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CHAPTER 1 Population Mobility and Political Change in the American Electorate Jumping into a time machine and traveling into the past to 1970, I would get out on the hill overlooking the town where I grew up and instantly recognize the view. Yes, a few buildings have been constructed, a few torn down, a new subdivision has gone up on the east edge of town, businesses have come and gone, people have died and been born, but based on an eyeball inspection things have not changed much. On the downtown streets, I would recognize all of the signs and storefronts and would even recognize some ofthe faces, although they would be much younger. A look at official statistics would reveal that the population in my hometown is slightly smaller in 2000 now than it was in 1970, but it is nearly identical in terms of its ethnic and economic composition. The population consists almost entirely of local natives-few have moved in from elsewhere. People are better educated than in 1970, but probably not relative to the rest of the nation. The politics, too, has remained pretty much the same, although scrutiny of the figures would reveal a slow drift toward the Republican Party as the generation that came of age during the New Deal has died. Visible differences, though, would be difficult to detect. While real estate speculators would have found it impossible to make millions in my hometown, they might not have lost much either. There has not been booming prosperity, but the bottom has not completely fallen out of the local economy. In other places in the nation, though, a journey back to 1970 would reveal a far more active, prosperous, and ethnically diverse setting than exists today. The door to the time machine would swing open to busy streets, businesses, factories, and schools that are now either nonexistent, abandoned, or in a pathetic state of disrepair. Whole city blocks of homes and businesses that had vanished by the year 2000 would appear in photographs from that earlier time. These are places 2 Separate Destinations where investors could have lost many millions. Several of the depressed old steel towns of the Monongahela Valley in western Pennsylvania come to mind as places that in 1970 would be hard to recognize for any of us whose vision of these towns had been shaped by visits during the 1990s. Compared to 1970, the populations of Homestead, Duquesne, Clairton, and McKeesport are smaller, poorer, older, and more hopeless (Gittell 1992; Serrin 1993). While industrial decline was well under way as early as 1960, the last of the major mills, the Homestead Works, did not close for good until 1986. Even in 1970 these towns had large middle-class populations , ethnically robust neighborhoods, strong main streets, and schools of which the residents were proud. At the turn ofthe century, these towns will head the list as the most economically and socially distressed places in Pennsylvania, if not the entire Northeast. Population flight is not the only aspect of mobility that can render a place unrecognizable to the time traveler. I now live in a suburban setting, about halfway between two major East Coast cities in a corridor that has been rapidly developed. Pulling back a curtain to look at my neighborhood as it was in 1970 would reveal not a single familiar vista. Nothing was the same then. Farms and forests have been replaced with strip malls and low density subdivisions that house middle and upper income professionals . An overwhelmingly white population in 1970 is only predominantly white now, as a small black middle class and a sizable popUlation of immigrants have changed the complexion of neighborhoods and schoolrooms . Where a visitor once would have been hard-pressed locate a burger joint or a Dairy Queen, one can now find restaurants named Ak-Bar, Hunan Manor, and Bangkok Delight, to say nothing ofthe ethnic grocery stores where no English is spoken and smaller restaurants where my ignorance of other languages prevents me from understanding the signs. I do not feel unsettled by these changes since I have contributed to them. My spouse is a Hispanic immigrant, and our children will be bilingual. I have not lived in my neighborhood long enough to experience the changes that have taken place since the 1970s, but I do find myselfmarveling at how different a place can come to look in less than half a lifetime. And ethnic diversity is not the only conspicuous indicator ofchange...

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