DLC types supporting Roemer and the like keep bringing up how Kerry lost 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the U.S. as evidence that the country is flying fast and furious to the right and that the Democratic party must do so also. Here is why this statistic, while perhaps true, does not reflect the country getting redder, but is simply a consequence of the growing political chasm between the older and more urban sections and the newest and most sprawling sections of metro areas.
Metropolitan areas grow out. Think of a metro area as several concentric rings. If the metro area grows, the outer rings will always grow faster because the inner and middle rings have already been developed. So most of the fastest growing counties are in exurban and newly suburban parts of large metro areas. Large metro areas are not trending to the right as a whole (at least not anymore than the country is and while I'm not the biggest expert here on how much or if the country is, I am an urban planner that knows about metro growth cycles). While they are each different politically and in terms of their physical layout, all metro areas for the most part these days tend to have three demographic layers as one moves out from the middle.
There is the liberal inner city layer. Then there's the moderate layer of outer city neighborhoods and/or inner and middle ring suburbs. Finally, there's the outermost layer of new, conservative suburbs where upscale and/or anti-urbanist conservatives tend to be the ones buying the newest McMansions and living on the most sprawling acreages. These outer-layer types are the ones filled with people who chose to live there because it was far away from the gays, secular humanists, folks of color, and all manner of miscellaneous undesirables: crowded urban neighborhoods that are supposedly bad for children, and liberal atmospheres that are supposedly bad for children. In other words, as the metro area expands outward, these people keep moving (often to newly built houses on newly developed land) in the fringe of the urban area, trying to get away from us urban liberals and to live up to the pseudo-folksy red lifestyle of worshipping rural values in their acreages.
Most of these fast growing counties are not areas that somehow reflect, in their high growth, an increase in Republicans vs. Dems in a general sense, the way the DLCers self-servingly use the stat to imply. Just as such counties are filling up with Republicans, some inner ring suburbs and city neighborhoods are losing Republicans and gaining Democrats (but, because they are existing areas, they are not growing in population as a whole the way the outer burbs are). It is a natural progression of growing metro areas- as the area as a whole expands, all three layers expand proportionately. It is just that the inner two layers expand by "imposing" their demographic over existing neighborhoods that used to be more conservative while the outer layer, by nature of its physical location, has to expand over non-developed lands. Hence the reason that these counties at the edge of metro areas are both fast-growing and conservative.
For any folks out there that still don't understand, just imagine having a tri-colored doily on your table made up of an outer red ring (the outer layer) and a middle purple ring around a blue circle (the liberal inner ring). If you go out and get a doily of a larger size but with an identical design (analogous to metro growth), each of the three colored areas will be larger, but all will still be proportionate to each other. If this doily is so big it expands off the table (analogous to growing into the next county), then the areas immediately off the table will only be red because only the outer layer extends off the table (until you get an even larger doily). But just because the area immediately off the table is now red doesn't mean the house (the nation) as a whole is getting more red; as you can see you have that much more purple covering up areas that used to be covered by red parts of the smaller doily, and blue areas that used to be covered by purple areas of the smaller doily. So the house, as a whole, is still proportionate because the new doily is proportionate.
Here in the Portland area, the fast growing suburb of West Linn is Republican. Does this mean metro Portland is becoming more Republican? No, it is just that West Linn, due to its newness and location on the metro fringe tends to be a place where Republicans like to live. While the DLCers would obviously point to this fast growing town being Republican as evidence of rightward trends, it is just as noteworthy that Lake Oswego (next door to West Linn but further in toward the city of Portland) is trending left. It used to be the uber-GOP fringe but is trending left as the three layers move outward, the purple and blue overtaking Lake Oswego while the red layer that formerly included Lake Oswego now moves out to West Linn. The whole northern half of Lake Oswego seemed to have 5-10 (depending on neighborhood) Kerry signs for every Bush sign this year. 15 years ago Portlanders thought of Lake Oswego the way Kossacks think of Freepers.
So don't believe it (or probably other stats as far as I know) when DLCers and righties try to use this stat to prove the nation is flying fast to the right.