MICHAEL BARONE: The 2010s look more like Trump’s ideal America than Obama’s.
Who are the big population gainers? Some small units: the District of Columbia at 15 percent (big government, gentrification), North Dakota at 12 percent (fracking, which liberals failed to stop), Utah at 12 percent (1950s-style high birth rates).
Those with the largest impact, however, are Texas at 13 percent and Florida at 12 percent. Together, their population increase was 5.3 million, nearly one-third of the national total. Why? No state income taxes, light-touch regulation, and the resulting private sector booms. Immigration? Not so much this decade, with their 1.6 million immigrants outnumbered 2-1 by 3.5 migrants from other states.
Three states actually lost population. Two are small and easily explainable. West Virginia, minus 2 percent: Obama’s war on coal. Vermont, minus 1 percent. Woodstock-era migrants — Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean — liberalized the state’s culture and politics. But with high taxes and stringent environmental bans, no one is following.
The third loser is Illinois, minus 0.3 percent. It takes some doing to get people to flee one of mankind’s greatest artifacts, Chicago. But Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House for all but two years since 1982, has proved up to it.
High and rising taxes, to pay for hugely underfunded public pensions, have done the trick. Net domestic outmigration from Illinois in 2010-17 was 642,000, more than any other state but New York’s 1,022,000.
The nexus between high taxation and domestic outflow is plain when you look at percentages. . . .
All of which suggests a counterintuitive hypothesis: The patterns of internal and immigrant migration of 2010-17 looks less like Barack Obama’s ideal America and more like Donald Trump’s.
The flight from high-tax to low-tax states, diminished by higher-skill immigration, the fracking boom in North Dakota, and the decline in hip Vermont: You might even say Trump started winning even when Obama was still in office.
The Dems will be pivoting from “demographics ensure our victory” to “it wasn’t Hillary’s fault, the demographics were against her!”