Americans are fleeing blue cities — and their suburbs

People have been leaving many of America’s major cities for years, as high taxes and the failure or deliberate refusal to maintain law and order have generated a downward spiral of living conditions. Now, suburbanites are increasingly deserting high-tax, high-disorder urban areas as well.

“Major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lost 2 million net domestic migrants to other parts of the nation in just three years (2021-2023),” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity reports.

Support for Trump was associated with population gains even in counties in states that lost population overall, while the opposite occurred in Biden-supporting areas.

This exodus is not just a matter of Americans in big cities moving to nearby suburbs. Suburban counties in the New York City metro area lost more than 200,000 people between 2020 and 2023. Cities surrounding Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Miami also lost population during that time, the report notes.

This makes sense given that many suburbanites work within the city limits or patronize businesses there and are thus made vulnerable to the rise in urban pathologies.

Millions of Americans have been victimized by the rise of crime. Retail stores, restaurants, bars, and other gathering places have closed down or fled to less-disturbed places. Service deterioration and lack of commuter safety have made public transit a reasonable choice only for the desperate, such as those who must use it to get to work. Large areas are no-go zones because of the preponderance of unpredictable homeless people. Illegal immigrants flood the local schools and make learning difficult for those already there. Declining services and torn-up streets impede commerce and safety. And so on.

A particularly compelling factor is many urban governments’ conscious choice during the past decade not to apprehend and prosecute large numbers of people who commit crimes. Broken streetlights, tangled traffic, and streets marred by potholes are inconveniences. Crime is a dire threat to people’s lives and well-being.

The flight from the suburbs of deteriorating cities has important policy implications: The outflow is massive where Democrats run things. The defining characteristic of the biggest population gainers and losers in all the nation’s counties is whether their residents voted for Donald Trump in 2020, the editorial board of Issues and Insightsnotes.

“Last year, the 10 counties that gained the most through net migration had one thing in common — they were conservative counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020,” the editors write. “At the other end of the spectrum, all 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration also have one thing in common — they all voted for Biden in 2020.”

Although correlation is not causation, it stands to reason that local governments in Trump-supporting counties would be more conservative in their policies and those in Biden-voting regions would be left of center. Issues and Insights confirmed this on the national level: “Biden-voting counties lost a net of 3.7 million people (3,670,516 to be exact) to Trump-voting counties from 2020 through 2023.”

That amounts to more than 1% of the nation’s population fleeing Democratic-voting places in three years, I&I notes.

Among the counties with the worst population losses, the association with Biden support was a rather conclusive 100%: “The 11 counties that had the biggest population declines over the past three years all voted for Biden,” I&I reports (emphasis in original). “They lost a net total of 2 million people.”

Support for Trump was associated with population gains even in counties in states that lost population overall, while the opposite occurred in Biden-supporting areas.

One wonders how many millions more would have emigrated if financial and family circumstances and other such ties had not prevented them from doing so.

The reason for this mass migration from Biden’s America to Trump’s America is obvious. States that vote for Republican presidential candidates have better governments, lower tax rates, better job markets, higher fertility rates with a widening advantage over other states, much smaller percentages of homeless people, lower murder rates at the county level, better protections against voter fraud, and superiority in a variety of other measures.

The nation’s biggest cities, all run by Democrats, are increasingly driving people out of their core areas and now evenout of their suburbs. This is all a result of the catastrophic mismanagement and arrogance of urban governments in one-party, Democrat-controlled cities.

Throughout the country, Democrat-run metros are falling into a destructive-governance spiral in which bad policies create adverse outcomes, productive people leave, the government increases tax rates and cuts services for those who remain, more people and businesses depart, the shrinking tax base reduces government revenues further, the government cuts services, more people leave, and the decline accelerates. Things are going to get even worse in these places unless their governments reverse course and restore order.

Americans are voting with their feet, increasingly leaving Democrat-run places and their problems for greener pastures. Meanwhile, many of those cities persist in imposing policies that are detrimental to them, heightening the misery for those left behind. As is often the case, the populace is proving to be far wiser than the politicians.