I & I Editorial BoardIf you want to know what the country thinks about President Joe Biden’s agenda, look at how they vote. Not at the ballot box. But with their feet.
Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released data on “net domestic migration.” This tracks where people are moving between counties in the country. Last year, the 10 counties that gained the most through net migration had one thing in common – they were conservative counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
At the other end of the spectrum, all 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration also have one thing in common – they all voted for Biden in 2020. That includes two blue counties located in red states – Miami-Dade County, Florida, (where Biden beat Trump 53%-46%), and Dallas County, Texas, (where Biden got 65% of the vote).
But this is just part of the story. People have been fleeing liberal counties in droves for each of the past three years.
I&I conducted a detailed analysis of the latest Census data, comparing migration trends and the 2020 election outcomes for all 3,144 counties. What we found is that Biden-voting counties lost a net of 3.7 million people (3,670,516 to be exact) to Trump-voting counties from 2020 through 2023. (That’s up by more than a million since we did this same analysis last year.)
In other words, in just the three years after Biden won his election, more than 1% of the population had packed up and moved out of counties that voted for him.
Here are some more details from our research:
- Of the 555 counties that voted for Biden, 343 (or 62%) lost population since 2020. Of the 2,589 counties that voted for Trump, 1,726 (or 67%) gained population.
- The 11 counties that had the biggest population declines over the past three years all voted for Biden. They lost a net total of 2 million people.
- Of the 11 counties with the biggest gains in population, eight voted for Trump in 2020. And the other three (Maricopa County in Arizona, and Williamson and Fort Bend counties in Texas) come with big asterisks.
Maricopa’s population boom is driven by people quitting far-left California counties. (And Biden barely “won” Maricopa, 50%-48%). Biden won Williamson County (which is just north of liberal Austin) by a mere 4,000 votes. And Fort Bend, Texas, is just outside the more liberal Harris County, home to Houston, which Biden took 56%-43% and which has lost more than 88,000 people since 2020.
What’s more, Trump counties saw gains in several states that lost population overall, and Biden counties saw declines in population-gaining states such as Texas and Florida.
- In Texas, for example, 15 of the 22 counties that voted for Biden lost population from 2020 to 2023.
- In Tennessee, only three counties suffered a negative net migration since Biden took office. All three of those counties voted for Biden (Davidson, Haywood, and Shelby).
- In Utah, of the four counties that lost population to migration, three voted for Biden, including Salt Lake County, which had a net loss of 33,299.
- In Ohio, the six counties with the biggest losses of population all voted for Biden.
- In solidly blue New Jersey, only nine of the state’s 21 counties saw a net gain in population. And six of those nine voted for Trump.
(The complete data set is available here.)
For more on this topic, see:
- As Millions Flee Blue States, Red States Need To Remind Them Why
- The Results Are In: Red States Won The COVID Fight, Hands Down
- The Dis-Unification Of America Continues: I&I/TIPP Poll
- America’s U-Haul Revolution
While it should be abundantly clear that millions are abandoning liberal strongholds for more conservative ones, the implications of this mass migration are far from clear.
Is this a sign that the country is becoming more divided along ideological lines as people move out of areas where they feel unwelcome because of their political views?
Or is it simply a case of people moving to where jobs and opportunities are more plentiful? If that’s the case, do these people realize why liberal areas are so much worse than conservative ones?
Will all those people fleeing liberal enclaves bring their voting habits with them, turning solidly conservative counties increasingly blue? (As we’ve seen happen in many places.)
What is clear from this data is that the mass migration underway today presents a huge opportunity for conservatives, if they can figure out how to seize it.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
As someone who lives in a conservative state experiencing dramatic immigration from Blue states, I just hope they leave their voting habits and political attitudes behind.
It’s not even that they have to change their voting habits, because in the last decade, it’s been blue state Republicans migrating.
We live in a different world than when Californians mass migrated to Colorado turning it blue. They were moving from blue coastal cities to blue cities with hiking, and the political differences between democrats and republicans weren’t that starkly different prior to 2010.
Now, the political differences between GOP and Democrats are so different that they largely cannot tolerate living under the other’s governance. This was traumatically demonstrated by how blue states overreacted to covid, the Floyd riots, racial and gender quotas, transgender therapy for kids, and abortion laws.
The migration has been conservatives leaving blue areas. Ted Cruz only won his senate seat in Texas in 2016 because of how heavily non-native Texans voted for Cruz over Beto. Native Texans actually slightly favored Beto in that election.
Now, 2020 has changed that. Both non-native and native Texans have shifted to the right, especially Tejanos, and polling aggregate for Texas is +8 GOP as opposed to +5 GOP of the 2020 election. As long as migration from blue states continue, Blue Texas is a distant dream for the Democrats.
Californication. Know it well.
Indeed. They need daily reminders that they are refugees from their own stupidity, not missionaries.
Well stated!
These domestic migrants better leave their “liberal” values behind or they’ll ruin their new locations. I’m not optomistic.
It’s called “Californication.”
Per capita, it’s almost as fast as the rate people were moving from East Germany to West Germany in the 1950s before the Communists put the Berlin Wall up.
Interesting, but … there is an obvious unreported side effect. In the future, these same blue counties will likely vote Democrat by an even higher percentage. Not a hopeful prospect for conservative remainders.
That’s why those losing counties push for illegal aliens. They push the census numbers back up for districting.
This is exactly why illegal aliens are being counted in the census. States like California and New York will lose representation and electoral college votes if they don’t.
Analysis very well done.
Would that somebody, anybody, analyzed COVID numbers half so well, the CDC certainly did not, nor any MSM outlet.
Anyway back to the story, it’s a tad surprising to find Orange County, CA losing people and apparently having voted for Biden in 2020, but I guess as with your asterisks, it is too close to Los Angeles County.
We fled the radical leftist community of Boulder, CO for a deep red county in the mountains of Utah and never looked back. Trump Derangement Syndrome followed by covid hysteria and defund the police turned what was once one of the nicest small cities in the world into an open air insane asylum. As moderate Republicans we were treated as pariahs. People just literally lost their minds. I had an older lady chase me with a hiking pole because I didn’t have a mask on out on a hiking trail. Hikers, when they saw me without a mask, would cower into the forest and hold their noses and mouths while turning their backs to me. Grown men drove around town solo in their Prius’ wearing masks. Tent cities sprung up everywhere, drug laws were aggressively disregarded, sidewalks were littered with needles and human waste, street racing became a thing, the gang community of Denver descended on Boulder on the weekends because word got out on the lawlessness. Bicycle theft proliferated at a pace of $500,000 per month in a town of 100k, with the prevailing attitude from the radical city council that the thief deserved your $5k bicycle more than you. Black Lives Matter and “in this household” virtue signaling yard signs sprouted like weeds. Some of our meth and fentanyl fueled tent dwellers enjoyed intentionally lighting fires in the forest on windy days. The chaos knew no bounds. Driving around became like a game of whack-a-mole, as there were crazed lunatics around every corner. There was a mass shooting in our grocery store, my wife was friends with one of the victims. There was a gunfight in a business district four blocks from our home. I was very vocal on Boulder NextDoor about the chaos and in a matter of months I went from being a neighborhood “Lead” to earning a lifetime ban. The media ignored this transformation, the local newspaper wouldn’t touch it, and most of our few remaining lib friends were in complete denial. I never understood that. I could go on and on and probably write a book. If you had told me 10 years earlier that we were leaving beautiful Boulder to live in Utah I would have called you crazy. I abandoned a real estate business that I had cultivated over the previous 20 years as we just couldn’t handle it anymore. I shed a tear on my final hike in those glorious mountains that I could access right out of my back door. A wise man once opined that “everything woke turns to sh*t”. In the matter of a few short years the Dems had turned our wonderful city into an absolute sh*thole. What a surreal experience that was.
I can’t figure out what makes people apparently intelligent enough to afford such a lifestyle so incredibly stooopit, irrational, and self-destructive. It’s mind-blowing. Are they just surrounded by militant stupidity and unable to combat it? Are they just weak? Have they lost meaning in their lives?
Mass Formation Psychosis and mental illness. Also, the legal weed in CO is extraordinarily potent and I think it impacts the rational thinking part of the brain. Google set up a secondary headquarters there in the last decade and bringing in a few thousand woke Googlers was probably the tipping point.
My wife and I are natives of Colorado. Boulder has been going to sh*t for decades. Far Left Coasters, both East and West, have been moving there since the 1980s slowing turning Boulder and the Front Range into a Collectivist disaster. Eastern Colorado remains staunchly Conservative as does most of Western Colorado but the Front Range is lost to Californication. On a side note, distant relatives of ours moved from New York City to Boulder about 15 years ago. They brought all their Leftist lunacy with them. Their oldest daughter thinks she’s a man and their youngest daughter has blue hair, thinks she’s a lesbian and is a drug addict. The couple have separated with the wife living on the Maine Coast in a retreat for Feminists. They are a dysfunctional mess yet remain in the Leftist cult of debauchery.
The government vibe In Boulder, though always left-wing, took a very strange turn. 20-25 years ago, it was old-school libs, conservation and low-density oriented, who ran the show. Now it’s Agenda 21, high-density, pro censorship, revenge of the nerds types. Nearly everyone on city council, whether male or female, has that Kate Starbird/Scary Poppins look. It’s actually quite frightening.
Maga
Again
Trump 2024
How about a good solid conservative small government, but get the USA moving attitude. People are tired of cultural war BS and just want to get on with living life the way they know best. Stand up to it and own what is right.
Maybe it’s just a plot by the blue voters to take over the red counties.
Unfortunately, these people fleeing are bringing the same politics they left. Our county commission is full of New Jersey refugees who hate cattle ranches and are now out to get us who have been here for generations.
My son moved to SC because of a job from Mass. That led to grandparents on both sides and aunt and uncle moving here. I know for a fact we ALL will be voting Democrat and it’s only a matter of time especially where I live in Mount Pleasant that we will return a Democrat to DC in Nancy Useless Mace’s district. SC is 46th in worst crime and most gun deaths per capita in the US, and 42nd worst in education and state to live in. In fact of the worst states to live in all but New Mexico are run by Republicans. So complain all you want but that’s why President Biden won Georgia and has 2 Democratic Senators.
My son moved to SC because of a job from Mass. That led to grandparents on both sides and aunt and uncle moving here. I know for a fact we ALL will be voting Democrat and it’s only a matter of time especially where I live in Mount Pleasant that we will return a Democrat to DC in Nancy Useless Mace’s district. SC is 46th in worst crime and most gun deaths per capita in the US, and 42nd worst in education and state to live in. In fact of the worst states to live in all but New Mexico are run by Republicans. So complain all you want but that’s why President Biden won Georgia and has 2 Democratic Senators.
That’s why they call them Massholes.