COTTonLINE's favorite demographer, Joel Kotkin, writes for The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. has four "red state growth corridors." These four corridors are the Intermountain West, the Third (Gulf) Coast, the Great Plains, and the Southeastern industrial belt. This WSJ article is available to non-subscribers.
The four corridors are strings of rapidly growing low tax, right-to-work red states. It's no surprise that states with low taxes and right-to-work laws attract firms which hire workers who add to the population there. Many of these states are also beneficiaries of the new energy activities - fracking and the like.
On the other hand, states not included in these four corridors, particularly the West Coast, the Northeast, and the Upper Midwest have high taxes, tough unions, and lots of regulations resulting in higher unemployment rates, slower growth rates and outmigration.
