Americans Vote with Their Feet for Red States

National Review Online

Monday, February 02, 2026

 

The latest Census Bureau population estimates are in. Halfway through the 2020s, they show a tectonic shift in America’s population, a decided preference among Americans to vote with their feet for red-state over blue-state governance, and the dramatic demographic effects of replacing Joe Biden’s border policies with those of Donald Trump.

 

The population grew slowly in 2025, but that was mostly because of the border. On the whole, the U.S. has added 10.3 million people since the 2020 Census, bringing us to a nation of 341.8 million. Only a fifth of that growth — 1.9 million — has been from the natural increase of births over deaths; the other 8.3 million have been new arrivals. The low rate of births, by itself, is deeply concerning; the notion of a future in which we add four new immigrants for every net increase of one homegrown American is alarming.

 

Net international migration shot up under Biden from 1.7 million in 2022 to 2.2 million in 2023 and 2.7 million in 2024. It fell off to under 1.3 million in 2025. The foreign-born population dropped from 53.3 million to 51.9 million just between January and June of 2025, the biggest driver of which was a collapse from the historic 2022–24 peak in “humanitarian migrants.” Border policy matters.

 

The list of fastest-growing states in 2025, as usual, was dominated by those with Republican governments, led by South Carolina, Idaho, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah. The five states that lost population were mostly deep blue — Vermont, Hawaii, West Virginia, New Mexico, and California, with New York just barely breaking even.

 

The six states with the highest per capita rates of net internal migration are likewise a red-dominated list: South Carolina, Idaho, North Carolina, Delaware, Tennessee, and Montana. The biggest losers, per capita: New York, Hawaii, Alaska, D.C., California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois. We sense a trend.

 

No wonder projections for the post-2030 reapportionment now show a nine-seat loss for states that were won by Kamala Harris in 2024, with eleven new House seats and electoral votes for red states being offset only by losses of a seat apiece for narrowly divided Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That is a grim picture for Democrats indeed. Texas is now projected to gain four seats, Florida two, and California to lose four.

 

Aggregating the data to classify the 25 red states (the ones Trump carried in 2020), the 20 blue states (the states Harris carried in 2024, counting D.C. for these purposes as if it was a state), and the six purple states (the ones that voted for both Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024), the problem for blue America appears starkly. Between 2020 and 2025, the red states added 7.7 million inhabitants; the purple states added 1.4 million; the blue states added only 1.15 million. Notably, in the purple states, 1.1 million of that was just in Georgia and Arizona, which continue to lean Republican and are governed that way.

 

By natural growth rate, the blue states added more people, at a higher per capita rate, than the red states — though not by a large margin. Americans, however, have voted with their feet. In 2025, the blue states lost 478,319 people to net internal migration, an average of 3,377 per million people. The red states gained 399,121 people the same way, an average of 2,683 per million. The purple states gained 79,198, an average of 1,542 per million. Over the 2020–25 period, the red states gained 3.3 million people by net internal migration; the purple states gained half a million, while the blue states lost 3.8 million.

 

That leaves immigration. Over the four years of Biden’s presidency, blue states gained 3.3 million people from net international migration, compared with 2.99 million in the red states and 740,325 in the purple states. Porous borders were propping them up. But international migration fell off faster in the blue states from 2024 to 2025, dropping at a per capita rate of 5,392 per million people versus 3,738 per million in the red states and 2,970 in the purple states. That is at least suggestive that the blue states were previously leaning more heavily upon illegal immigrants.

 

The blue-state model simply doesn’t work for its citizens. That’s why they keep leaving, and why those states need to keep importing noncitizens by hook or by crook to replace them. Four years with less access to that spigot ought to force those states to reconsider how they treat American citizens.