The past few years have involved a pandemic, racial unrest and extreme climate events — all of which have contributed to polarizing Americans on both sides of the political divide.
That polarization is also is also impacting where individuals of different political parties want to live, a new survey from rental platform Zumper shows. For this survey, Zumper polled 1,500 members of the general U.S. population, and “and the results are sobering,” it claims.
If given the choice, slightly more individuals would not move to an area that doesn’t jibe with their personal political leanings (35.8 percent) than those who would bite the bullet and move there anyway (34.6 percent).
More Democrats (39.9 percent) than Republicans (35.7 percent) said they wouldn’t move to an area that clashed with their political leanings, and more Democrats reported that they wouldn’t move to an area that didn’t match their politics than those who said they would do so. On the opposite end of the spectrum, more Republicans said they would move to an area that wasn’t in line with their political ideologies (42.5 percent) than those who wouldn’t move.
On the whole, younger people tended to be more willing to move to places with different political ideologies than their own. Over 40 percent of survey respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 said they’d be willing to move to an area with different political ideologies than their own, in contrast to the roughly 30 percent of respondents 60 years or older who said they’d be willing to move to such a location.
Survey respondents also said that how an area responded to the pandemic could also impact whether or not they would want to move there, with 38 percent stating that how an area handled the pandemic could negatively influence their decision to move there, 27.1 percent stating it wouldn’t impact their decision and 35 percent saying that their decision would depend on the specifics of the situation. Younger generations tended to have the strongest feelings about this scenario overall.
When it comes down to an area’s mask or vaccine mandates, Republican survey respondents took the greatest issue with this points. Just 44.8 percent of Republicans said they’d move somewhere that imposed mask mandates, whereas 86.3 percent of Democrats said they’d move to mask-mandated areas. On the vaccines side, only 37.7 percent of Republicans said they’d move to an area with a vaccine mandate, but 82.9 percent of Democrats said they’d move to such areas.
