This year's March Madness reflects rise of Red State America

From 2020-23, the southeast gained a net 2.5 million more residents, while the northeast lost in net-migration from other states, almost exclusively people leaving the northeast, California and Illinois.   

This declining influence of the blue states is embarrassingly amplified by what is happening in college sports. The South has won 17 of the last 20 national championships with the Southeast Conference gaining most of those titles. 

Now look at this year's "sweet sixteen" in the NCAA basketball tournament.  Amazingly, 15 of the 16 teams that have still survived the first two rounds of the tournament's first weekend of madness are located in states won by Donald J. Trump in November. 

The survivors include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Auburn, Brigham Young, Duke, Florida, Houston, Kentucky, Michigan, Michigan State, Mississippi, Purdue, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Texas Tech.  The only outlier was Maryland. Admittedly, Arizona, and Michigan are purple states but all the rest are ruled by Republicans and have a long history of low taxes.  

It wasn't that long ago that the college basketball champion trophy resided in Westwood, California -- with John Wooden's UCLA Bruins stampeding over opponents in the 1960s and early 1970s mostly with home-grown Golden State talent.  Then, in the mid-1980s, it was the rugged Big East with schools like Syracuse, Georgetown, St. Johns and Villanova bulldozing through the NCAA tournament with kids from New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In 1985 for the first and only time ever -- three of the Final Four teams were from the same conference: the Big East.  Now these teams have sunk into mediocrity.  

The regional disparity in football high school star recruits is even more pronounced.  Amazingly, 75 percent of the Top 40 high school football seniors are from red states.  

Not only are blue-state progressive policies chasing out businesses, jobs and capital, but now they are driving away young talent and turning blue-state America into sports wastelands.