The Census Bureau recently released its latest report on "domestic" migration and the results demonstrate that Americans are on the move. And we're talking about a lot of them. This particular study is interesting because it doesn't just measure the flow of population between states. It breaks the numbers down to the county level, capturing those who relocate but remain in their home state. At Issues and Insights, the editorial board breaks down the figures and discovers that a significant percentage of these domestic migrants had one thing in common. The majority were moving out of counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and into counties that voted for Donald Trump. This is clearly not a coincidence. 

If you want to know what the country thinks about President Joe Biden’s agenda, look at how they vote. Not at the ballot box. But with their feet.

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released data on “net domestic migration.” This tracks where people are moving between counties in the country. Last year, the 10 counties that gained the most through net migration had one thing in common – they were conservative counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, all 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration also have one thing in common – they all voted for Biden in 2020.

The linked report includes a pair of charts listing the American counties with the greatest positive and negative net migration numbers. You probably won't be surprised to learn that eight of the ten counties seeing the greatest population gains are located in Texas and Florida, with Polk County, Florida seeing the largest increase in 2023. Horry County, South Carolina, and Pinal County, Arizona also earned spots in the top ten. Donald Trump carried each of those counties in 2020.

The list of net population losers was quite different. Seven of the bottom ten counties are located in California and New York. Cook County in Illinois, home to Chicago, came in at number two. The two outliers were Miami-Dade County in Florida and Dallas County in Texas. This is where the granular nature of the survey proves helpful. Trump carried both Texas and Florida in 2020, but Biden won in both of those specific counties.

That pattern repeated itself all across the board. The I&I analysis found that 62% of the nation's counties that Biden carried in 2020 lost population over the next three years. Conversely, 67% of the counties that went for Trump saw net population gains. The total number of people undertaking these moves is measured not in the hundreds or the thousands, but in the millions.

So what's driving these domestic migration patterns? That's a lot harder to determine, though some of the detailed data appears to offer hints. We might suppose that people are moving away from areas where their neighbors vote differently than them for ideological reasons. Perhaps there's some of that going on, but I tend to doubt it accounts for much of what we're seeing. Speaking from personal experience, most of us manage to get along with our neighbors well enough no matter what color yard signs adorn our lawns. And if life is otherwise going well, that's really not much of an impetus to pack up and relocate.

Far more likely is the probability that most of these people are moving to places that have more jobs, a lower cost of living, lower taxes, and less crime. It's not surprising that those conditions are most commonly found in places under conservative governance. The major problem, as the I&I editors point out, comes when progressives fleeing blue states bring their liberal voting habits with them, poisoning the well for the people who helped establish those positive conditions to begin with.