There is another factor that is often less recognized. Over the course of four years, many simply upped the ante and moved on. And that could, at least in theory, influence the outcome of the election.
This is not easy to track. The Census Bureau collects interstate migration data annually, but in aggregate. For example, we don’t know if someone moved from one state to another and then back. And we can only guess what the political implications will be. Is someone moving from Ohio to Michigan adding Republican votes to the latter state, or is it a Democrat looking for slightly bluer climes?
There is another data set that provides a better lens into this issue of partisan drift. Political data vendor L2 tracks individuals’ registrations over time, including after they move across state lines. Analyzing that data provides a complete, albeit incomplete, picture of inflows and outflows of state residents by political party.
There are two caveats worth remembering.
The first is that even for voters who are registered in both states, not all movements are recorded in this data. Of course, people who move across state lines often register to vote in their new states for the first time. This data is not reflected. The same goes for people who didn’t match their previous registration (usually because they didn’t fill out a post office change of address form).
Another caveat is that this analysis includes partisan data modeled by L2. In some states, registration is bipartisan. In these states, L2 uses other data (voting patterns and demographics) to estimate partisanship.
With these modifiers in place, you can simply dive into your data. We were less interested in the number of people moving from state to state (given any qualifiers about that number) than in the patterns of that migration. For each state, we calculated the number of Democrats, Republicans, third parties, or independents who moved to the state since 2020, as well as the number of each group who moved out. We then expressed those totals as a percentage of the state’s total population.
This was the result. If the bar on the left is thicker than the bar on the right, it indicates that there are more arrivals than departures. Bars are usually arranged in order of size. If the Republican bar was at the top, that meant more Republicans were coming and going than any other group.
Many nuances can be gleaned from these charts. I’ll leave that to you.
However, let’s dig deeper into the first question and consider how this might impact the presidential election. When comparing the net partisan change (i.e., movers minus leavers) to the 2020 vote, Democratic-leaning states often have larger positive inflows of Democrats, albeit cloudy. I understand that. This partisan correlation was stronger in Republican-leaning states.
In the center, you can see the battleground states that flipped in 2016 and 2020. If we sample the eight states closest to 2020, we find that the net change by party differs. In Georgia, there were more positive changes for Democrats. Republican support is strong in Florida.
But what is actually numbers, you request. Now, in Georgia, the net gain (comparing parties after subtracting outflow voters from inflow voters) was an increase of about 18,000 Democrats. In Florida, there were 124,000 Republicans.
But again, this is just a small movement. The Census Bureau’s 2021-2022 migration data shows that inflows to Florida are 50 percent higher than the number of new arrivals tracked in L2 over all four years. In Georgia, the Census Bureau’s one-year total is more than double his of her L2 number. Some people are missing out, including those registering for the first time.
There is one other point I would like to point out. That means newly moved people are less likely to vote. Other data from the Census Bureau about the 2020 election includes:
There are many reasons for this. One is that you’re not registered yet or you don’t know where to vote. People who move frequently are less likely to own a home, skew younger, and younger people vote less often.
In other words, don’t use these numbers to make bold predictions about how this consistently close presidential election will ultimately turn out. Instead, use it as a reminder to register and vote.
