Voting With Their Feet

Michael Barone loves, understands and explains statistics better than most pundits. Writing for the Washington Examiner, he looks at the state-by-state population trends during the period 2010-2017, noting these were mostly the Obama years.

The big winners were low tax states. That’s where the jobs went and naturally people followed.

Those with the largest impact, however, are Texas at 13 percent and Florida at 12 percent. Together, their population increase was 5.3 million, nearly one-third of the national total. Why? No state income taxes, light-touch regulation, and the resulting private sector booms. Immigration? Not so much this decade, with their 1.6 million immigrants outnumbered 2-1 by 3.5 migrants from other states. 

And Barone concludes:

The patterns of internal and immigrant migration of 2010-17 looks less like Barack Obama’s ideal America and more like Donald Trump’s.

The flight from high-tax to low-tax states, diminished by higher-skill immigration, the fracking boom in North Dakota, and the decline in hip Vermont: You might even say Trump started winning even when Obama was still in office.

Or just maybe Trump sensed what was happening before others did. Metaphorically, he chose to board a train already in motion, one others either didn’t see or disdained. Read Barone’s whole article.