BLUE STATE BLUES: Citadel Flees Illinois for the Sunshine State.

It’s a familiar story by now. Firms from San Francisco and New York have been steadily making the move south over the last two years. Blue states had imagined that they held businesses hostage, that these firms could simply not pick up and move. The pandemic proved them wrong. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted how red states have “won” the post-pandemic economy. “Remote work allowed many workers to move to red states, not because of political preferences, but for financial and lifestyle reasons—cheaper housing, better weather, less traffic and lower taxes, the analysts said.”

But those political preferences do matter. We don’t have the data to tell whether politics play a role in people making these moves, but it’s hard not to suspect that it figures into the equation. Normalcy during Covid was clearly a draw. Florida had famously reopened, under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, far earlier than any of the blue states. Much of life had returned to normal there, and companies followed their employees as they sought out that freedom. With this migration has come a serious shift in the state’s politics. Previously a purple state, Florida has moved solidly into the red column. In March, Fox News reported “registered Republican voters now outnumber Democrats by over 100,000 for the first time in the state’s history.”

Crime as a factor is also under-examined. It’s not that there is no crime in Florida in general, or in Miami specifically. Of course there is. But there is a seriousness to Florida’s response that simply doesn’t exist in Illinois, New York, or California. While Pritzker talks about fantasy proposals, which likely wouldn’t stop the Chicago bloodshed anyway, Governor DeSantis is focusing on crime-fighting, hiring away out-of-state officers, and raising police pay across the board.

Plus: “DeSantis, for all the 2024 speculation about his candidacy, is also not trotting around New Hampshire complimenting their root vegetables. He is laser-focused on making Florida better.”