Illiberal policies are forcing Americans in many blue states to flee in search of economically and politically friendlier climates. Are politicians getting the message?
Something remarkable is happening in these disunited states: a rapid rearrangement of population of the kind not seen for decades. This internal migratory surge, however, may not be as benign as some earlier ones. It is fueled less by geographic factors — the availability of fertile land or the appeal of a milder climate — than by political considerations.
It reflects, in part, the fact that people are voting with their feet and fleeing jurisdictions that limit their economic and social well-being or fail to respect their property rights in favor of places where these priorities are better served. While this may be viewed as necessary and, in some sense, desirable, there’s reason for worry about both its short-term costs and long-term consequences.
Let’s first understand the data. Since the 2020 census, the U.S. population has grown by only about 0.5 percent. But it has shifted dramatically among the states. California and New York each lost more than half a million residents between the last official count and the latest estimate; Texas gained almost 900,000, and Florida more than 700,000. Many pundits have noted that the first two states are deep blue and high tax while the latter are red and do not levy state income taxes.
Of course, this is a small sample, and there’s much more to a migration decision than party affiliation or income-tax rates. Recently, the Cato Institute has provided a ranking of states by degree of “overall freedom.” In brief, the path to a high ranking is good scores on more than 200 variables related to both economic and personal freedom, from efficient taxation to ease of same-sex marriage.
Cato’s data provide nuance to any state’s appeal. On local taxation, for example, Texas ranks 48th — almost as bad as New York, which is 50th. Overall, however, there’s a very strong inverse correlation between a state’s population change since 2020 and its freedom rank. People are, in general, fleeing to freedom.
The table below shows the states at the opposite ends of the freedom rankings. With one exception, all the least free states have shrunk, while the freest states have grown dramatically. And even the exception has more recently joined the trend: Oregon’s population grew modestly between the 2020 count and the Census Bureau’s estimate later that year, but since then it has fallen by almost 5,000 residents.
It would be heartening to think that this is all to the good: that outbound voters send a powerful message to political leaders in less free states to get their act together and provide the policies voters want. That’s the way it would work for most goods: Companies that lose market share usually rush to imitate those gaining it.
That’s not the way things often work in the political marketplace, however. Repelling people with whom you disagree — alienating them so much they actually leave — can enhance politicians’ job security. Their political base becomes numerically more important, and they become more powerful, a phenomenon first noted by Harvard economists Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer.
This problem — bad policies forcing people to uproot their lives in pursuit of more freedom in a friendlier political climate — may not be self-correcting. Cato’s rankings, which its authors have been refining for over two decades, are suggestive. New York’s raw freedom score is not only the nation’s worst but has been declining steadily since 2000 (from -0.60 to -0.75); ditto California’s (down from -0.36 to -0.51). By contrast, the influx of freedom-lovers to New Hampshire over the years has raised its score to the highest on record (up from 0.46 in 2000 to 0.73 today).
The lack of meaningful political competition and, thus, freedom in some states can have tragic consequences for their (remaining) residents. In one of our most cited academic papers, we showed that freedom is strongly correlated with prosperity and, therefore, the length and quality of life. (New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto sounds extreme but accords with life-expectancy data!) Perhaps more important to progressives, there is also considerable evidence that freedom and respect for individual rights have favorable effects on the distribution of income.
There’s a good case to be made that freedom-friendly policies deserve to be embraced by shrinking states. Even voters who are unhappy with the status quo don’t tend to want to leave the places where they have roots, but the long-term interests of the majority of voters are not served by policies that restrict freedom. The question is whether any political entrepreneurs in these states will heed “the science” and “the data” and do the right thing.
Steve H. Hanke is a professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Stephen J. K. Walters is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise and the author of Boom Towns: Restoring the Urban American Dream.