Ever since the idea of a “national divorce” started percolating on social media platforms, I’ve found myself wondering how that might work. A “great divorce” certainly sounds a lot better than a civil war, I suppose, but how would you organize something like that? Who would organize it and under what authority? It would obviously have to be voluntary or the people organizing it would just be another bunch of autocrats. But as it turns out, perhaps it doesn’t require any organization at all. At Issues and Insights, they’ve been tabulating all of the numbers and concluded that it’s already happening. Americans are migrating in increasing numbers and a significant majority of them are moving away from blue states and cities.
Is the country separating itself into two distinct camps? One increasingly leftist and the other trying desperately to cling to traditional American values? Census data seem to show that it very well could be underway.
Last week, we commented on recent population data showing that people have been fleeing urban areas, noting that these are mostly Democratically controlled, and we pointed out that people have also been moving from blue states to red.
But we wanted to go deeper and get more precise numbers. So, we matched Census net migration data from mid-2020 through mid-2022 for all the nation’s 3,000-plus counties (or their equivalents) and compared that with how these counties voted in 2020.
We already knew about the migration taking place on a state-by-state basis. People have been fleeing from New York to Florida by the tens of thousands. Other parts of the country are experiencing similar trends. But as noted above, the editors at I&I wanted to dig deeper, so they examined the data broken down to the county level and matched it with how people voted in those counties in 2020 and 2022.
The results were striking. They found a net migration of nearly 2.6 million people from blue counties that Joe Biden carried to red counties that voted for Donald Trump. 61% of the Biden counties experienced a net population loss, while 65% of Trump counties recorded a net increase.
The two counties that lost the greatest net number of people were Los Angeles County, which lost almost 370,00 people, and Cook County (home to Chicago) which lost more than 200,000. By comparison, the biggest population loss registered for any county that Trump carried was seen in Jefferson Parish in Louisiana which lost just 18,470.
Going through all of their figures, you will see another surprising fact. In most states that experienced a net gain in population, the blue counties in those states still had a net population loss. This can’t all simply be written off as a coincidence. There’s clearly a pattern here, no matter what you’d care to attribute it to.
So what does all of this mean? Clearly, it would be easy to conclude that the red states are getting redder and the blue states are getting bluer. But that’s not necessarily true. For one thing, people move all the time, frequently for reasons having nothing to do with politics, so people in that category wouldn’t be part of a “national divorce.”
Second, and perhaps more importantly, some of the people who flee blue areas with high taxes and high crime for a safer, more affordable red area, bring their “blue” attitudes with them. I&I points to the example of Maricopa County in Arizona. It had been reliably red for more than half a century. But that county experienced a significant jump in population and the result was a situation where Joe Biden took 50.1% of the vote in 2020 but Hillary Clinton only took 44.8%. So a shift took place, but not the type you might have expected or hoped for.
It would appear that this is more of a “separation” than a “divorce.” And the places in question are still fighting over custody of the children to carry that analogy to the end. The places that continue to lose population will eventually lose representation in Congress. But does that change the outcome of a presidential election? Perhaps in the very long run. Every time New York loses a seat (which has happened after the last several census cycles) they lose another electoral vote. As Florida and Texas gain in population, their share of the electoral college will rise. But that’s only beneficial to conservatives if we don’t start seeing more examples of what happened in Maricopa County.
