The U.S. population has shifted away from blue states and toward red states in recent years. To understand why, and how blue states might become more appealing places to live, David Leonhardt of Times Opinion convened a round table with three influential Democratic policy experts.
David Leonhardt: This chart tells a damning story:
The only three of these large states to have lost population since 2020 are the three reliably blue states. And the two biggest red states, Texas and Florida, have experienced population surges. Why is this happening?
Jason Furman: This is almost entirely about domestic migration. About two and a half million people in total left California, New York and Illinois, and nearly as many arrived from other states in Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. The migration to the Sun Belt has been going on for decades but was interrupted somewhat in the wake of the financial crisis. It appears to have resumed in recent years with some shifts in destinations — notably, Texas is a favored destination.
This was reinforced by international migration, although the pattern is less clear. More than a million international immigrants showed up in Florida and Texas over this period, but other red states were not major destinations. California attracted a sizable number, too.
The population shift from 2020 to 2025 was not about the natural demographic change from births and deaths. Red states tend to have both higher birthrates and higher death rates, and these roughly leave their natural demographic change similar to blue states.
Neera Tanden: To underline a point Jason makes, Florida and Texas had more international immigration from 2020 to 2025 than any other states in the country.
The chart elides a bit of a significant driver of emigration: the impact of Covid. California saw relatively high net outflows from 2020 to 2022, during the height of Covid. But California’s population grew in 2023 and 2024 and was essentially flat in 2025. Other blue states, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, had similar trends. So Covid-related migration seems to be a unique factor in the last five years.
To provide more context, California and New York over the past decade have both drawn people from other countries and lost some of their residents to other states. California and New York are the embodiment of the melting pot: Younger people come from around the world and older people leave for the rest of the country. Yet both states are growing economically. California is now roughly tied with Japan as the fourth-largest economy in the world, up from ninth in 2010, and New York had the highest G.D.P. per capita in 2024 of any state, up from fifth in 2010. Domestic emigration is not a problem for them in and of itself for growth.
Indeed, 40 million Californians and 20 million New Yorkers are already a lot of people for a state. Losing several hundred thousand people on net migration over five years is not much in the grand scheme of things. Still, it is important to learn from the growth of Texas and Florida over the last few years.
Elizabeth Wilkins: Neera is right that immigration helps put this chart in perspective, and that we should be careful not to overread it. But domestic migration trends are worth a hard look. They’re more complicated than a blue-versus-red-state story, and they might tell us something about the way people are looking to live.
What stands out to me is that a lot of domestic migration has been oriented toward progressive to moderate-led metro areas. Think Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, especially in the Sun Belt. Some of this might be a search for warmth, some for lower costs. But even fast-growing Sun Belt hubs are now running into the same affordability pressures that have nudged some residents out of other high-cost metro cores. As Jed Kolko has pointed out, “Miami is the new San Francisco.”
An additional accelerant has been the pandemic-era expansion of remote work, which loosened the link between where the best employment opportunities were and where people had to live. For many households, that meant they could leave high-paying, expensive labor markets without giving up access to those jobs. Figuring out what people are moving toward, and how we can make sure to provide it, is pretty important for our future.
Leonhardt: Neera, when you talk about the impact of Covid migration, I assume you’re referring to the fact that many blue states imposed longer school closures and more aggressive restrictions. Are you saying that these were sufficiently unpopular to cause a significant number of people to move?
Tanden: I don’t think it’s possible to know the precise mix of motivations that drove people to move during the pandemic. Was it school closures, remote work, job opportunities in less expensive or less locked-down metros, public health concerns, or just a desire to live in places where life had seemed to return to normal? I really don’t know.
What is notable is who is leaving. The California Policy Lab released a study recently that found people living in high-income communities were more likely to leave California during and after Covid than before, while people living in low- and middle-income communities were less likely. And in New York, millionaires were more than twice as likely as everyone else to leave early in Covid. That’s in large part because higher-income jobs are more likely to accommodate remote work, so an economy where remote work is more common is also one where white-collar workers have more geographical flexibility.
All to say: To me, the story of Covid-era migration isn’t a neat narrative about Democratic governance driving people away. There were more forces at play than just blue-state policy.
Leonhardt: Covid aside, I worry that we may be letting blue states off too easily here. If the Sun Belt effect — the appeal of warm weather — were the dominant factor, California should be keeping up with Florida and Texas. It’s not even close to doing so. The share of the national population living in blue states has been shrinking for most of the 21st century:
There are meaningful policy differences among the states. For one thing, blue states tend to have more zoning regulations, less housing construction and higher housing prices. How much of a role do you think housing policies and costs play?
Furman: The economic literature has consistently found that lower housing costs because of fewer constraints on building has been the biggest factor in the shift away from (blue) coastal states and to the (red) Sun Belt for decades. The increased availability of work from home has only increased the importance of cheaper housing.
Wilkins: Housing is a big part of this story. But I’d frame the question this way: Do states with strong economies and good jobs still leave room for ordinary people to not only afford a home, but care for a family and build a future? That challenge isn’t partisan. For example, some of the places that have added the most people since Covid are blue metros in blue states, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Chicago. Those places are still attractive. This suggests the issue is less about state partisan identity than whether cities are making room for people to stay.
People are looking for more than cheaper housing. They’re looking for the chance to build a life that might include a larger home or a new job. So the challenge is whether cities and states will build and maintain enough housing, close enough to opportunity, to keep a good life within reach. That means not only zoning reform, but also policing abuses in the market. For example, in New York City, Mayor Mamdani’s mix of pro-housing regulatory reform, commitments to build and rental ripoff hearings gets at the right instinct. This is not about less government, but about stronger government that can build more, move faster and take on abuse at the same time.
Tanden: The evidence is clear that housing is the primary driver of migration. Census data from 2022 indicated that 42 percent of moves were for housing, more than any other reason. Second was family, and third was employment. Indeed, you don’t see nearly as much emigration from blue states with lower housing costs, like Minnesota. And when people leave high-cost states, they’re typically moving to places where housing is much less expensive. The same study I cited earlier found that Californians leaving the state move to neighborhoods where monthly housing costs are nearly $700 lower on average, and households who leave are 50 percent more likely to own a home after seven years.
My organization, the Center for American Progress, and others have put forward ideas both to provide relief from high housing costs in the immediate term and to lower costs in the long run by building millions of new homes. Both California and New York recently passed legislation to increase the supply of homes, and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois proposed legislation to reduce local barriers to new housing construction. In the short term, we should also offer residents rental relief for a few years if their cities cut red tape and build more homes.
Leonhardt: What about the set of issues that might be summarized as disorder. Blue states have more homelessness on average and more tolerant policies toward drug use, for example. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof asked, “What have we liberals done to the West Coast?” Some Democrats — like former President Barack Obama and the current mayor of San Francisco — agree that the party became too tolerant of disorder. Do you?
Tanden: I think the most important disorder issue is crime, and crime is a story of blue-state success. Homicide rates are actually much lower in blue states than in red states, perhaps because guns, a major driver of crime, are more regulated by Democratic legislatures. In 2024, California and New York had lower homicide rates (4.7 and 3.8 per 100,000 people, respectively) than Texas (6.2) and Florida (5.8). Other red states, like Mississippi (21.4) and Louisiana (16.4), had much higher rates.
But it is also clearly true that open drug use and tent encampments make cities feel less safe and less habitable. David, you cite the mayor of San Francisco, who is making real progress on these issues: clearing encampments, investing in police and cracking down on drug markets. Rather than just letting people find their own way to addiction treatment, the city is pushing them toward programs that are proven to work. And it’s not just San Francisco. Both California and New York have made it significantly easier to mandate services and housing for mentally ill people living on the streets.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that public disorder is driving migration patterns. But for those of us who believe in a stronger role for government in solving problems, I do think we need to treat public disorder as a problem rather than the price of admission for urban living.
Leonhardt: Big blue states also tend to have higher top income tax rates, as Republicans like to point out. But my sense is that middle-class and working-class families don’t necessarily pay higher taxes in blue states than red states. Do you think taxes play a role here?
Furman: Unfortunately — contrary to what I wish were the case — taxes probably have played a role. Maybe not a huge role for the total number of people moving, but a meaningful one. The evidence suggests that higher-income people are disproportionately shifting their locations in recent years, and it has long been the case that the location decisions of the very wealthy are also responsive to tax rates.
This effect has likely grown. The 2017 tax law limited the deductibility of state and local taxes, magnifying the total tax differences among states because people paying high state taxes no longer got much of a reduction in federal taxes. (A 2025 law only partly reversed the change.) The rising availability of work from home has also made it easier for people to move — and thus harder to raise much revenue with much higher tax rates on high-income households.
This raises a bigger issue. It is common when legislation is stymied at the federal level to try to make progress at the state level. On a lot of issues, like housing supply and child poverty, this makes perfect sense. It works much less well for progressive taxation because it is much easier to move from California to Nevada than it is from the United States to Bermuda.
Wilkins: If the theory is that working families leave places like California for places like Texas, then it would need to take into account that they’d often arrive paying higher property taxes. So, no, that doesn’t seem like a driver of working people’s movements.
On wealthier folks, I think the story is more complex than Jason suggests. Research indicates that tax policy has much less influence than we might think on wealthy migration; economic power and social status often keep people where they are. To the degree that wealthy people do migrate, most of them are retirees who pay less in income taxes, so progressive tax policy isn’t a good explanation for their moving. What this points to more clearly is an affordability crunch for working families that’s driven by factors other than tax.
Tanden: To David’s point, it’s worth correcting the common misconception that taxes are much higher in blue states. They are not for working-class and middle-class families. In California, for instance, a family making $50,000 will pay about the same in state taxes — income, property and sales — as it would in Texas and Florida. Of course, there is a fair amount of variance; that family would pay a little more in state taxes in New York and a little less in Massachusetts. Still, overall, blue states have far more progressive tax codes that tax top earners more than red states, but, again, they do not tax the middle class more.
The reverse is also true in many red states, which often have lower top tax rates and tax the poor more than blue states do. A family in the bottom 20 percent by income faces an overall state tax rate of 13.2 percent in Florida. In Minnesota, they would pay about half that (6.2 percent), and both California (11.7 percent) and New York (11.1 percent) would tax that family less.
Leonhardt: What about policies I haven’t mentioned? Are there others that help explain the population shifts?
Wilkins: Child care matters. Transportation matters. Public services matter. And whether you can make a decent living matters. These are the factors that determine whether people can manage daily life in places where jobs and opportunities are growing. And people want leaders who will cut through red tape and take on the folks, from employers to landlords to developers, who take advantage of them.
Growth on paper means very little if your everyday experience is scarcity, long commutes, unaffordable care and public systems that are hard to use. That’s why focusing on red-state governance, and maybe the more laissez-faire governing philosophy that implies, is incomplete. Government has a pretty active role to play in getting places right for people. Governments, at every level, need to get more efficient at delivering not just on housing but also on the range of things that people want in their places, and more muscular at protecting people from being taken advantage of.
Leonhardt: Even if we don’t all agree on the causes for the trend, it’s clear that the effects are problematic for the Democratic Party. The faster growth of red states will make it harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. If you were going to advise Democratic governors and legislators on one policy that they could adopt with the goal of retaining and attracting more residents, what would it be?
Furman: Build, baby, build. More housing. Cheaper housing.
The blue states can be amazing places to live. The fact that people put up with a higher cost of living in Boston and San Francisco is a testament to just how much people love the amazing amenities that come with density, from entertainment to food to shopping and more.
But these places could have all those amenities and more if they just allowed more housing and facilitated building it more quickly and cheaply. My hometown, Cambridge, one of the most liberal cities in America, has done that. More places should.
Wilkins: Here’s what I would say to any leader: It’s not a single policy; it’s an attitude. What we need is an all-of-the-above approach to both tackling costs and raising incomes that shows people that government is on their side. That means taking on the predatory landlords and employers that profit from scarcity. It means showing how investments in housing and care can fundamentally alter communities by providing people with greater stability. And it means being excellent at the basics like filling the potholes.
Tanden: Many families are struggling to make ends meet between income and costs. States, like the federal government, should focus on lowering the cost of living across the board.
When it comes to housing, I could not agree more with Jason: Leaders should build, baby, build. But they should do more than just lower housing costs. On health care, the Center for American Progress has proposed ways for states to reduce premiums and deductibles by addressing outlier hospital charges (as Indiana and others already do), and more states should imitate California’s direct, aggressive action to slash generic drug costs, such as capping monthly insulin costs at $35 and enacting reforms that target pharmacy benefit managers. Reducing child care costs is also really important for families. And on electricity costs, governors should work with public utility commissions to lower utility rates, like Gov. Mikie Sherrill is doing in New Jersey.
Making life more affordable overall is a great way for states to attract and grow their populations.
Jason Furman, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, is a professor of the practice of economic policy at Harvard University. He served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.
Neera Tanden is president of the Center for American Progress. She was the domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden, a health care adviser in the Obama administration and a longtime senior adviser to Hillary Clinton.
Elizabeth Wilkins is president of the Roosevelt Institute. She was the chief of staff to the chair and director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration and worked in the White House under both Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama.
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