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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire. I'm John Bickley, editor-in-chief of Daily Wire, and I'm here with Georgia Howe. Today, we're discussing the great California exodus.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's right, John. According to the LA Times, 40% of California residents are now considering leaving the state. Census data shows that the mass exodus from the Golden State has continued post-COVID and shows no signs of stopping.
--:-- John Bickley: That's right. The state has been hit with a net loss of nearly 700,000 people since 2020, more than any other state in the nation. Joining us to discuss the exodus from America's most populous state is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Thanks, John. It's not looking too good for California, and it really hasn't for years. Census data show a loss of about 509,000 residents from April 2020 to July of 2022. That's second in the nation, only behind New York, another blue state that's struggling with population loss.
--:-- John Bickley: New York lost about 15,000 more people to edge out California. However, if you look at just the total number of people who moved out of the state during that period, that number is nearly 700,000 people, and that is the highest in the nation. 700,000, that's a sizable percentage of the state's 40 million. So why are we seeing this mass exodus from these blue states, California in particular?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: For the most part, yes. It largely comes down to freedom, cost of living, crime and safety, the stuff that really matters to Americans. California had some of the strictest lockdown measures in the United States. It has the highest personal income tax rate, some of the most onerous regulations, and about half of all homeless people live in California.
--:-- John Bickley: It's true that the state is the most populous in the union, but it only makes up a total of about 12% of the U.S. population, so a really high number there. Tack on this trend of remote work, which allows people to move, and you've got yourself in exodus.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: I wanted to learn more about this trend of people leaving, especially after lockdown restrictions have eased. So I spoke to Scott Shepard, a real estate agent who founded ExitCalifornia.org back in 2019, right before the pandemic.
--:-- Scott Shepard: Once I started to see the trend take place and the fact that I started working with more clients than I had worked with up until that point, I decided to build a model around it.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Shepard told me people were already on the edge of leaving the state before COVID hit because of things like cost of living, outrageous taxation, and crime and homelessness, himself included.
--:-- Scott Shepard: My wife and I were doing well financially, but we were bleeding out. We make good money, but it's like a sieve, it's just in the front door and out the back door.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Then these really draconian COVID measures were implemented and pushed those people on edge who hadn't moved yet right out of the state.
--:-- Scott Shepard: I think maybe if anything, individuals who were feeling the squeeze during COVID, some of them weren't ready, but forced themselves to be ready, where now I feel like people who are still wanting to leave, but maybe feel like, okay, at least the heightened sense of fear of this lockdown and all the measures being put in place has kind of eased.
--:-- John Bickley: I also spoke to 46-year-old Tito Soto. He lived in California his whole life before he picked up a move with his wife and two high school-aged sons back in 2021 during the pandemic.
--:-- Tito Soto: The move was so urgent, Soto actually had to quit his job where he'd worked for 24 years without having something lined up in Nashville where he moved.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: I've been wanting to get out of California for many years. Multiple reasons, obviously, expenses, cost of living is more than anything was really the push.
--:-- Tito Soto: I think with COVID and everything, the way that went down, that was, I think, the straw that broke the camel's back. You know, we finally just like we got to get out.
--:-- John Bickley: I hear, I mean, the big trigger, I believe, was really my kids and the things that were at their schools being shut down for so long.
--:-- Tito Soto: When they were out of school for, I think, a year, year and a half, they were part for a little bit. When they did finally go back full, they were being sent home. My youngest was sent home those close contact rules.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: He also expressed to me the intolerance he witnessed in California over his personal politics.
--:-- Tito Soto: Politics started coming into play, but even then, for a long time, it really never was that bad until the last few years, where I felt basically if you weren't from one party, you were under attack.
--:-- John Bickley: On the flip side, there are, of course, people who can't imagine leaving the state and just love California. I spoke to Susan Faris, a former Navy nurse and now publicist who has lived in several states and is originally from New Jersey.
--:-- Susan Faris: I love the environment here. I absolutely love it. I have always loved the ocean because I grew up in New Jersey on the Central Coast.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: She really gushed over California's geography, citing the weather, theater, film, the attractions, and the diversity in the state.
--:-- Susan Faris: But as a bird watcher and nature photographer, I love the lagoons. I just love the nature and the environment around here.
--:-- John Bickley: But she did acknowledge some drawbacks.
--:-- Susan Faris: The prices have gone up, I think, since COVID and everything. Prices are higher probably everywhere, but the gas prices, the electric bill, cable, food, restaurant definitely have increased over the past year or so.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Safety, crime, it comes and goes. And when I asked her about the number of people leaving California, Faris said she thought it might be due to rising prices and the housing crisis in the state, which seems to at least partly align with the analysis from Shepard.
--:-- Susan Faris: I wonder if it's just the amount of income and the housing prices to be able to sustain or even the rentals are pretty high here too. So it's difficult, especially for young people just starting out that might want to buy a house.
--:-- John Bickley: High housing costs are certainly a major factor in this trend. So where are these people that are leaving California moving to?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Well, states like Idaho, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida have had an influx in their population since COVID.
--:-- John Bickley: Texas has had a net gain of nearly 640,000 people, with Florida picking up a net of nearly 800,000 people. Those states largely resisted lockdown measures during COVID and are governed far more conservatively.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: I asked Shepard if he noticed a trend in where Californians were looking to relocate.
--:-- Scott Shepard: I did a quick analysis of our gross data just our relocation form somewhere or the other. There was about 51,000 total entries that we received. I ended up analyzing that to see if there was a particular trend in the way of maybe a red state relocate or a blue state relocate.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: So out of the top 20 states, 13 of them were trending on a conservative red state and seven of them were blue states. So Texas was the top, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Washington.
--:-- John Bickley: Not every single person that I talked to was motivated for political reasons, but I could definitely say a hefty portion of every conversation I had had some political undertone on their reasons for wanting to leave.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Soto has personally seen an influx of Californians moving to the greater Nashville area.
--:-- Tito Soto: I couldn't tell you the number of people that I know move. Just here in the greater Nashville area, there's 10 families that I personally know that have moved within 20, 30 miles of me.
--:-- John Bickley: That's 10 families from one small city in Los Angeles County that have moved within 20, 25 miles. And we're 25, 2,000 miles away from Los Angeles.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: It will absolutely continue, in my opinion.
--:-- John Bickley: So these policies that are causing so many Californians to flee the state, are leaders in the state actually backing away from them at all?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: No, not at all. It seems to be business as usual in California. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom faced a recall effort in 2021, but handily fended that off and then coasted to reelection last year.
--:-- John Bickley: Newsom did try to lure residents to California by buying up billboards in seven GOP-led states, including Texas, touting California as an abortion destination.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: He even aired a TV commercial in Florida. Freedom is under attack in your state. Republican leaders, they're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.
--:-- John Bickley: I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight or join us in California.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: This ad aired on July 4th last year, but it doesn't seem to have stemmed the flow out of a state of people or businesses.
--:-- John Bickley: Tesla, Oracle, Align, Hewlett-Packard, Yelp, Dropbox, and Airbnb have all reduced their company footprint in the state. As has The Daily Wire.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Right. Thanks for reporting.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
