You may vote red or blue, but would you rather live in a blue state or a red state? Regardless of what people do at the ballot box, newly released data from the Census Bureau overwhelmingly show people voting with their feet, leaving blue states for red states. And this is nothing new.
From July 2024 to July 2025 (the latest numbers available), blue states like California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts hemorrhaged their most valuable resource—people—at an alarming rate.
These were the five worst states for net domestic migration, meaning more people left those states than moved in, for a combined net loss of 477,000 in just 12 months. Since 2020, these five deep-blue states have cumulative net losses reaching almost 3.7 million people in total. That’s a lot of one-way U-Hauls.
By contrast, the top-five destination states from July 2024 to July 2025 were North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona—all red. The Census Bureau numbers clearly show people are fleeing blue states for red states, and that’s been the pattern for years, including the entire decade before 2020.
The story is no different when looking at percentage changes, instead of absolute numbers. Since 2020, New York, Washington DC, California, Hawaii, and Illinois have seen the largest shares of their population move to other states on net. Sadly, this trend has been going on for a while, and many saw it coming.
In March 2021, I coauthored a study with Stephen Moore in which we calculated that New York’s then latest tax increase would cause even more people to pick up and leave the Empire State, which was already home to some of the highest taxes in the country.
Fast forward to today, and our estimates were right on the money. Since 2020, New York has ignominiously led the nation with net migration losses hitting a whopping 1.1 million, or 5.5 percent of the state’s population. Will the last New Yorker please turn out the lights?
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Mr. Moore and I authored a similar study with Dr. Arthur Laffer in 2020 that looked at how Illinois’s oppressive tax burden was causing people to flee the state in droves. Since then, almost 460,000 Americans have escaped the Land of Lincoln on net—3.6 percent of the state’s population.
Sadly, there are fewer people living in New York and Illinois today than when we authored those studies. So, where did everyone go? The top-ten list of destinations is solid red.
Since 2020, the states with the largest net domestic migration are Florida, Texas, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma. Almost 3.8 million people on net moved to these states, roughly equal to how many people on net left the biggest loser states—which were all blue.
But why are people overwhelmingly taking the one-way street from left-wing bastions to conservative states? It’s because they’re sick of living in financial and social basket cases.
Blue states have a significantly higher tax burden than red states, including income taxes, property taxes, sales and excise taxes, etc. The 10 states with the highest overall tax burden are all blue, while the 10 lowest are all red.
A lower tax burden means a lower cost of living and makes it easier to save, invest, and own a home. By allowing individuals and businesses to keep more of what they earn, people’s take-home pay is higher and their paychecks go further. With lower sales, excise, and property taxes, the total cost to the consumer for products and services is cheaper.
And while red states like Florida are planning tax cuts, blue states like Virginia are planning tax hikes, and that’s on top of already having higher-than-average tax burdens.
And what do residents get for the nose-bleed level of taxation in places like California, New York, and Illinois? They don’t get roads smooth as glass or better schools—literacy and numeracy rates are terrible. Nor do they get safer streets—places like New York City and Chicago are among the deadliest in America. Californian cities have more homeless people than any state in the country.
It’s obvious that folks prefer to live in red states because public policy matters, and people are proving it by getting one-way tickets out of blue states.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist and the Richard Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
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