Seriously, where do I go?

There hasn’t been “bitter cold” in the northeast for a decade. Climate change is a bitch. We barely get snow anymore - 2015 was a banger, but it’s been dustings since.

84

Idk it was -15 in 2020 and 2021 and in subzero in 22 and 23 where I live in IL.

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- northeast
  
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Ok so where in the northeast is not batshit? Rural PA is the same as here. Same with upstate NY or NH. NYC? No way. Maybe Delaware or something?

-3
- You really can’t get bluer than mass ri conn and vt
  
  Southern nh and southern me are basically Boston suburbs. As you go north it gets more red. But not like sc (I have family in sc and outside of the blue cities - ya they are pretty maga stupid). They are more “leave me alone red” as opposed to “my pastor said abortion is bad and I like to make fun of the gays”
  
  I mean there’s maga idiots everywhere-but honestly things might even tip a little too blue in southern New England.
  
  32
- Can't help but think you're overlooking Cleveland. Where we have billboards that have eyebrows. You KNOW what he does! We have romanburger FEED THE HUNGER!!! We'll talk about how Melt and Barrio lost their way, and how the George family are pieces of shit. Mark from Norton furnature is here for you! Seriously! Now, if you can't get credit here, you can't get credit anywhere! Now enjoy this unrequested acid trip, as shit stops making sense, and Gumby chases a mad scientist with scissors through a missmash of full size random characters that sometimes hang your coat for you, and sometimes run you out the store chasing you with hedgeclippers. Where we used to all be in on the joke of the Cleveland tourism videos, but now loathe them as they've been taken over by outsiders as a means to mock us.
  
  We also race hot dogs at the baseball stadium, and you can pick your favorite based on condiment. My pick is ketchup, because he's awesome. Kids love mustard because he "plays by the ruuuules", and nobody picks onion, because.....well, she knows what she did. She's a disgrace to the city, and the less spoken about the great hobo vehicular manslaughter of '88 said the better.
  
  And so now, I can put either an Indians hat on your head, or a Guardians hat on your head. Seeing as you have no personal emotional ties to the 1995, 1997, and to a smaller extent 2016 Indians, I assume you have no personal attatchment to chief wahoo, so it's perfectly fine to wear the Guardians stuff. Just don't be surprised that people 40+ will still wear the old chief wahoo gear. It's not a sign of racism to us. It's a tribute to the days of Jim Thome, and Manny Rameriez, and Carlos Baerga, and Kenny Lofton, and Albert Belle, and (as much as it sucks to know how he turned out) Omar Vizquel. We'll still shit on Jośe Mesa, but really it wasn't as much his fault as people like to say. Now, regarding Slider, we don't know what the hell he is either. No one does. It's best not to think about it. It's also best not to think about the time Slider was dancing on top of the dugout, and slid knees first off the side and broke his leg. I say it's best not to think about because it's really funny, and you'll laugh for too long of a time.
  
  We also have Cleveland signs, all over the city. By this, I mean just statue like letters, all in white, that are styled the same way, and they say "Cleveland". Just in case you forget where you are.
  
  Then there's Big Chuck, and Little Jon. No, not the rapper, but he does have as much bling as a rapper. He own a jewelry shop, but also, he's like 4'5. Despite his name, he's not really known for having prostitutes.
  
  And people will come up to you on the street, and start talking to you. You've never met these people, but they'll come up to you like "Hey man, you see the game last night? Shiiiiit, Rameriez knocked out Tim Andersons punk ass!" while you're like "Uhhhhhh, sure. I'm just trying to carry this refridgerator home." And then he'll offer to help. You think I'm joking, but I'm using this as a real life example of what happened to me.
  
  And our weather can best be described as "FUCK YOU!!!!". Last week it was roughly 100 degrees, and the past few days it's been in the 70s. We havent had much snow since covid. Except for that one week last year near christmas where it said "FUCK YOU! NEGATIVE 20 DEGREES AND 3 FEET OF SNOW OVERNIGHT!!!" and we haven't seen snow since.
  
  So come to Cleveland. We have beer.
  
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- Philly suburbs!
  
  2

Come to Georgia. It's close. We're a swing state now. We could use your vote.

42

Georgia keeps impressing me with how much green tech (solar, batteries, etc) are being built out of there too!

8

Southern Florida? Like the man said: Florida: the more North you go, the more South it gets. Orlando seems mostly OK. Big city, opportunities, and there's a NASA space center and launch facility not too far.

My mom lives there, and that's about the limit of my knowledge. I will personally never again willingly live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, I hear that if you stay out of the little handle at the bottom, Missouri is nice. A friend from there once told me that if they'd cut off that handle and give it to Arkansas, it'd raise the average IQ of both states. Never been there, myself.

Lots of places in Oregon and Washington are great; large swaths are not, but if you're not prone to SAD, there are great towns in the Willamette Valley: Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashville down on the California border. Also, California is enormous. N California is very different from S California, and the coast is enormously different from the interior. It's a huge state, and painting it with a single brush is like saying Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania are all the same. It's seriously about the same area as all those put together, lengthwise, at least. The greater LA/San Diego area alone is almost as big as your entire state. But the Pacific Northeast is wet if you live in the Valley, and there isn't much in the way of big cities east of the Cascades.

How about Boise, ID? Good size college city, lots of microbreweries, lots of outdoor recreation, pretty great weather if you like hot, but you get snow in the winter, too. Plus nearly half the state is national park; fantastic backpacking.

Most of these places I mentioned specifically lean liberal, although when you venture into rural areas it gets red pretty quickly, like anywhere. An exception is Orange County in CA, which is full of really crazy red-hatters. But it sound like you've already ruled out at least part of CA, and "insufferable" makes me think you're thinking specifically of S Cal.

Eugene is, or used to be, fantastic. Extremely liberal, and not trust-fund hippie style. Decent sized to be entertaining. You just have to put up with the weather and hippies, or whatever hippies have mutated into with successive generations. Pot's legal in OR, too, if that's your bag.

Bend, OR is one of the best places in the planet if you're sporty. It's high desert, but smack up against the mountains. In the summer, people rock climb and bike. In the winter, they ski Mt Bachelor. There's fishing and camping, and at one point it had more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. There's no humidity. At all. Very pretty town. A 4 hour drive north, and you're in Portland, OR, which isn't what it used to be and has been having problems, but is still a large metro area with lots to do and a fantastic science center. 2 hrs West through the mountains is Salem, the capital, which frankly sucks; or or 3+ hours SW is the aforementioned Eugene. A couple hours south is Crater Lake. A couple three more hours and you're in the N California Redwood forest. Oh, and if you do speed through So-Lame (Salem), another 1.5 hours and you're on the Oregon coast, so 3-4 hours from Bend to the coast, mostly through a fantastic, amazing mountain range (and then the Valley and then the smaller coastal range).

If you want to stay on the E coast, I recommend the greater Philadelphia area. From there, NYC is a 3hr drive. The Jersey shore is a 3 hr drive. Washington DC is a 3 hr drive. Gettysburg is a 3 hr drive. Williamsburg, VA - possibly my favorite place in the US - is a 4-ish hour drive (depending on DC traffic). Plus, you can get to almost any of the coast cities from Philly by train, if you're willing to sacrifice a couple more hours. Pennsylvania wasn't my favorite place to live, but if you can stand living in S Carolina I'm sure it'd be fine for you.

Honestly, you might consider Minneapolis. It does get cold in the winter (-50F is the coldest I've experienced), but The Cities are fantastic, full of Art Deco architecture, and end-summer temps can hit the 100's. In September, any of the literally over 10,000 lakes are bath-water warm. And we don't have copperheads. The great lakes are close; we're practically in the center of the country, so flying anywhere in the continental US is a 4-hour flight or less. The Cities are very progressive - again, you drive an hour outside and it's Trump signs everywhere - par for the course - but within The Cities it's quite nice. And the bike paths are incredible; miles and miles, and much of it completely off-road - at some point they took all the old industry rail lines and turned them into maintained bike and foot paths. It's really quite remarkable. And the metro system isn't half bad, for a US city. The humidity gets oppressive, but, again, you're surviving S Carolina so I don't think that'd be a problem for you.

33

They have some pretty impressive tourism videos too.

6
- A classic!
  
  3
- I didn't mention Cleveland, but those ads are hilarious. At first I thought, because I was talking up Oregon, you were linking to one of these Oregon travel ads:
  
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  2
"insufferable" makes me think you're thinking specifically of S Cal.

Ohhhhh okay, thanks makes sense then. Southern… yeah I get that perception.

Lotta coast in California, nothing insufferable about Mendocino or Santa Cruz etc. (though can complain about anything and some will be very valid)

4

Come to Finland. I have absolutely zero clue about what party my neighbours vote. Hell, I don't even know who my friends of parents vote.

31

I would love to move to Finland.

2
I genuinely want to move there if trump wins. Could someone who only speaks english function there?

1
- Most Finns speak english pretty well, especially ones that are under 40 years old. However finding a job as someone not speaking Finnish can be a struggle. Fluent english skills alone aren't something most companies would see as a big advantage as most people fresh out of school can pretty much do that as well. Finnish is a difficult language to learn but you don't need to be perfect at it either. A foreigner willing to even try and learn the language is hugely appreciated. My russian neighbour knows like 30 words but that's enough to get thru most conversations one needs to have with a neighbour.
  
  3

Hello neighbor! NC will welcome you. It's purple here. Rural areas are not so great but closer to the bigger cities (Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, Greensboro/Winston) are nice.

Sorry about your sanity.

25

Came here to say Asheville as well

5

I'm not from the US, so I don't know how accurate this is, and I also don't know if this thing has ever been updated (I found it a long time ago), but there's this tool that might help with deciding: https://www.whereshouldilive.co/

20

That seems like an overly tedious way of entering your preferences. Why can't I just rank a handful of factors (cheap housing, beaches, climate, politics, diversity) and give them some weight?

You could even make the ranking of the factors in the current style ("snowy winters are [much] more important than beaches"). That would reduce the cognitive load of comparing 3 vs 3 properties many times in a row.

4
- You can do just that. Before you begin the quiz, there's a link to skip the quiz and directly enter your preferences.
  
  7
I am both surprised and not that I got Denver, CO. I've been told before by someone that they initially thought I was from there the first time we met.

2
Apparently I should live in Denver - no idea if that's actually good though.

What I need is one of these for places worldwide...

2
It said I should live in San Francisco which is interesting because I already do live there.

2
- Well, should you live there?
  
  3
I got New York, but I just moved out of New York. Was born and raised there, but I don't think I'm going back.

1
I've got Washington, DC.

1

45 minutes outside of Portland, OR in any direction will get you somewhere just as rural as the place you left in SC, only with better weather and sane laws.

20

Accurate, but be careful because once you go 2+ hours outside of Portland, OR you will likely find yourself once again among cognitively challenged folks...

25
- Heck, 10 minutes past Portland city limits and it's Dodge Rams and Trump flags.
  
  9

If you wany a rural setting you're probably fucked.

If you're looking for a SC kind of 'city' I would suggest perhaps Colorado, or something like Bend Oregon, or Spokane Washington. More isolated cities without large populations and also surrounded by that rural character.

16

Colorado is great, just don't move anywhere near Colorado Springs unless you wanna help turn it purple. The city is a Republican enclave full of defense contractors and wrapped around the Air Force Academy and a Space Force base.

7

Portland or Seattle would for those criteria well as long as you don't mind rain. Both very progressive cities, weather is generally mild (rarely above 85, rarely below 30, usually less than 2 weeks a year with snow).

12

Was going to suggest this. Portland is rough to move to right now, it's very popular, so costs have been climbing pretty fast. But there are some decent suburbs, Milwaukie, Tigard, Beaverton, Vancouver.

3
- Costs is the key thing. People know it's nice, so people move here, and costs go up. Expect 2000/month rents, and that's the low side in some areas
  
  2

SC doesn't have any blue bubbles? I'm in Texas and i only know about 5 people that i think are probably trumpsters.

8

Only blue bubble I know of is Charleston? But I promise you the white people there aren’t blue voters.

2
Closest I have heard of is Greenville, and its surrounding area is definitely red.

This NBC link on the 2020 presidential election is somewhat surprising, though. Maybe the US Senate results, as they narrow that potential blue bubble down to either Richland county or tiny Allendale.

2

Durham or chapel Hill? We got lots of libs over here.

8

If options were no object, Pacific Northwest is beautiful and temperate

8

Atlanta, Denver, somewhere in Virginia, Maryland, or DC, or possibly Ohio or Pennsylvania. There's places like Austin and some places in Florida that might have cool people, but the state government is trash.

I saw Greenville recommended, and this is anecdotal, but last time I was there visiting friends, we (visibly queer) got followed around by this crazy guy with a metal pipe making all kinds of death threats. I love my friends but that sealed the deal for me on not wanting to live there. There are some neat places there ngl, the sex themed desert restaurant was a fun place for a queerplatonic hangout, but in general it's not exactly going to be a refuge from Trump supporters.

7

Speaking of Virginia, stay in the north half. Down here in the southern part is maga fucks as far as the eye can see.

One down the road just put up a huge Confederate flag and two large trump flags. Instead of fixing their collapsing roof. Priorities I guess...

3
I wouldn't recommend any place that votes red, even if you live in a blue city, because the state's laws still apply to blue cities and sometimes are even made specifically to make blue cities worse

1

Stay and run for office. Even under a maga banner..if anything shown we can change this country it's voting. Also both parties shown that you can change parties once in office. So run win then go full blown progressive while in office.

6

Hey, Chicago food is way better and the child weather kills all the bugs every year. Don't be a wimp, move north. Or what your kids will have to anyway thanks to climate change. Oh yeah, we've never had a hurricane up here.

6

What’s wrong with California?

6

Too awesome

15

Pacific Northwest

6

There are a number of blue cities in the Midwest. What's the lowest temp you want? I live in Lincoln, Nebraska and it's pretty great: nice weather most of the year, low cost of living, blue city, tons of parks. Only downside is dealing with red state bullshit from the state government.

6

Lincoln's nice though I have found Omaha a little more affordable, same great purple people, same crappy state government

1
- Omaha is a lot less left-leaning in my experience. It's very purple. Lincoln is solidly blue.
  
  I just recently purchased a house in Lincoln. Just quickly looking on Zillow for Omaha and home prices look to be very similar to what I was seeing here in Lincoln. Property taxes in Omaha are also a fair bit higher than Lincoln.
  
  There's other stuff too, like lower crime rate in Lincoln, better/more parks, LPS being generally a lot better than OPS, etc.
  
  I guess it ultimately depends on what you're after. If you want something more big city, then Omaha obviously has Lincoln beat. But for a more relaxed pace of life and for raising a family, Lincoln is where it's at.
  
  1

Charlotte? Raleigh? DC?

I'm in Tampa and it's a real mix here, but oof housing cost is out of control.

If you don't like to be in a city, you will probably be in a backwards place, that's just how the US works. But lots of mid sized cities are moderate politically.

5

Yeah we live across the border from Charlotte. The area would be really nice if it could stop stepping on its own dick so much. The public schools are among the top in the nation (believe it or not) but a maga bitch who’s hell-bent on destroying the system just won. The sheriff who won tonight was at Jan 6 and freely admits it. It might be time to get out of here.

8
- First of all congrats on realizing the insanity around you. Second of all there's probably a lot more moderate liberals in your area than you realize because they're smart enough to shut the fuck up around the insane maga posse. Be the change you want to see in the world. Stand up for your beliefs. And if you do actually decide to jump ship, just remember there are other parts of California besides the coast...
  
  4
North Carolina is gerrymandered to hell.

3
- Florida too. Even with the influx of racist northerners, it's mixed politically here, mixed in every way imaginable actually but you'd never know it looking at the legislature.
  
  2

I live in a similar part of SC as well. I feel you.

When I had a FB acct, I wasnpart of my area's group, and the racists there was insane, even one person litterally was complaining that she moved to this area because she was tired of the north and was looking for the "white parts" of the south.

If you figure out where to move, please post an update, looking for somewhere new as well.

5

Come to Columbus, Ohio. It doesn't have the name recognition of Seattle or Denver, but it's a pretty chill city with decent weather, good people, and a lower cost of living than just about anywhere else while also having job opportunities.

5

Northern New Mexico?

4

Because Putin & Murdoch hate democracy & know new age warfare: troll social media, market fake news.

With a tiny troll army: Created a party of snowflakes that calls everybody else snowflakes.

Streaming endless propaganda (Fake News: Fox, Alex Jones etc)

4

Well I'm in Tucson, AZ right now. It's a pretty liberal city in a decidedly purple rural state. Mountains and wildlife are gorgeous.

3

But it’s Tucson…

1
- Exactly! You get to be surrounded by nature, and not concrete and pavement like that other city.
  
  3

Maryland

3

I dont know why but this just summoned in my brain the ancient text, the knowledge…

Come to Kenya; we got lions

3

I’m on FL and planning to be in CO before October for the same reasons.

2

I've heard good things about Durham.NC.

I love South Carolina and used to visit Charleston annually but I'll never go again because of the politics.

2

Greenville. That downtown is perfection.

2

Cincinnati is pretty diverse, but also corrupt law enforcement.

2

Central Illinois - basically everything within 50-75 miles of I-74 across the state. Doesn’t get bitter cold, not overrun with MAGA asshats (among the reasons we left another Midwest state), cost of living isn’t terrible, and easy access to Chicago, St Louis, and beyond.

2

I guess you could go to Georgia. You could go to Savannah or St. Simons. Make the state slightly more purple.

North Carolina is a crapshoot. Virginia?

Those are your options. Feel free to move to Tennessee: you won't like it, but I'd like my state to turn purple eventually so all libs are welcome.

Edit: I used to live in Macon, and I hated it, but it's apparently amazing to visit now, so maybe you can live there if you don't need to work.

1

North Carolina is lightly blue these days. And clearly superior per my relatives that live there.

1

Why don’t you just stay there?

If you have a good rate you’ll be setting yourself up for a haircut if you choose to move.

1

Ideally, you don't go anywhere. You talk to those assholes and degenerates and try to understand them a bit better and maybe even try to make friends with them (yes, yes, crazy idea). They are your fellow citizens, after all.

From over here in Europe, questions like this really make America look screwed. Let's hope it's not.

1

This isn't really going to happen. It's past the point where you can pretend that they're even trying to do what they think is right.

11
Yeah.... We're talking about people who literally want us dead. And because it's America, they likely own guns. Some of them are literal neo-Nazis or Christian fascists and might actually try to do you harm if you're Jewish, Muslim, or gay. Making friends with them isn't just painful and unpleasant, it's dangerous.

Just to give you a sense of the type of things that you might have to sit through to be "friends" with these folks... My cousin had a kid in her Catholic school class write an essay comparing gayness to bestiality. Another cousin's husband constantly misgendered my trans sibling on purpose. My parents' neighbors hung a flag on their wall depicting a person pointing a gun at my parents' house.

I'll give you a pass since you're from Europe and have no sense for the level of extremism embraced by our right wing political groups but trust me... If "just talk to your neighbors" worked we'd be doing it. As it is, your best bet is to avoid them knowing your politics and get out if you can.

11
- Online talk and in person talk differ. I know some people that bluster about how we need to get rid of x kind of people but if you confront them about yourself, friends, or family most people back peddle.
  
  1
Dumb take. I don't need to sit down and have a beer with my anti-vax MAGA neighbors to understand them. I understand them just fine, they're brain damaged morons.

5

You just sound like a miserable cunt so move where ever you want and accept noone wants to be around you as much as you don't wanna be around them.

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