I’m not going to argue with you, all I’m gonna say is anyone who thinks the metro area I mentioned is red probably hasn’t been there much. It’s solid blue. I was in downtown Durham the night Trump won and people were crying in the streets. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Worker rights come down to human decency. The two companies I worked for in NC treated everyone extremely well, much better than they legally had to. Now that I think about it, those were the two best jobs I’ve ever had. Best people, best environments. Zero stress from administrative stuff. The place I work now doesn’t care and there’s very little you can do when they treat everyone badly, according to the employment lawyer I talked with. It has to be some kind of discrimination to be actionable. I have contract, a pension, benefits, and ‘rights’ but everyone feels disrespected and the attrition rate is extremely high. If you can make people quit, you don’t have to pay for that social safety net.

Aside from the people treating each other well and generally being better, the quality of life is higher, there’s more to do in town and across the rest of the state, and everything looks nicer. You might pay more for a home but at least it won’t be a falling down ranch with a popcorn ceiling and bars on the windows.

Only one thing is worse than you mentioned: Raleigh isn’t snowy, because the temperature hovers right around freezing and the roads turn into solid ice for a couple weeks out of the year. Actually if we had that here many of the dumbest people in NM would probably take themselves out of the equation.