They fled California for Republican Texas. Then the blue wave hit the Lone Star State
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- Texas’ Democratic sweep has raised questions about whether California transplants helped turn the state blue, but experts doubt the newcomers drove the shift.
- Many Californians who moved to Texas were moderate or conservative, drawn by lower housing costs and a political climate that they believed better reflected their views.
- The election has unsettled some transplants, including one who is considering Oklahoma or Florida, while political analysts say the results don’t necessarily mean they should move again.
Did California help Texas turn blue?
One of the biggest stories of this month’s Democratic sweep in the midterms is that a very red Texas elected a Democratic U.S. senator and governor.
Pundits cite many theories for the surprising results: anger over the Iran war, high gas prices, Trump fatigue and data centers.
But did California’s high home prices and the state’s historic exodus play a role?
Experts doubt it. In fact, some Californians who moved to Texas are actually concerned about the blue wave.
Many presume that those arriving from California must be much more liberal than the average Texan, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
But “a significant share of the Californians transplanting to Texas tend to be moderate to conservative in their views,” he said.
For years, Californians fled to Texas in droves. About 100,000 people made the move in 2022 alone, and many were looking not just for a lower cost of living but also a state that reflected their conservative political outlook.
Nearly half of those Californians who moved to Arizona or Texas during the California exodus in recent years identified as conservative or very conservative, according to a Stanford University study.
The Public Policy Institute of California found that those who leave the state often go to states that share their political beliefs. “Californians leaving for Republican states are much more likely to be Republican than Democratic, compared to Californians as a whole, while those leaving for Democratic states are more likely to be Democratic than Republican,” the institute wrote.
A Times analysis of U-Haul data shows that young Los Angeles residents are more often leaving for other California cities than older Angelenos who are more likely to leave the state.
In all, hundreds of thousands of conservative Californians have relocated to Texas since the 2020 pandemic emergency, studies suggest.
Marie Bailey, 44, moved from El Segundo to a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in 2017. She and her husband built a home for $750,000, while a “tiny fixer upper” in El Segundo would’ve cost more than $1 million.
The couple quickly figured out that they could capitalize on the niche in the real estate market for California migrants to Texas.
For years, Bailey has administered the Facebook group in which 45,000 users swap recommendations on how to make the move. She runs a real estate firm that places Californians all over the state.
“Ninety-nine percent of our clientele are people moving from California,” Bailey told The Times in 2023. As for why people make the move, “No. 1 is cost of living and No. 2 is politics.”
Texas’ red politics were a big reason she made the move.
Bailey’s husband, who was employed by the UCLA medical system, “wouldn’t even talk about his politics because he was afraid of losing his job,” she said.
“Nowhere is perfect,” Bailey said in 2023, “but we fit in a lot better here.”
Now, just three years later, Bailey is confronting a seismic shift in her state.
California continues to see companies large and small move to Texas and other states, citing taxes, high costs and regulations. Is the business environment really as bad as it seems?
“I’m actually thinking of moving to Oklahoma because of this,” she said in an interview Thursday. “Or Florida.”
In the Facebook group “Move to Texas from California,” most posts since Tuesday concerned the new state of affairs in the Lone Star State.
“If I have to tolerate blue I might as well have good weather so maybe back to CA? Or give FL a try?” one commenter wrote.
“I am literally closing on a house in Texas next week! I am so pissed,” wrote another.
Of course, it was Elon Musk who led the charge from California to Texas when he relocated there during the pandemic along with his various companies. At the time, he railed against regulations and what he claimed was California’s “woke” politics.
Musk was part of a larger move from Silicon Valley to places like Austin, which boosted jobs and property values there.
But there is some evidence that the Texas tech boom was one element of the blue wave. Data centers became a major issue in the governor’s race, with Democrat Gina Hinojosa vowing more regulations.
She also repeatedly accused her opponent, incumbent Greg Abbott, of being too beholden to the tech billionaires and suggested she will also take a look at Musk’s businesses in the state.
Democrat James Talarico, who was elected to the U.S. Senate, has hit on similar themes. “We must get big money out of our politics, so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections,” he said on election night. “We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%.”
Musk spent heavily to support Republicans in the midterms.
After the election, Musk took to X to explain his move from California to Texas: “SpaceX and Tesla have prospered in Texas, because we were not constantly operating under an oppressive and extractive state government. And I need to be close to the factories, so that I can walk the floor in person. That’s why the first major SpaceX factory was in LA and first major Tesla factory was in SF Bay Area. As California became increasingly difficult, due to extreme taxes and overregulation, we moved our major domestic expansions and HQ to Texas,” he wrote.
It will take time for the politics to shake out.
Blank sees some upsides to the Texas blue wave for those who moved from California.
“They get the benefit of having left what they see as a too liberal state, and they get a place that is conservative but is unlikely to get much more conservative any time soon,” he said.
About 60,000 more people moved from California to Texas than the other way in 2022. Experts point to housing, taxes and politics.
Blank thinks many California transplants were primarily motivated by housing costs, with politics being secondary.
“They don’t have to move back,” he said of Californians who moved to the Lone Star State. “And if they do, I’m going to tell them they’re silly. It’s not a good way to make decisions.”
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