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.
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