At WaPo, an Epic Blunder

Jennifer Rubin is a left-wing columnist for the Washington Post. So, naturally, she hates Ron DeSantis. On Friday, she published a column arguing that DeSantis’s conservative policies endanger Florida’s economy. The headline was, “Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism.” Just another objective day at the office at WaPo! Unfortunately, her entire column was based on a grotesque factual error.

The Washington Post has had to post a correction following Community Notes fact-checking Jennifer Rubin. pic.twitter.com/ccjLXVgTwq

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 16, 2023

The centerpiece of Rubin’s piece was this absurd claim:

DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’ That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic, according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.

This assertion came from a Business Insider article that, when Rubin wrote, had already been corrected. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The Post had to correct Rubin’s error:

A previous version of this article mischaracterized Floridians’ state-to-state migration in 2021. According to the Census Bureau, more people moved into Florida than any other state that year. This version has been corrected.

This is one of those corrections that destroys the entire point of the original article. The correction implicitly acknowledges that the column never should have been printed in the first place. Both the Post and Ms. Rubin should be embarrassed, but we know from experience that, as a hard-core apparatchik, Rubin doesn’t embarrass easy.

But this is the point I want to make: it is truly extraordinary that a left-wing columnist and (presumably) an editor at the Washington Post are living in such a bubble that they are unaware of the fact that Florida, under Ron DeSantis, has become America’s number one boom state. Americans are moving to Florida as fast as they can dump their houses in New York, Illinois, California and Minnesota. This chart, from American Experiment, shows net domestic migration for each state from 2019 through 2022. Florida is on top, with Texas in second place:

Note that the states to which people are moving are red, while the states that Americans are abandoning the fastest–California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts–are blue. Doesn’t everyone know this? Apparently not. Evidently those who work at the Washington Post are ignorant not just of data, but of the most obvious and visible demographic and economic trends.

This episode provides, I think, a revealing glimpse into the liberal mind. It is full of hate–here, for Ron DeSantis–but bizarrely devoid of information.

STEVE adds: That’s not the only embarrassment at the Post in just the last 48 hours. One of the Post‘s young culture writers tried to play the race card in a Tweet about an old Tracy Chapman soul ballad now being covered by a country artist. It didn’t go well for Ms. Yahr, and offers more evidence that abject ignorance is apparently a pre-requisite for a job at the Post: