Editors at Issues and Insights document an interesting demographic trend linked to support for President Biden.
If you want to know what the country thinks about President Joe Biden’s agenda, look at how they vote. Not at the ballot box. But with their feet.
Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released data on “net domestic migration.” This tracks where people are moving between counties in the country. Last year, the 10 counties that gained the most through net migration had one thing in common – they were conservative counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
At the other end of the spectrum, all 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration also have one thing in common – they all voted for Biden in 2020. That includes two blue counties located in red states – Miami-Dade County, Florida, (where Biden beat Trump 53%-46%), and Dallas County, Texas, (where Biden got 65% of the vote).
But this is just part of the story. People have been fleeing liberal counties in droves for each of the past three years.
I&I conducted a detailed analysis of the latest Census data, comparing migration trends and the 2020 election outcomes for all 3,144 counties. What we found is that Biden-voting counties lost a net of 3.7 million people (3,670,516 to be exact) to Trump-voting counties from 2020 through 2023. (That’s up by more than a million since we did this same analysis last year.)
In other words, in just the three years after Biden won his election, more than 1% of the population had packed up and moved out of counties that voted for him.
Here are some more details from our research:
*Of the 555 counties that voted for Biden, 343 (or 62%) lost population since 2020. Of the 2,589 counties that voted for Trump, 1,726 (or 67%) gained population.
*The 11 counties that had the biggest population declines over the past three years all voted for Biden. They lost a net total of 2 million people.
*Of the 11 counties with the biggest gains in population, eight voted for Trump in 2020. And the other three (Maricopa County in Arizona, and Williamson and Fort Bend counties in Texas) come with big asterisks.