[posterchild]

More than 1 million descendants of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants from the three-state region around New York City and from metro Philadelphia have moved south along Interstate 95. That migration has left those metro areas, competitive in 1988, solidly Democratic.

And those internal migrants have made Virginia and Florida, and to a lesser extent the Carolinas and Georgia, more Democratic. Virginia, solidly Republican in the 1980s, voted at the national average in the Obama elections and has tilted more Democratic this year. North Carolina, competitive in the last two elections, is so again.

These 2 sentences seem to contradict each other. How are the people heading south from NYC and PHL leaving a slight conservative vacuum there yet making MD,VA, NC, SC, GA and FL more liberal?

[posterchild]

To answer my own question, it may be that the migrating population is on average less liberal than where they left but more liberal than where they arrive.