This Time Americans Are Voting By U-Haul, Not The Ballot Box
Not everyone in Blue State America is moving to a far healthier Red State. It only seems that way. But enough are doing so to say, without a doubt, it is one of the most significant trends in America today. A revolution of sorts.
It’s long been known in demography and population economics that people leave areas known for authoritarian tyranny, stagnation, stultification, crime and excessive regulation in order to find the opposite somewhere else: economic freedom, dynamism, social diversity and good government.
Amid a backdrop of slow overall population growth, a problem in itself, comes the mass exodus of more than a million Americans moving largely from Blue States to Red States, expressing dissatisfaction with high taxes, rampant crime, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, excessive state government regulations, a politically stifling “woke” culture, and lack of economic opportunity and freedom.
Taken together, from 2010 to 2019, Census data show, the top 10 mostly Blue States lost 845,000 citizens, while the top 10 mostly Red States gained just over 1 million. In short, as the Blue State model crashes, the Red State model soars.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry recently noted in a tweet: “Americans are moving from high-tax, forced-unionism, business-unfriendly blue states like CA and NY with high housing costs to low-tax, right-to-work, economically vibrant, business-friendly red states with lower housing costs like FL and TX.”
This was not just Perry’s opinion. He did the math.
He looked at a set of 14 demographic, economic and regulatory data, in the table below. What jumps out is that it’s clear Red States, often led by moderate Republican governors, outperform the Blue States when it comes to their economic dynamism.
The U.S. Census and Perry are not alone. Yet another measure of the Blue State exodus is the U-Haul Growth Index, a yearly report that gauges the net number of U-Haul trucks leaving and entering a state. It’s a measure of that state’s raw emigration rate.
This year, no surprise here, the top 5 were all Red States — Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona. The bottom 5 included California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Alabama.
