Who’s Leaving Where?

We have written about the Great Sort many times, but frankly you can’t emphasize it enough. Americans are deserting blue states and cities in favor of red zones. Liberalism has proved to be a failure by the most reliable measure: fewer and fewer people want to live under liberal regimes.

Here are two examples. First, the City of New York, which was thought doomed to dystopia in the 1970s, rallied in the 1980s and beyond, and now is slipping back into chaos and insolvency. The New York Post reports: “Half of all New Yorkers will flee city in next 5 years as quality of life plummets post-pandemic.”

Just half of all New Yorkers plan to stay in the city over the next five years, and anger over quality of life has skyrocketed since the pandemic — with just 30% saying they’re happy here, according to a damning poll from the The Citizens Budget Commission.

The non-profit think tank’s first such post-pandemic survey, released Tuesday, also found that only 37% of New Yorkers thought public safety in their neighborhood was excellent or good, down from 50% six years ago.

When asked if they planned to stay in the Big Apple until 2028, only 50% of those surveyed said yes, down from 58% in 2017, according to the CBC.

As so often happens, the “pandemic” is blamed for ills that have more to do with crime and chaos, such as that engendered by the influx of illegals into New York City. The value of commercial real estate in New York has plummeted as companies have departed for greener pastures, to the extent that some speculate that Donald Trump will let Letitia James take over Trump Tower. What, exactly, would she do with it?

And New York is just one case among many. Another instance is Minneapolis, whose far-left City Council is anti-law enforcement. (Also, anti-Uber and Lyft; it adopted an ordinance requiring sky-high minimum wages for drivers, as a result of which both companies have deserted the city, and in Uber’s case, the metropolitan area, so that I can no longer take Ubers to the airport. Thanks, City Council.) Minneapolis is the center of Hennepin County, which includes suburbs out to the third tier and comprises around one-fifth of Minnesota’s population.

In 2022, Hennepin County elected a pro-crime County Attorney who is now prosecuting a state trooper, Ryan Londregan, for doing his job. Her pro-crime posture will only accelerate the exodus from Hennepin County that my colleague Bill Glahn has documented:

In the little over three years between the date of the last census (April 1, 2020) and July 1, 2023, Hennepin County lost a net 23,000 residents, even as the state, overall, has posted a modest gain.

From 2020 to 2023, Ramsey County (St. Paul) lost a net 16,000 residents.

This chart tells the story:

So net domestic out-migration from Hennepin County was over 50,000 people, equivalent to a good-sized suburb, which was partly balanced by international immigration, from Somalia and other countries, of 11,000. And that out-migration will only increase with a pro-crime County Attorney in charge of law enforcement. As Bill points out, Ramsey County, home of St. Paul, is doing even worse as a percentage of its population.

Bill notes that this pattern is common:

[T]he larger “blue” counties of Los Angeles, Cook (Chicago), and the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens lost even more.

Of the 10 counties in America with the largest net domestic inflows, nine were in “red” states (Florida, South Carolina, and Texas).

So the Great Sort is dramatically reshaping life in America. Liberals face a serious problem: their ability to achieve their goal of making our lives worse is limited by the fact that we can move. The Soviet Union dealt with this problem by devising a system of internal passports designed to keep people in place. But American liberals can’t really do that; certainly not without amending the Constitution. So, unlike residents of some totalitarian countries, Americans retain the ability to vote with their feet. Which might turn out to be the most important right of all.