SBSQ #6: People are fleeing California and New York. Will that make other states bluer?

Plus, Barbie vs. Oppenheimer, and did the 49ers screw up in the Super Bowl?

Happy Leap Day, and welcome to the February edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions, the place for paid subscribers to ask me questions about pretty much anything. In the comments, you should feel free to debate this month’s answers or to ask new questions for March.

But first, an update on this newsletter and a slightly harder sell than usual for paid subscriptions. Now that my book is done, I’ll be ramping up posting volume here, and that means I’ll have the capacity to write more paywalled posts without compromising the free channel too much. I’m not going to inundate your inboxes — something like the recent post on Google Gemini took a couple of days of work, and I’d rather do more of that than shorter quick hits. But the plan is to write 9-10 times a month — basically two planned posts per week plus occasional spontaneous stuff off the news — probably 3-4 of which will be for paid subscribers.

One other nice thing about paid subscriptions on Substack is that prices are locked in so long as you remain subscribed. There’s a decent chance I’ll slightly raise prices later depending on how some other things go. (Progress Is Being Made, although there’s no news just yet.) Anyway, I very much appreciate free subscriptions — but if you’ve considered taking a plunge into the paid tier, now’s a pretty good time:

In this month’s edition:

• How will domestic migration reshape the electoral map?

• Should the 49ers have kicked in Super Bowl OT?

• Barbie or Oppenheimer?

• What would I do if I were the general manager of the Detroit Pistons?

• What it’s like to visit Paris for a poker tournament.

How will domestic migration reshape the electoral map?

Patrick C. asks:

Future mailbag question: During the pandemic, there were lots of media stories about people moving out of big cities (e.g. New York, San Francisco, Chicago) to states with less density (e.g. North Carolina, Texas). My assumption based on the media anecdotes was that many of these people were blue voters moving to red states. To your knowledge, has any person or agency tried to quantify this larger-than-normal relocation period? And is there any consensus on whether these stories were simply anecdotes, or if the quantity of relocations is significant enough to impact the electoral map for 2024?

Let’s start by double-checking the premise here: are people still leaving blue states like New York, California and Illinois? As of the Census Bureau’s most recent data from 2022, the answer is yes. Because these are statistical estimates rather than hard-and-fast data, I’m going to average the Census Bureau’s 2021 and 2022 data together for the rest of this answer. You might think that 2021 was more affected by the pandemic than 2022, but really they show the same broad patterns.

So here’s a map showing the relative number of people coming and going from each state in 2021 and 2022. Green means that net domestic migration was positive — more people moved in than moved out — while orange/red means people left the state on net.

The state with the highest ratio of comers-to-goers in 2021 and 2022 was not one I would have guessed, although it’s one of my favorite states: Maine. It had 1.8 arrivals for every departure, followed by South Carolina (1.6), Vermont (1.5), Florida (1.5) and Idaho (1.5).

The state with the most outmigration over this period was New York, with 1.9 departures for every arrival. It was closely followed by California (1.8), then Illinois (1.6), New Jersey (1.3) and Louisiana (1.3). Note that this covers migration within the United States only; California and New York are still big destinations for immigration from aboard.

What’s going on here? Basically, three things: 1) migration into states with lower cost of living; 2) migration to warmer places; 3) migration from higher-density to lower-density states. These factors tend to correlate with migration from blue states to red states, although I’m not sure that politics are a causal factor. (If you run a regression analysis, Biden’s vote share in 2020 doesn’t have any effect once you account for these other factors.) Red states generally have lower taxes and fewer restrictions on housing development and those can be reasons to move irrespective of your views on social policy, for instance.

You can see these trends as part of longstanding rebalancing of a natural equilibrium. States become attractive to move to because they offer cheaper living and/or abundant job opportunities. But before long, the equilibrium adjusts: housing becomes more expensive; and people demand more services and tax rates go up. So states like Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Virginia that were once hot destinations for domestic migration had slightly net-negative numbers over this period. Instead, the fastest growth is often in more unheralded states like South Carolina and Idaho.

To get back to the original question: if people are leaving blue states like California and New York, does that imply the states they’re moving to are getting bluer? Not necessarily. The problem is that a New Yorker who chooses to migrate to, say, South Carolina is not a randomly selected New Yorker. Almost by definition, they probably don’t like New York all that much. Even though most moves are made for economic rather than cultural reasons, there are still selection effects. For instance, even though I don’t really have to be here, I pay a lot to live in a crowded, cold-weather city (New York) because my partner and I like the people here and the urban amenities NYC offers. That alone tells you a lot about us and what we value, especially in a universe where blue-red political affiliation is strongly correlated with urbanization.

But maybe New York-to-South Carolina isn’t the best example, because most moves are made within the same region, often to neighboring states. Here are the top outbound destinations for domestic emigrants from California and New York, measured as a share of their new state’s population. For instance, 1.8 percent of Nevadans in 2021 and 2022 were actually living in California a year earlier.

Californians have quite a few choices of where to emigrate. Crunchy California expats have probably helped to entrench the blueness of Oregon and Colorado. But Idaho attracts a different type of California expat, and it obviously isn’t on the verge of becoming a swing state. Even Nevada isn’t really trending Democratic any more — Democrats have won more than their share of close elections there, but Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton considerably underperformed Barack Obama’s big margins there. Nevada’s lack of state income taxes and anything-goes ethos has a lot of appeal, but not necessarily to typical progressive types.

On the East Coast, meanwhile, Florida is only getting redder despite perpetually having a lot of immigration from the blue Northeast and the purple-blue industrial Midwest. Off the top of my head, I can think of 6 people I know who moved to Florida in 2020-22. Three of them were tired of blue-state politics, one’s personal training business had been severely impacted by COVID restrictions, and one wanted lower taxes¹ — so again, we see selection effects at work rather than a random sample of people.

Should the 49ers have kicked in Super Bowl OT?

Brian Corby asks:

My curiosity about this has not allowed me to let it go, trivial but nonetheless I want your take:

The 49ers choice to take the ball (as opposed to kicking off) in OT?

Although I’m acutely aware of the dangers of hindsight bias, and it’s likely a close decision, I think Kyle Shanahan screwed up and the Niners should have kicked to start overtime, giving the Chiefs the first possession.