Americans love Florida, even if you don't
The rate of "mover's remorse" is statistically low. Understanding why might help in understanding America.
I’m a big fan of revealed preference: watch what people do, not what they say. Especially in a world where survey research is increasingly coming into question, sometimes unfairly, seeing how people vote with their feet can get us closer to ground truth.
And here a truth that some of my progressive readers might find uncomfortable: Americans love Florida. Lots of people are moving there, and relatively few people are leaving.
But let’s start by talking about my own revealed preference. However cagey I might be about it, my revealed preference says that I like Florida, too — or more specifically, that I like Miami. The first trip that I made by plane after the pandemic was to a poker tournament at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, about 25 miles north of Miami proper.
Now, this was a work trip: I was beginning research on my book. And in having one of North America’s better casinos, plus being the country’s de facto crypto capital, and generally being a risk-on place, South Florida hits on several of the themes that the On The Edge covers. But — more revealed preference — my partner and I also thought about a Miami condo at one point. It does have its charms: a good art scene, great poker games — Florida Man is always someone you want at your table — and a lot of cultural, demographic and political diversity.
It also has aspects that are not so charming. As someone who’s more sensitive to humidity than heat — I’m convinced that most people are the same way and the heat index is miscalibrated — the weather is bad in South Florida for much of the year. One of the quarterly poker tournaments at the Hard Rock is held in April, for instance — I’m not going to make it this year — and even this time of year often turns into a sticky mess, where you may need a change of clothes if you do so much as take a 20-minute walk. South Florida is also hard to get around, with basically all of the traffic going north-south except for the interminable traffic backups between Miami Beach and the mainland. A better place to visit than to live, we’ve concluded. Though Miami also lacks some of the tourist infrastructure to keep up with the demand — the nicer hotels are very expensive, the nicer restaurants are hard to get into, and it’s kind of a shitshow.
But many Americans — and many people around the world — disagree. Florida was the fastest-growing state between 2021 and 2022, with both substantially positive domestic net migration and the highest rate1 of international migration of any state. It was also among the fastest-growing states in 2023.
People are moving to Florida — and staying there
Florida is in the political crosshairs again after the state Supreme Court upheld a 15-week abortion ban on Monday and sent the issue to the November ballot. Politically, this is a gift for Democrats. Abortion restrictions have become very unpopular since Roe v. Wade was overturned and are a source of repeated Democratic overperformance at the ballot booth. This probably won’t be enough to make Joe Biden competitive in Donald Trump’s adopted home state, and Florida is lacking in close Congressional races. But abortion represents an opportunity for Democrats to rebuild their brand in the Sunshine State.
However, progressive political types seem inclined to write Florida off, often even treating it with disdain. Take, for example, an NBC News story from Sunday, which was approvingly tweeted into my X feed by many Democratic types. The premise of the story is that, sure, lots of people might move to Florida, but many of them regret doing so, finding the state’s political climate and its actual climate equally disagreeable. It reads like a laundry list of progressive complaints:
“Even home showings have become a politically sensitive issue. He recalled showing an elderly woman one property where there were Confederate flags at the gate and swastikas on the fish tank.”
“Homeowners insurance rates in Florida rose 42% last year to an average of $6,000 annually, driven by hurricanes and climate change—”
“But she said the final straw was when she couldn’t find a surgeon to remove a 6-inch tumor from her liver that doctors warned could burst at any moment and lead to life-threatening sepsis.”
“Along with the $9,000 in repairs from the armadillos, her car insurance doubled and Hurricane Ian destroyed her home’s roof on her 62nd birthday.”
“Young people in Miami demonstrate in 2023 in response to Florida's crackdown on lessons surrounding race and Black history, and against a string of anti-LGBTQ laws that are affecting students” [photo caption]
Look, I’m not entirely against dog-bites-man type stories where you profile people who are going against some prevailing trend. If I was an editor for one of the local papers in the state, I’d probably bite on a story pitch along the lines of “Lots of people are moving to Florida — But these people are leaving.”
The NBC story leaves a false impression, however, partly by relying on anecdotal evidence — I would like to have seen some due diligence on the woman who said she had a tumor that doctors refused to operate on. But mostly because it implies that the rate of “movers’s remorse” in Florida is high. And statistically, it isn’t.
The numbers that I’m about to show you come from the same Census Bureau migration data that the NBC story cited. In principle, a state could still have a net positive migration flow is a lot of people leave it, provided that even more people arrive But Florida isn’t like that: it has a high rate of in-migration and a low rate of out-migration:
In 2022, Florida ranked 18th in domestic in-migration — which I define as the share of a state’s population that lived in another state a year earlier, and 1st in international in-migration. But it was just 38th in domestic out-migration — the share of people who left for another state.2 Sure, in a state with 22 million residents, you’re going to find plenty of leavers, like the half-dozen people the NBC story interviewed. But this is not a typical pattern.
As we’ve looked at state-to-state migration flows in the past in this newsletter, this data is otherwise interesting. It’s actually not all that accurate to say that people are fleeing California and New York, for instance. In 2022, New York’s rate of out-migration was only average, and California’s was low. Rather, it’s that few new people are arriving in these states.
Conversely, there are some states that have both high in-migration and out-migration. Colorado — which can seem like a progressive utopia on the one hand, but is also becoming far more expensive on the other hand — is like that. Alaska is really like that; I don’t know if that’s people taking temporary jobs or not being able to cope with the remoteness and long winters. Washington, D.C., not listed in the chart since it isn’t a state, also has very high rates of annual in-migration and out-migration. I assume some part of that is the rotating nature of jobs in government and politics, and part of it is because D.C. proper is only a fraction of its metro area.
But in Florida, people are coming — and mostly staying.
Why it’s important to get the story right
One of the underlying themes in my work is that people make far too many inferences about public opinion from the preferences expressed by their friends or professional peers. That may be especially true for progressives who work in media given the blob-like nature of the mainstream media, where progressive, liberal, centrist and center-right news outlets are all smooshed together, but there aren’t a lot of outright Trump supporters and there isn’t much cultural conservatism.
And part of it is that Florida, like no other state, challenges the Emerging Democratic Majority hypothesis. If looked at in a highly abstract way, you might expect Florida — a diverse coastal state — to be solidly blue, but instead it has gotten redder: ground zero for Democrats’ increasing erosion with nonwhite voters. Some 42 percent of the Miami metro’s population was born abroad, the highest rate in the country. Miami proper is majority foreign-born, though many of the immigrants there are patriotic (as immigrants often are) and have become US citizens.
Not that you necessarily have to support Trump to live in Florida: Barack Obama won the state as recently as 2012. Miami is relatively red for a major metro area, but it’s still blue overall, as are the other big cities in Florida. Meanwhile, some people both like cosmopolitan amenities and aren’t particularly progressive politically. South Florida offers that combination, perhaps uniquely in the US, where cosmopolitan metro areas are almost always very blue. It at least offers more variety: Miami proper has a moderate-ish Republican mayor, Miami Beach has a nonpartisan mayor but formerly had a Democrat, and Broward County (Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood) is relatively blue.
In an era of abundant air conditioning, people also really like warm, even muggy weather. I don’t begrudge anyone for being concerned about climate change, and more Americans are gradually beginning to agree with the scientific consensus about it. But the number of people who are letting it determine where they live is relatively small (and undoubtedly over-represented among NBC News watchers). Similarly, although the issue is a winner for Democrats at the ballot box, I suspect the number of people who actually move because of abortion access is fairly small. The Dobbs decision will provide some evidence of that that we can look back on in a couple of years.
Finally, there may simply be a certain amount of snobbery here. Beaches are relatively lower-case ‘D’ democratic third places that people from all different cultural backgrounds enjoy. Florida is unpretentious and apart from the Miami art scene — and crypto, I suppose — it really isn’t purporting to be at the forefront of any cultural trends. You’re under no obligation to be a Florida fan yourself, and personally I have mixed feelings. But statistically, it’s closer to being the future of the country than some cultural backwater.
As a share of its population.
I can’t find data on international out-migration.
Article about how Florida's population statistics demonstrate revealed preferences that go against the media blob narrative. Ok, cool.
The comments: "i haaaaaate florida so much it's the worst place ever, and here's why that reflects well upon ME and why I am so obviously superior in intellect and culture to those stinky people who live there." like congrats, i guess.
Absolutely fascinating and fair article by Nate Silver who works strenuously here to avoid the TDS affliction and weak research methodology of his partisan lefty journalism peers.