The Democratic Party has come a long way from 1996, when President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign declared that America “cannot tolerate illegal immigration” and added, “We continue to firmly oppose welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.”
When we seek explanations for why today’s Democrats refuse to call those here without permission “illegal,” oppose lawful deportations, and seek government benefits for those who’ve snuck into the country, we probably need to look no further than the population woes of Democratic states. At a time when states are governed increasingly by one party or another, the latest migration trends, released last week, show Americans continuing to move heavily away from states with politics dominated by Democrats, and toward Republican locales—significantly shifting population, political power, and economic resources.
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The latest data, for the year ending July 1, 2025, show that seven of the top ten states gaining residents from elsewhere in the country are all governed by so-called Republican trifectas, in which the party controls the governorship and both legislative houses—including Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The remaining three states in the top ten—North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada—went for Trump in 2024 and have divided governments that lean Republican. Of the 22 states where Republicans control all branches of government, only three lost population to net migration in the last year. In two of those, Mississippi and Nebraska, the net decline was less than 1,000. In all, Republican states gained a net of nearly 345,000 people from other places.
By contrast, Democratic states dominate the list of places with the biggest outflow of residents. Nine of the ten states losing the most population are Democratic, led by California, with a net loss of 229,000 residents, and including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois. A notable addition to the bottom ten is Colorado—a politically competitive state as recently as 2019 but dominated by Democrats since. Unlike California and New York, which have seen net outmigration for more than a decade, Colorado’s fortunes have only recently turned, but dramatically so, as the state recorded the eighth-highest net loss of residents last fiscal year. Only four of the 15 Democratic trifecta states last year gained residents: Washington, Oregon, Delaware, and Maine. In all, Democratic-led states lost about 495,000 residents to net migration.
This trend has been building for years. A decade ago, when Gallup asked residents of every state whether they intended to move elsewhere, Democratic states dominated the ranks of places people wanted to leave. Analysts found “a strong relationship between total state tax burden and desire to leave one’s current state of residence.” It wasn’t clear whether most of those discontented residents wanted to move elsewhere specifically because of taxes, or whether taxes were just a marker for a big-government ethos that pervades other areas of life as well, but the result was the same.
When Covid-19 emerged, the policy and governing differences between red and blue states widened further, as Democrats were more likely to lock down society (including schools) longer, to institute more draconian restrictions on businesses, and to offset any declines in government revenues from these stoppages with higher taxes. Outmigration subsequently soared. Now, post-Covid, state policy differences have heightened in everything from transsexual rights to opposition to deportation to taxation.
The latest Census numbers illustrate why Democrats have been anxious to welcome immigrants (legal or not) and see that they get counted in the decennial tally. With the border effectively closed, the populations of states like California, Hawaii, and New Mexico are declining, and they’re stagnating in New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Meantime, populations are growing significantly more in Southwestern and Southeastern states like Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Compounding the problem is that Democratic-leaning states have some of the lowest total fertility rates. In 2023, nine of the 11 states with a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman or less were Democratic states. The blue state with the highest birth rate, New Jersey, ranks only 18th nationally, behind such Republican trifectas as South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, and Utah.
These demographic shifts are showing up everywhere from politics to economics. In the last 20 years, Florida and Texas alone have gained nine electoral votes, while New York, Illinois, and California have lost six. Projections based on current population trends suggest that, in the next Census, Texas and Florida may each pick up two or more votes, while California and New York could each lose two or more electors. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin are among those states which could lose a single vote.
Economically, power has already shifted. The stark contrast in tax and budget policy among states during Covid showed in the rapid revival of the economies in Republican locales. A mid-2022 study documented the way Republican states had already added back 341,000 jobs, while Democratic states were still struggling with losses of 1.3 million positions from Covid lockdowns. Robust gains in everything from retail sales to home listings in Republican states followed on the heels of massive migration, as some 46 million people moved in response to Covid. A year later, a Bloomberg analysis found that the largely Republican Southeastern states and Texas had, as a region, surpassed the Northeastern states in contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product. A 2024 study of patterns throughout Covid further documented the massive movement of workers in their prime employment years and their families out of major metro areas in states like New York, California, and Illinois and into counties in places like central Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida, among other Republican areas.
Looking at these results, one might conclude that Democratic voters and the politicians they elect would consider reforms to keep and attract more voters. But states like California, New York, and Illinois have been racking up losses for more than a decade with no sign of political change. If anything, Democratic states seem to be pressing ahead with the very policies that repel a substantial number of citizens and businesses. During the Biden years, Democrats decided that the solution to this problem was to import a cohort of new voters. That immigration policy, ironically, had as much to do with the improbable reelection of Trump as any other Democratic strategy.
The great Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith once observed that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Today, you might describe the process as “managed decline.” It’s a feat that many Democratic states are pulling off quite convincingly.
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