Did California help Texas turn blue?
One of the biggest stories of this month’s Democratic sweep in the midterms is that a very red Texas elected a Democratic U.S. Senator and governor.
Pundits cite many theories for the surprising results: Anger over the Iran war, high gas prices, Trump fatigue and data centers.
But did California’s high home prices and the state’s historic exodus play a role?
Experts doubt it. In fact, some Californians who moved to Texas are actually concerned about the blue wave.
Many presume that those arriving from California must be much more liberal than the average Texan, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
But “a significant share of the Californians transplanting to Texas tend to be moderate to conservative in their views,” he said.
For years, Californians fled to Texas in droves. About 100,000 people made the move in 2022 alone, and many were looking not just for a lower cost of living but also a state that reflected their conservative political outlook.
Nearly half of those Californians who moved to Arizona or Texas during the California exodus in recent years identified as conservative or very conservative, according to a Stanford University study.
The Public Policy Institute of California found that those who leave the state often go to states that share their political beliefs: “Californians leaving for Republican states are much more likely to be Republican than Democratic, compared to Californians as a whole, while those leaving for Democratic states are more likely to be Democratic than Republican,” the PPIC wrote.
In all, hundreds of thousands of conservative Californians have relocated to Texas since the 2020 pandemic emergency, studies suggest.
Marie Bailey, 44, moved from El Segundo to a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in 2017. She and her husband built a home for $750,000, while a “tiny fixer upper” in El Segundo would’ve cost upward of $1 million.
The couple quickly figured out that they could capitalize on the niche in the real estate market for California migrants to Texas.
For years, Bailey has administered the Facebook group where 45,000 users swap recommendations on how to make the move. She runs a real estate firm that places Californians all over the state.
“Ninety-nine percent of our clientele are people moving from California,” Bailey told The Times in 2023. As for why people make the move, “No. 1 is cost of living and No. 2 is politics.”
Texas’ red politics were a big reason she made the move.
Bailey’s husband, who was previously employed by the UCLA medical system, “wouldn’t even talk about his politics because he was afraid of losing his job,” she said.
“Nowhere is perfect,” Bailey said in 2023, “but we fit in a lot better here.”
Now, just three years later, Bailey is confronting a seismic shift in her state.
“I’m actually thinking of moving to Oklahoma because of this,” she said in an interview Thursday. “Or Florida.”
In the Facebook group ‘Move to Texas from California,’ most posts since Tuesday concerned the new state of affairs in the Lone Star State.
“If I have to tolerate blue I might as well have good weather so maybe back to CA? Or give FL a try?” one commenter wrote.
“I am literally closing on a house in Texas next week! I am so pissed,” wrote another.
Blank sees some upsides to the Texas blue wave for those who moved from California.
“They get the benefit of having left what they see as a too-liberal state, and they get a place that is conservative but is unlikely to get much more conservative any time soon,” he said.
Blank thinks many California transplants were primarily motivated by housing costs, with politics being secondary.
“They don’t have to move back,” he said of Californians who moved to the Lone Star state. “And if they do, I’m gonna tell them they’re silly. It’s not a good way to make decisions.”
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