
While 86 percent of Democrats said they would move to an area with a mask mandate, less than half of Republicans said the same. Aversions to vaccine mandates held similar sway. Just over one-third of Republicans said they would move somewhere that had vaccination requirements; 82 percent of Democrats said they would.
Considering the strict vaccine mandates for certain jobs and venues in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, it seems unlikely that the three cities will see an influx of Republicans anytime soon.