The past five years have seen a massive migration of Americans out of heavily Democratic counties and into ones where Donald Trump won majorities in each of the past three elections. That’s according to an exclusive analysis by Issues & Insights of the latest Census Bureau and election data.

Most analyses of internal migration patterns look only at state-level data. And what they show is that blue states are losing population to red states, and have been for many years.

I&I wanted to go deeper, so we used the latest Census data on migration between counties, and compared that with how these counties voted in the past three presidential elections.

What we found was that millions aren’t just moving out of blue states, but are moving out of blue counties within states.

Trump won 2,589 counties in each of the past three elections. From 2020 to 2025, those counties gained 5.4 million people due to net migration — which measures how many people move into and out of an area. The 433 counties where Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris carried the day saw a net loss of 5.43 million people.  

And the 121 counties in which Trump won at least one of the past three elections saw a net gain of 29,000 people over those years.

I&I has been tracking these migration trends for years. In 2023, we found that Biden-voting counties had lost 2.6 million people from 2020 to 2022. We did the analysis again in 2024, and the number had swelled to 3.7 million. The exodus clearly has continued.

The latest data show that of the 10 counties with the biggest gains in population, only one was deep blue. Trump consistently won the rest in the three past presidential elections. (Maricopa County [officially] went for Biden in 2020, as did Williamson County, Tex.)

The 10 counties with the biggest loss of population from 2020 to 2025 were all heavily Democratic — they voted for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris. (Miami-Dade flipped into the Trump camp in 2024.)

Even if you go further down the list, the pattern remains.

Of the 50 counties with the biggest net gain of population, all but four voted for Trump in the past three elections. Of the 50 counties with the biggest losses due to net migration, all but five are solid blue.

Other findings:

• Blue counties lost population even in states that had big gains. The five Florida counties where Trump lost in his three election bids lost 150,000 people due to net migration over the past five years. This is a state that saw an overall net gain of 890,000.

• The three heavily Democratic counties in Tennessee lost more than 81,000 people, while the state overall gained 293,000.

• Only five counties in Utah lost population from 2020 to 2025, and three of them voted for both Biden and Harris.

• At the other end of the spectrum, California lost almost 1.7 million people to net migration. But the few counties that consistently voted for Trump saw a slight gain of 3,024.     

• New Jersey’s seven solidly pro-Trump counties gained almost 25,000 people during the years that solidly Democratic counties lost more than 214,000.

• Virginia’s blue counties lost nearly 160,000 to net migration, while its solidly red ones gained more than 122,000

We keep hearing how unpopular Trump and his policies are. (Our latest I&I/TIPP poll shows that just 39% have a favorable opinion of the president — See “Trump’s Popularity Took A Hit In April — Is Iran War Reason Why, Or Something Else?“) While that might be what people tell pollsters, their own actions – picking up and moving to a new county or a different state – speak much louder.

Millions of Americans would rather live among Trump supporters than those voting for the likes of Kamala Harris.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

CORRECTION: Thanks to an observant reader, the Biggest Winners and Losers chart and the accompanying text have been updated to reflect the fact that Maricopa and Williamson Counties officially went for Biden in 2020 and Miami-Dade flipped to Trump in 2024.

Editor’s Note: To see the complete data set, click here.