Michael Barone: Only the COVID Accelerated Blue State Exodus

Are Americans moving where? To be more precise, where have Americans been since the sudden onset COVID lockdowns? These questions are answered by the Census Bureau’s annual Christmastime release of estimates of the population of all 50 states and District of Columbia as of July 2013.

These numbers can be compared to the April 1, 2020 decennial census count, which was taken just as COVID restrictions were in place. This gives a glimpse of how Americans moved during and after the pandemic.

Domestic out-migration — the number of U.S. residents leaving the state minus those entering — in 2020-22 was 3.3% of the 2020 population in New York state and 2.2% in Illinois and California. These numbers are alarming and higher than in any other state. As suggested by the District of Columbia (where pre-COVID population was increasing but was down 3.8% in 2020-22), these losses are certain to be concentrated in central cities.

These states also have the highest local and state tax rates in the country and high housing prices due to strict regulations. This has sparked outmigration for over a decade. The post-COVID woes — lockdowns and masking mandates, the post-George Floyd upward zoom in violent crime and the spread of homeless encampments — have sparked a larger exodus that seems unlikely to be fully reversed.

What is more striking? The map shows domestic migration from all five states to the Pacific Ocean. This was once the promised land of many. Domestic in-migration is also visible along Interstate 15 from Nevada to Nevada, even though it’s not leading the nation in terms of growth as it was in 2000s. It is now heavily Mormon Utah and north Idaho and Montana.

There has also been movement to the east along Interstate 10 between Arizona and Texas. These five Mountain States have seen a similar level of domestic migration to Texas (4133,000) or Arizona (475,000), which is nearly identical to the California out-migration (871,000).

If you look at the east side, you will see a lot of growth in the states south of Richmond and Washington along Interstates 95. While the national population grew 0.6% between 2020-22, North Carolina saw a 2.5% increase, South Carolina 3.2%, Georgia 1.9%, and Florida 3.3%, respectively.

The domestic in-migration to these four states (1 128,000) is almost equal to the out-migration to New York from the I-95 States from Virginia north to Massachusetts plus Illinois (1 285,000).

Florida is an exceptional example. Its domestic migration (622,000) is almost identical to New York’s out-migration (6664,000). The total 2020-22 domestic migration into Florida was 2.9%, which is a rate that is higher than the smaller states of Idaho and Montana.

This is the reverse direction of migrations along the Interstate corridors that occurred during wartime and postwar decades, which was between the 1940s and the 1970s. Then you saw substantial migrations of both Black and white Southerners up to the great cities of the Northeast — Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York — and to Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland in the industrial Midwest.

Similar to Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, postwar growth and wartime industries led people from Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana to California and the Pacific Northwest.

These migrations were both larger in absolute numbers and larger percentage-wise than the ones we see today. Which makes the really large movements today — out of New York, Chicago and coastal California, into Florida and Texas — stand out so vividly.

You see something called stasis in a lot of the country. There are lower birth rates than ever before and more deaths in many of the 50 states than in any other state. The population grew by 0.2% in eight Southern states (excluding Texas and South Atlantic) and 11. Midwestern states. Domestic migration was 0.1%.

The old cliche that the Snow Belt would eventually empty into the Sun Belt has become obsolete. Instead, you will see movement from the idyllic Pacific coast north along I-15 to Mountain States and Texas. A larger shift is seen from metro Washington to metropolitan Boston southward on I-95, I-85 to the Carolinas and Georgia, and most importantly to Florida.

In a generally prosperous and tolerant society — more prosperous and tolerant than the tenor of Twitter debate, in my view — it takes a lot to get people to move. Census numbers reveal that COVID lockdowns piled atop high taxes, restrictive housing regulations, brought several million people to the move over the 27 month period between April 2020 and July 2022.

Although those who have moved will likely be in a better place, it is possible to cause damage to their homes and make it difficult to rebuild.

Michael Barone, a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and a long-time co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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