A graph that was making the rounds online captures how hundreds of thousands of people abandoned “blue states” like California and New York for “red states” like Florida and Texas last year.
SO WHAT
Conservatives see Americans voting with their feet against liberal policies.
THE CHART
NBC News national political reporter Marc Caputo recently tweeted the chart, which is based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2021.
Florida gained the most residents of any state last year, followed by Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho and Utah, in that order.
- All of those states have unified Republican governments except North Carolina, which has a Democratic governor and a GOP-controlled legislature.
- Nevada, at No. 10, is the first state on the list with a Democratic trifecta government, and it’s followed by another string of deep red states.
- California, coming in dead last, lost more than 360,000 residents to domestic migration in 2021.
- The Census Bureau’s 2021 Population Estimates, released in June, confirmed the trend.
A January study by U-Haul similarly found that Texas, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina and Arizona were the states that picked up the most new residents.
THE VIBE SHIFT
According to data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute, economics — taxes, costs, home prices and jobs — are largely responsible for the blue state exodus. But some high-profile observers have suggested other factors are at play.
- Mega-popular podcast host Joe Rogan made waves in 2020 when he announced he was leaving Los Angeles and moving to Texas.
- “I just want to go somewhere in the center of the country, somewhere it’s easier to travel to both places [coasts], and somewhere where you have a little bit more freedom,” Rogan said at the time.
- Sohrab Ahmari wrote for The American Conservative last year that radical progressive policies on crime, homelessness and COVID-19 had spurred his family to move out of New York City after many years there.
- “Life in ‘The City’ has become unbearable, and it’s about to get worse,” Ahmari wrote. “The grim transformation isn’t the fault of some nebulous scapegoat called the pandemic, but of concrete policies enacted by the Big Apple’s ruling class and, in many cases, demanded by fellow New Yorkers, if indirectly through their ballot-box choices.”