In North Carolina, a hard-right shift hits a roadblock

[Alcibiades]

49. That's a good point

There are many people who migrate, for many reasons. Right now, the unemployment rate in Durham County is 6.1%, and one of the reasons it is that high is because so many folks have moved here. It's not great, but apparently lower than where you live. I would guess that lots of those young people are coming down here for jobs, which makes some sense. Looking at your housing market, though, it makes no sense. It looks like you can find some lovely houses in Ashtabula for cheaper than you could in a good neighborhood here, assuming you can land a job.

Much of the push and pull seems to be driven by the housing and labor market. Anecdotally, we are probably getting a lot more older folks than young people looking for work, but they come, too. They tend to wind up in places such as Charlotte and Wake County, particularly Cary and Apex. There is a bit of a selection effect: people looking for a place that is "vibrant" move to someplace like Durham or Asheville, folks who are mainly looking for good schools wind up in the suburbs of Charlotte or various places in Wake County.

It has been reported that there is something of a self-selection sorting effect going on: many progressives who move look for other progressive places, and many regressives look for the opposite. For folks who have paid off their mortgages, moving to someplace like NC is a no-brainer, at least if they don't care about being near friends and family (I had family in the Carolinas myself, which was one reasons I came home to NC). In the northeast, in places where housing prices are high, you can sell your house, even in this market, and earn a tidy profit, and buy a much larger house here, assuming you want a larger house (incredibly to me, many people seem to want that, though there is also an increasing market for smaller homes near the city center). But that does not apply in your case, so it's probably the labor market that is driving things.

I used to live in Pittsburgh, though the closest I ever got to your neck of the woods was Erie. That was a long time ago, but after a lot of the mills had shut down. I do see a lot of Steelers bumper stickers here, so we are getting plenty of folks from western PA, but I don't think I know anyone from eastern Ohio, though I imagine they are coming for the same sorts of reasons the Pennsylvanians are coming.