The Great Covid Migration: One Million Moved Out of Blue States

The stringencies of Covid policies seemingly prompted one of the largest interstate population shifts in a generation.

Re-upping this post from last year. I think the thousands of new subscribers will enjoy it!

Our colleague @birb_k on Twitter has crafted a masterful thread documenting in 10 charts the large population migrations coinciding with draconian Covid policies and the enticement of more free states.

One key highlight from the charts:

On a net basis, nearly a million people who called Blue states home in early 2020, now call Red states home. CA, NY, IL biggest losses. FL, TX, AZ biggest gains.

We reproduce his thread below:

Chart 1/10. Net Domestic Migration Jul 2020 to Jul 2021, by the four U.S. Census “Division.” A huge influx into the South Division. Previous post erroneously included 15 months of data. This one corrects it to 12 months census data, allowing accurate year/year comparisons.

Chart 2/10. Net Domestic Migration Jul 2020 to Jul 2021, by the nine U.S. Census “Regions.” The three South Regions plus the Mountain Region are up, all others are down. Adding all nine numbers together equals zero, or a true “Net” migration, per Census design/analysis.

Chart 3/10. Net migration vs. vaccine mandates. 13 states that have banned/blocked mandates received net increase of nearly three-quarters of a million people. Conversely over 800K people no longer call states home that have vaccine mandates. Base map NYT. Black/blue/red mine.

Chart 4/10. Net migration by state, including political party designation. Comments from initial post challenged a few party designations, saying “sitting Governor” is an inadequate measure. I agree and made changes to a handful of states based on criteria shown on chart #10.

Chart 5/10. A couple claimed migration trend is typical and not Covid-related. This chart compares migration numbers to pre-Covid year July 2018 to July 2019. It shows that the trend does generally pre-date Covid, but Covid & Covid policies appear to be a massive accelerator.

Chart 6/10. Digging back in time, this chart adds average annual migrations from 1995-2000. The migration trend from blue states to red states was evident even back then, but again Covid & Covid policies appear to have accelerated movement at a statistically significant scale.

Chart 7/10. Migration by political party. On a net basis, nearly a million people who called Blue states home in early 2020, now call Red states home. CA, NY, IL biggest losses. FL, TX, AZ biggest gains. Red & blue determined by weighted scoring method, see chart 10.

Chart 8/10. Public policy around child education appears to be a big influencer. Looking at the 25 states with most in-person education during 2020/2021 school year, vs the 25 states with lowest in-person education, reveals a net movement of over 800K people during Covid.

Chart 9/10. Per-capita migration is also revealing. Idaho hands down gainer at 2.73% of its previous pop, Montana 1.8% increase. Washington D.C. down 3.26%, New York down 1.81%. Illinois, California, and Hawaii down nearly a whole percent. Will such erosion continue?

Chart 10/10. Identification of Red vs. Blue states was done using this admittedly imperfect homemade scoring system that takes in governor, registered voters, 2020 vote, and legislative representation at both the Federal & State level. Where nearly a tie, governor breaks tie.

The rest of the pages in this thread lists sources used. JULY 2020 TO JULY 2021 NET MIGRATION

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-2021/state/totals/NST-EST2021-COMP.xlsx…

https://census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-national-total.html… https://census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/comm/how-does-your-state-compare.html…  

JULY 2018 TO JULY 2019 NET MIGRATION

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2010-2019/state/totals/nst-est2019-05.xlsx… https://census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-state-total.html…