At this rate, the Empire State is on track to be a former empire.
Citizens voting with their seat and leaving blue states for red states is no new phenomenon. The Daily Signal reported back in 2015 that even then, there were 1,000 people moving from blue states to red states every day, on net balance.
The blue state exodus has since accelerated in the pandemic-era. Nearly half-a-million people fled Manhattan alone at the start of the pandemic, and it’s common to see headlines every couple of days reporting on the latest famous person to announce their departure from California and New York to Texas or Florida.
According to the New York Post:
More residents escaped from New York over the last year than from any other state, according to estimates released by the US Census Bureau on Tuesday. Some 126,355 people hightailed it out of the Empire State between July 2019 and July 2020, a dip of 0.65 percent, the preliminary figures show.
New York has been losing locals since 2016, but the most recent drop was significantly larger than in years past.
It was also the state with the nation’s biggest population decline, followed by Illinois with a 0.63 percent dip, Hawaii with 0.61 percent and West Virginia with 0.58 percent.
While the state wrestles with some of the worst carnage from the coronavirus in the nation, sky high taxes, soaring deficits, and their citizens jumping ship for neighboring states, Governor Andrew Cuomo has been busy congratulating himself for a job well done.
As I noted in my forthcoming book “Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and De Blasio Ruined New York,” this is on top of some already unfortunate trends for the state:
The number of citizens leaving the state is at its highest rate since NYC’s pre-Giuliani-era crime wave. From 2010 to 2017, New York lost 1,022,071 residents, a negative 5.27 percent change in internal migration. Total population grew only 0.4 percent from 2010 to 2019, at a time when the national population grew 16 percent.
NYC’s population is beginning to drop for the first time in a decade. From 2017 to 2018, it fell 0.47 percent, which may appear minor but was the largest drop in any metro area during that period. While the population was projected to grow by seven thousand, it actually declined by thirty-eight thousand. The exodus accelerated from 2018 to 2019, with the city losing over fifty-three thousand people.
During the early months of the pandemic, nearly half a million people left the city, though we won’t know for some time how many left for good. Even immigrants are avoiding the city; international immigration fell nearly half since its peak in 2016 (far out of proportion with the decline in legal immigration under President Trump). By 2019, NYC’s population was only 2 percent larger than it was in 2010, again, a time period where the population grew 16 percent nationally.
Following the official 2020 Census results, it’s possible that the state will have lost enough population to cost them up to two seats in the House.
