Hallmark's popular, if painfully corny, Christmas movies, definitely have a casting formula for their heroines: Mostly white, clean-cut, and of an in-between age. That is, young enough to be plausibly short of middle age, but old enough to sell the standard Hallmark plot: Urban professional leaves the city to get a new lease on life, by returning to her parents in small town America and marrying the boy next door. But the women who actually watch Hallmark movies are much older than the stars. Over 70% of the Hallmark audience is past 50 years old. This breakdown of the most popular Hallmark Christmas movies shows they're mostly a hit with the Medicare crowd, with over half of the audience aged 65 and up.
The audience for Hallmark movies, in other words, doesn't look quite like its heroines, but more like their mothers. It's also a very white audience that is more concentrated in Republican-voting areas. As Amanda Festa at Samba TV writes, "Hallmark’s conservative beginnings have been slow to change," and "this is certainly reflected in the channel’s holiday viewership."
A lot of the critical reaction to the popularity of Hallmark movies assumes they are selling a comforting, if reactionary reverie of retreat from urban life to small town simplicity. In light of these demographics, however, I'd argue the story being sold is even narrower than that. Hallmark is selling a fantasy to older, mostly Republican viewers: That their wayward daughters will give up on life in the big city and return home to live near their mothers.
(As I noted on Friday, the actual daughters in question are way more invested in the Taylor Swift narrative: Daughters who have flown the coop and are very happy living their busy lives with a cat in the big city.)
The sad irony in all this is that the Hallmark-loving grandmothers of America, by voting for Republicans, are working against their own dreams of having adult children — and grandchildren — who live next door. As Timothy Noah wrote recently in a cover article for the New Republic, the increasingly authoritarian policies passed by Republican leaders are leading to what he deems the "Red State Brain Drain": "an out-migration of young professionals" from GOP-controlled states to the more welcoming pastures of blue state America.
There are many reasons the under-50 set are taking their college degrees and robust contributions to the tax base out of red states into blue ones. The biggest concerns are for their own school-age children. They want their kids to go to schools without book bans, to have access to reproductive health care, to be safe from violence and, should they identify as LGBTQ (as many in Gen Z do), that they will be affirmed instead of bullied. But for people in professions like teaching, medicine, science or the arts, it's just increasingly hard to feel safe and supported in red states. So they leave.
Noah's focus is on how the brain drain is impacting life in red states, which are seeing massive shortages in teachers, doctors, and other necessary educated professionals. "And much as Republicans may scorn Joe (and Jane) College, they need them to deliver their babies, to teach their children, to pay taxes," he writes. But, if the popularity of Hallmark movies is any indication, there's another loss a lot of Republicans have brought upon themselves by relentlessly electing authoritarian leaders: The loss of their own children's presence.
The first couple that Noah profiles — Kate Arnold and her wife, Caroline Flint — are a good example. The two were both doctors serving in Oklahoma, which is in desperate need of more medical professionals. They lived in the state because they have roots there. But after abortion was banned, the familial connection to Oklahoma could not overcome their anger and fear at living in a place that makes it so hard to live their lives and do their jobs. So they moved to D.C. They easily named four other friends who had left Oklahoma for similar reasons recently. And this is despite the fact that, due to the higher demand for doctors in Oklahoma, the two women could make way more money in their home state, while paying much less for housing.
There's a lot of angst in red state America over the loss of young people in general, but especially with those MAGA voters whose adult children have moved to far-flung places. Right-wing media outlets clearly understand this, because they churn out an endless stream of propaganda about how all those young white people who go to college and move to the big city are brainwashed idiots who will rue the day they left their hometowns behind.
Fox News is an endless drumbeat of stories falsely painting American cities as hellscapes where residents have to hopscotch over sleeping junkies in between enduring armed robberies at the hands of Black Lives Matter protesters. This narrative has long been a mainstay of the right-wing noise machine, but there's one major thing that's shifted about it. In the past, the "scary cities" framework was mostly an excuse for blatant race-baiting and thus tended to focus on cities with large Black populations, like New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia. That is still a big part of it, of course, but now a lot of the anti-urban hysteria has shifted to cities that are a whole lot whiter: Seattle, San Francisco, and even Portland.
In these segments, the villains are educated white "elites" — like many of the children of Fox viewers — whose supposed youthful idealism has allowed crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to run amok. Another flavor of this hate comes in right-wing scare stories about dystopian police states created by liberal overreach in the name of public health or environmentalism. To hear conservative pundits carry on, one would think wealthy liberal cities have vaccine checkpoints on every corner and cameras in your homes to keep you from drinking soda. Conservative media is even using urban walkability proposals to float conspiracy theories that people will be banned from leaving cities. The claim is urban residents will be "imprisoned in our local communities and condemned to forage and eat bugs," with "no football games, no concerts, no amusement parks, certainly no church."
And, of course, the increasingly loud right-wing war on education is a big part of this.
The Republican attacks on college professors, the fear-mongering about "woke" college kids, and the substantive efforts to run off faculty and/or deprive them of free speech flow directly from years of conservative messaging treating college itself as a threat. A big part of this is that it's college, of course, that freed so many young people to get the hell out of red state America.
It's messaging that fits with Donald Trump's "retribution" style of politics. Rather than asking why young people are leaving and how to get them back, it's about lashing out at them and entertaining fantasies of revenge. (Just wait until that wayward daughter gets mugged! That'll teach her to leave suburbia.) But it's a long, ugly act of MAGA America shooting itself in the foot. The truth is a lot of younger professionals would be open to living in red states if the political situation weren't so terrifying. The housing is cheaper and often the job opportunities are more plentiful, especially in education and health care. And many people would like to be closer to aging relatives, to help them out and have them in their grandkids' lives.
But by voting for Republicans, red state denizens are making sure their Hallmark dreams will never come true. In the real world, your harried urban professional daughter will never come home to Oklahoma or Texas or Florida, because, for one thing, she can't get an abortion if she needs one. Or her own child will be punished for saying "gay" in school. Or she will worry every day about her kid getting killed in a mass shooting. Fox News paints the blue states as crime-ridden hellholes, but college-educated people under 50, who have the privilege to choose where they live, see it very differently. The word they use for blue states is "safe."
