Three years ago, Jessa Davis sold her house in Odessa, Texas, and moved to Seattle after coming out as a trans woman. She described the decision as a matter of safety.
“I had a lot of close calls, a lot of threats,” Davis told NPR. She said she volunteered with organizations advocating for trans and queer rights in Odessa but concluded: “I’ve got one life and I don’t want to spend the next 20 years of [it] fighting a battle that I’m not sure we’re going to win in a place like Texas.”
Davis now serves as co-chair on a commission advising Seattle on LGBTQ issues. She said she and other commissioners have urged the city to declare a state of emergency to provide more resources for growing numbers of people relocating to escape anti-LGBTQ laws and hostile social climates elsewhere.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, Kirby Wilbur, a conservative talk show host who briefly served as Washington state Republican chair, left Seattle for conservative McKinney, Texas. Wilbur described himself as a “refugee” from the liberal city. He told NPR that after the George Floyd protests in 2020 — which involved looting and vandalism in Seattle — he and his wife Trina decided they could no longer live there.
“We looked at each other and said, ‘No, we can’t live this way. This is it,’” Wilbur said.
Wilbur connected with Paul Chabot, a retired U.S. Navy commander who runs Conservative Move, a realty service that since 2017 has helped thousands of people relocate from blue to red states. Wilbur has since become a part-time realtor with the company.
“They feel like they can’t talk politics with people on their street,” Chabot said of his clients. “It’s not like people are leaving just because they hate Democrats. They don’t like Democrat policies, but they really feel like they’re alone, alienated, ostracized.”
Bob McCranie, who started a website called Flee Texas in 2020 that later expanded to Flee Red States, said he has helped more than 875 people relocate. He said for some clients, the stakes include concerns that conservative groups may try to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.
“People are moving because they don’t feel safe in their own state, in their own country,” McCranie told NPR.
U.S. Census Bureau data for 2024 indicates that almost exactly as many people moved from Texas to Washington as went the other direction. A wider Stateline analysis of county-level migration from mid-2020 to mid-2023 found that Republican counties gained 3.7 million people while blue counties lost an equivalent number — a period that included pandemic dislocations, lockdowns and the rise of remote work.
Rachelle Vega, interviewed by NPR last year, moved from Austin, Texas, to Santa Fe, N.M., seeking a more welcoming environment for her two adult trans children. “There’s this sense of live and let live that is pervasive,” she said.
Bruce Desmarais, a political science professor at Penn State University, said political sorting is happening not only between states but between cities, counties and neighborhoods. A 2019 study he co-authored found that people tend to move from one left-leaning city to another, and the same pattern holds for right-leaning moves.
Stefanie Chiappetta moved with her husband from Middleborough, Mass., to Conway, S.C., four years ago. She said politics was “box one” on her list, followed by taxes — the couple had been paying nearly $7,000 a year in property taxes in Massachusetts — and warmer weather for their back problems.
Steven Webster, an associate professor at Indiana University, said that despite such examples, economic priorities typically dominate. “Americans do have a preference for living near co-partisans,” he said. However, “things like the affordability of homes, living in a good school district far outweigh any explicit partisan-based motivation.”
Webster described political alignment as “the cherry on top” for most movers. He noted that a Democrat might choose an area with good public transit and that desire, not the partisan composition of the neighborhood, drives the decision.
“Places shape people more than people sort into places,” Webster said.
Josh Zhang, an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, said party realignment — voters changing their allegiances rather than moving — accounts for more of the ideological sorting than migration. “Southern whites converted Republican, suburbs of major cities converted Democratic, and the political map redrew itself without most people moving,” Zhang told NPR.
He co-authored a 2023 study using cellphone data that found people in heavily Democratic or Republican neighborhoods tend to frequent places — religious institutions, schools, restaurants — whose other visitors lean the same way, further reinforcing ideological insulation.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that geographic sorting is unlikely to become absolute. “Despite aggregate sorting, there are always going to be individual exceptions in a given area,” he said.
Both Wilbur and Davis expressed concern about the consequences of the trend. Wilbur said such ideological sorting is negative for the country. “Nobody talks to each other anymore,” he said. Davis worried about “isolating ourselves in bubbles” but recalled rare conversations in Odessa where she managed to connect with someone across the political divide.
“That’s the importance of being able to sit down with someone, share a beer in a dive bar in West Texas, and have a conversation about why I’m leaving — what’s happening, and why I feel I have to go,” Davis said.