America is moving to red states
The drivers of internal migration, big turnout expected for 2026, Elias disses Election Twitter, Chart of the Century update, hating your state, long live window seats
No. 389 | January 30, 2026
👫 Red state population boom
The latest Census population estimates are out, and they show a slowing down of population growth thanks to a fall in international migration — and a continuing shift of the population into states won by Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
At the state level, nineteen states lost population to domestic migration to other states, with California experiencing the biggest net loss — 229,077 people. With the crackdown at the border and stepped-up immigration enforcement, domestic migration is what’s increasingly deciding whether states will gain or lose House seats after the next decennial census in 2030.
Every state projected to lose House seats was a Biden state in 2020, while every state that would gain seats was a Trump state in 2024. If these reapportionment projections came to pass, Trump would have won by 9 more electoral votes in 2024 and would not have needed to win any of the “Blue Wall” states to win.
Lest we get too far out front of our skis, we are talking about the 2032 election here, which is still a ways off. If in 2014 you had talked about Georgia and Arizona as blue states in 2020, people would have looked at you funny. State political alignments are a fickle thing.
Yes, but… (to use an Axios-ism): Partisan loyalties are more sticky than they’ve ever been, a trend exacerbated by 45/47 but that didn’t start with him. The number of true swing states continues to decline (from 20-ish when I first started in this business down to 7). So there are now fewer opportunities for surprises on the political map.
And post-Covid, the act of moving across state lines is becoming an explicitly political act. The dream of Blexas was predicated on moderate northerners moving in and transforming the politics of the South and West, combined with theories about Hispanic voters that shall we say did not pan out. But now, if you’re moving to Florida or Texas, or moving out of California, chances are that you’re a Republican. When an empty field in Texas is taken over a subdivision, it goes from R+40 with 10 votes cast to R+20 with 2,000 votes cast. It “moved left” but this got canceled out and then some by sheer numbers. The new movers to these states are Republicans — Republicans ideological enough to uproot their entire families to move to places more closely aligned with their values. And certainly some of this is happening in reverse, with some people moving into California or Colorado. The net effect is a hardening of the existing partisan lines, not an upending of them.
Yes, but… but…
2030 is a long way off, and the projected pre-2020 population shifts did not pan out in the actual 2020 census, with New York City alone getting an extra Congressional seat it wasn’t expected to get. 2020 was an odd year due to Covid, but it underscores that the census isn’t perfectly predictable. An actual enumeration is different than the annual surveys the Census Bureau conducts. Add to this the politics of the Census: blue states and cities campaign to get people counted, and with more people packed into dense urban environments, have more ways to get people counted without talking to them directly. Conservatives, meanwhile, have often raised suspicion about the entire enterprise.
We don’t know how the decline of the illegal immigration population will play out over the rest of the 2020s. Red states like Texas and Florida are among those states with the highest unauthorized populations — and are the ones cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. Despite the Trump Administration’s wishes, the constitution’s requirement that the census counts all persons seems unlikely to be gotten around. For better or worse, the illegal immigrant population factors into how many seats states get in Congress, and a more successful deportation campaign in red states might blunt the advantage Republicans get from internal migration. And as Ryan Girdusky shows, immigration enforcement is already having a measurable impact in the cratering birth rate among foreign-born women.
To answer some common pushback to these numbers, Zachary Donnini shows that no, it’s not due to weather:
You also need to be paying attention to the maps and data @cincy9 produces. Here he shows that population growth has been most explosive in large-population counties in red states.
Another factor, Donnini shows, is higher birth rates in red states, seemingly a function of growing political divide on the very idea of child-rearing itself. A universal rule of The Intersection is Don’t Get Suckered by Demography is Destiny Arguments, but at least for the near-term purposes of analyzing population growth in red states, this seems significant:
🗳️ Based on turnout in 2025, expect a big turnout in 2026
Turnout in off-year elections has been increasing, leading to some explosive turnouts in midterms. Off-year election turnout last year was the highest it’s been in modern times (or ever?).
The partisan nature of these trends can’t be ignored. As I wrote immediately after the Virginia/New Jersey elections, a huge proportion of the shifts there can be attributed to differential pro-Democratic turnout. And in the latest Echelon Insights omnibus, we asked about motivation to vote in a hypothetical special election specifically to send a message about national politics. 69% of Harris voters would be extremely motivated to do compared to just 43% of Trump voters.
🗺️ Election Twitter data (and disses) a part of NY redistricting lawsuit
Because we’re on a Zachary Donnini kick, you should read his article about how his data is being attacked by Democrats in a Marc Elias lawsuit to eliminate the current Staten Island-based NY-11.
His precinct-level ecological inference estimates bring a modicum of accountability to the dated idea that you need to create Democratic districts to represent nonwhite communities. This idea rests on the notion that minority voters will vote the same regardless of where they live, but it turns out that in Staten Island, Hispanic and Asian voters vote much closer to the Trumpy majority when they live closer to Trumpier voters — and so are better represented by their current Republican representation than they would be in a hypothetical majority-minority district.
Elias brought in his own “expert” who claims that Hispanics in this district are a more solidly Democratic bloc than Black voters and then follows it up with this footnote.
📈 No end in sight to rising healthcare costs, but some progress in higher ed
Update to the Chart of the Century. People-heavy and government-adjacent costs continue to explode, while most goods continue to get cheaper in relative terms. Health care keeps getting more expensive, but the higher ed bubble has started to pop.
📉 No longer winning at life, visualized
This chart visualizing a version of the “success sequence” by generation brings home the starkly different life experiences of Millennials vs. Baby Boomers. By age 30, just 25% of millennials were married homeowners, compared with 43% of Boomers.
☹️ Who hates their state?
It’s too easy to make an Illinois joke here, so instead I will say as a former Nutmegger, its continued lack of state pride doesn’t surprise me in the least.
✈️ Window seats are lower-class coded
It turns out that my lifelong preference for window seats is lower-class coded while aisle seats are upper-class coded — so much so that airlines are starting to charge more for aisle seats.
To High-SES readers: When else will you have the chance to see your country or the world from the miles above in the air? Air travel itself is a part of the tourist “experiences” you have been consuming with such aplomb. With a window seat, you not only get to experience a new destination, but everything along the way. As a politics and geography buff, I’ve always enjoyed the chance to match up the places I’ve studied on precinct maps with an understanding of their real-world landscapes. I’ve rarely traveled from DC to New York by air, but when I did recently, I thought it was incredibly cool that I got to visually take in a large swath of the U.S. economy in less than an hour. It’s well worth lifting your heads up from those Excel sheets to see your country through a whole new lens. And for heaven’s sake, let’s stop wasting these views by shutting the blinds for the entire flight.
📰 WaPo craters in Trump 2.0
Vivid illustration of the perils and also the tremendous commercial opportunity of audience capture.
WaPo's cratering was entirely self-inflicted. I'm a former reader. I could not forgive their cowardly decision to cave to Trump just before the 2024 election.