A popular social media group for leftists floated the idea of strategically relocating young Democratic voters in a number of traditionally red states this week, with the aim of ensuring a permanent Senate majority for Democrats.
Occupy Democrats, a page for Democratic voters ranging from disaffected supporters of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to blue-haired liberals, on Thursday posted a meme online which asked people who work in remote jobs to relocate to places such as Alaska.
“If just 220,00 work-from-home Democratic voters (less than the population of Williamsburg/Bushwick) moved to: [Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming] … we could flip eight Senate seats within the next six years,” the meme stated.
A graphic showing a male wearing Chelsea boots, carrying a laptop computer and holding a coffee cup was presented with the meme.
The post noted it was aimed at young tech workers who have the ability to work from anywhere with an internet connection.
“(This has been a friendly PSA to well-paid tech-employed millennials who want to make a difference but remain unstrategically clustered in coffee shops in blue states,” the meme added.
The meme caught fire on Facebook, where it received 25,000 reactions, 5,000 comments and over 8,000 shares.
Some commenters on the post didn’t seem too excited about the idea.
“WTF would we want to surround ourselves with Republicans??All set thank you, I will stay in [Massachusetts],” one user commented.
“The big question is given everything [Trump] and Republicans have done, not to mention all the anti Vax [Trumpers] that have died from covid, how strong can their base really be? It seems that they have lost a lot of voters,” another Facebook user added.
“They might win certain areas but collectively, unless they cheat successfully, they can’t win. They’ve done too much damage to themselves.”
No commenter more adequately summed up the reaction from Democrats on Facebook than the beatnik hippie who wrote, “I love Alaska. But then I remembered that it gets dark at 3:00 in the winter.”
When the meme was shared on Twitter, one user pointed out how easily Democratic donors could flip the states mentioned. All that would be needed is cash.
This person of course had to update their math.
did some back-of-the-napkin math and found out it would take about $14B to move 220K people (<3% of LA County) to those 4 states to flip 8 senate seats. Includes $5K apiece for moving and $1K/month in rent assistance for 5 years. Bloomberg, Zuck, Mackenzie Scott, where yall at?
— Carl Gibson (@crgibs) October 1, 2021
In reality, if only 36,000 more Alaskans had voted for President Joe Biden than former President Donald Trump in 2020, the state would have gone blue. That likely would have meant that the state’s congressional delegation would have flipped as well.
Margins in the other states are similar.
Democrats seem interested in taking these states due to their lower populations and conservative leanings.
Thankfully for conservatives who aren’t ready to surrender the Senate over to Democrats in perpetuity, liberals who follow the Occupy Democrats page don’t seem interested in colonizing cold areas without a nightlife where Starbucks locations are scarce — at least not without someone else’s money.