Political and population trends are colliding as the steadily escalating tension between red states and their blue cities across the Sun Belt is reaching a breaking point over the volatile issue of school masking.
For more than a decade, GOP governors and Republican-controlled legislatures in states from Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona, reflecting the priorities and preferences of their primarily White and non-urban coalition, have moved with increasing boldness to override decisions made by Democratic-controlled city and county governments in their states’ racially diverse largest population centers on issues from environmental standards to workplace protections and even police funding. …
The struggle over school masking rules, which is barreling toward decisive rulings in state courts in Florida, Arizona and Texas possibly within days, is crystallizing the conflict between a Democratic coalition that is improving its position throughout the Sun Belt’s largest metropolitan areas and a Republican coalition that still controls statewide power in these states because of its dominance in less densely populated areas. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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