Diagnosing the Decline of New York State Republicans

The New York Times reports on the decline on Republicans in New York state:

Republicans have slipped to less than 27 percent of the state’s 11 million registered voters and Democrats outnumber them by nearly 2.4 million. The suburbs shifted hugely — the county executives of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk are Democrats — and even reliably Republican counties upstate, some of them crippled by declining population, can no longer be taken for granted.

Suburban Republicans in New York state brought this on themselves. Several decades ago, they passed zoning laws designed to keep out the riffraff. Those laws had the effect of raising housing costs to preposterous levels. (High taxes in the state as a whole may have been agreed to for similar reasons.) Time passes … and the political line-up changed from rich vs. poor to large families vs. small families. The large families most likely to vote Republican would rather look for cheaper housing and move somewhere else.