Wednesday, March 01, 2006

More demographics

Abortion isn't the only way to shrink the population of Democrats. You can also drive people out of blue states and into red states.

The latest Census Bureau data indicate that, in 2005, 239,416 more native-born Americans left the state than moved in. California is also on pace to lose domestic population (not counting immigrants) this year. The outmigration is such that the cost to rent a U-Haul trailer to move from Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho, is $2,090--or some eight times more than the cost of moving in the opposite direction.

Idaho is a conservative state – 68.5% of its population voted for Bush in 2004.

It turns out there's a correlation of 0.3 between the percentage of the vote in a state that turned out for Bush and the percentage of population change due to immigration from other states. Blue states tend to lose population, and red states tend to gain. The correlation isn't significant, but it's suggestive.

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