Red states now have more people at work than before the pandemic as they recover faster economically than their blue state peers. Tennessee enjoyed the highest inflation-adjusted GDP growth in America last year while the state’s unemployment sank to an all-time low. Democrat-run states, by contrast, have collectively lost roughly 1.3 million jobs since the start of the pandemic more than two and a half years ago. Moody’s Back to Normal Index shows eight out of ten states at the bottom for their economy, jobs, retail sales, and home listings are all deep blue.

Companies are now leaving blue states too. It’s not just Tesla leaving California now, but hedge-fund titan Citadel leaving J.B. Pritzker’s Illinois for Ron DeSantis’s Florida and blue-collar Caterpillar decamping to Texas. Seattle-based Amazon now splits its headquarters between Virginia and Tennessee. Investment in new manufacturing facilities is up an astonishing 116 percent in the last year alone to the benefit of states like Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas.

For years, blue states could tax and spend while their streets and schools went to hell without fear of mass outmigration for the simple reason that they’d struck gold in the modern economy. The technology and finance industries created vast amounts of wealth in places like the Bay Area and Boston, and then rewarded their talented residents with access to highly exclusive shares and homes. Bad policies barely mattered when you could pay to ignore them. Indeed, the only strange thing about this whole affair was that there was no gold rush into these states, because who else could afford a chance to live in California?