Americans Are Casting Their Votes--with Their Feet

It’s Nov. 2 and Americans are going to the polls.
 
That fact has created a lot of excitement, as well as anxiety, that voters will send a message that they are dissatisfied with the past nine months of complete Democratic control in Washington.
 
But Americans don’t just show their dissatisfaction with government overreach at the polls. They also show it with their feet, by fleeing mismanaged, high-tax, heavy-regulation states.
 
And we just got what you might call the “poll results” of that voting with their feet.
 
The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University just released an assessment of where newly arrived Texans came from during the pandemic. “More than one out of every ten people moving to Texas in 2020 was from California,” according to the report.

 

 
The report also points out that has been the case for 19 of the past 20 years. The only exception was in 2005, when Louisiana supplied the most new Texans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
 
Lesson: Only a historic natural disaster provides more new Texans than an endemic, multi-year political disaster like California.
 
It’s also interesting to note where these fleeing Californians are moving to in Texas. The report says Travis County, which is Austin, is their top destination. And that makes perfect sense.
 
Austin has become a major technology hub, which would attract lots of Californians.  The cost of living is also much more affordable than the Golden State, though that’s beginning to change as new arrivals bid up the price of housing.
 
And Austin has a reputation as one of the more liberal cities in the state, which could appeal to some California ex-pats who want to retain their liberal inclinations, while the conservative state legislature and governor protect them from the higher taxes and more regulations that drove many of those Californians to Texas in the first place.
 
The media keep warning that Tuesday’s election could be bad news for the Democratic agenda. But whatever voters do on Tuesday doesn’t negate the fact that millions have already, in effect, cast their ballot—by voting with their feet.