It’s not just people moving south. Opportunity is moving south, too
Conn Carroll
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“Go West young man, and grow up with the country,” New York Daily Tribune editor Horace Greeley allegedly said in 1865 as part of his effort to encourage Civil War veterans to take advantage of the Homestead Act.
And for over a hundred years, many people did exactly that, settling not just the Great Plains states but also making California the most populous state in the Union by 1962. All that is in the past, however. California has been a net exporter of people since 1995, its population only growing from births and foreign immigration.
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But there is one region of the country that is still growing: the South. The Northeast and Midwest both lost residents in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while the West grew by just 153,000 people, largely thanks to international migration. Only the South added population, a hefty 1.3 million people. The fastest states included Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia.
And it is not just people moving south. Opportunity is moving too. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the six fastest-growing states in the South — Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — now have a bigger combined economy than the entire Northeast corridor. That includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
In 2020 and 2021 alone, more than $100 billion in new income flowed into the South, while the Northeast lost $60 billion. And while weather is definitely a factor in this migration, it is not the driving one. No one has ever left California because of bad weather, yet thousands of Californians have been fleeing for Florida and Texas every year.
It can’t be a coincidence that all the big states losing population — California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, etc. — are all deep blue states dominated by the Democratic Party, while all the fastest growing states, in both people and economy, are Republican-controlled states.
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Low taxes are definitely a big reason why many people are moving south, but a bigger reason may be that Republican policies make life more affordable for working families. Without all the stringent environmental and labor mandates found in Democratically controlled states, it is simply a lot more inexpensive and easier to build not just new houses but new roads, schools, power plants, and everything else people need to live comfortably.
The future of our country may have once been in the West, but until the Democratic Party starts losing some elections out there, the future is moving south.