(End of the American Dream)—In recent years we have literally seen millions of Americans relocate from blue states to red states. In some cases, there is simply a desire to be around other like-minded people. In other cases, specific political policies that have been enacted in certain states have motivated large numbers of people to relocate. This was particularly true during the pandemic. Of course there are also many that are just trying to escape the crime, drugs, homelessness and violence that are plaguing so many major cities in blue states. For those that are trying to raise a family, finding a safe environment for their children is often of the utmost importance. As a result of the factors that I have just mentioned, we have been witnessing a “mass exodus” to “Red America” that is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Vast numbers of people have been moving from blue states such as California, New York and Illinois to red states such as Florida, Idaho and Montana…
More and more Americans are moving from Democratic-leaning blue states to Republican-voting red ones, and one of the effects of this change is that they are relocating to places with lower life expectancy.
Idaho, Montana and Florida, all red states, had the greatest population growth among U.S. states between 2020 and 2022. Meanwhile, New York and Illinois, both blue states, and Louisiana, a red state, suffered the biggest population losses. California, another blue state, has experienced significant recent population loss as well.
One key reason for this migration is the high cost of living in places like New York and California, compared with the lower cost of living in red states such as Georgia or Indiana.
The nationwide realignment that has been taking place is truly remarkable.
According to economist Stephen Moore, approximately 5 million people have migrated out of Illinois, New York, California and New Jersey during that past 10 years…
A lot has been reported about celebrities like Joe Rogan moving out of California in recent years. However, economist Stephen Moore says there’s a much broader trend here.
During a recent interview with Fox Business, Moore claimed that over the last 10 years, about five million people have left the so-called “blue states” Illinois, New York, California and New Jersey.
“This is one of the biggest mass migrations in American history,” he said.
He is right. This really is one of the largest mass migrations in our entire history.
The red state that has gained the most from all of this domestic migration is Florida…
Among large states (those with a population above the 50-state average), the net-domestic-migration winner over the 13-quarter period after Covid-19’s arrival was Florida. The Sunshine State added a net tally of 819,000 Americans over that span. To put that into perspective, in just three years and change, Florida added more people from net domestic migration than the combined populations of Miami and Orlando. The large-state runner-up: Texas. It added 80 percent as many people as Florida (656,000).
The state that lost the most was California, which shed 1.2 million people through net domestic outmigration—the rough equivalent of San Francisco and Oakland’s combined populations. The runner-up loser was New York, which lost about three-quarters as many people as California.
Not too long ago, Florida was considered to be a “swing state” that was divided almost equally between Democrats and Republicans.
But now it is solidly red.
Many conservatives are attracted to the Sunshine State because there is no state income tax. Of course the spectacular weather doesn’t hurt either.
According to a real estate company known as “Conservative Move”, large numbers of conservatives have also been relocating to South Carolina…
Conservative Move, a real-estate company with about 500 agents across the country, helps conservatives find homes near like-minded people — and South Carolina is becoming a big draw.
The group’s founder, Paul Chabot, told Business Insider that while Texas and Florida consistently rank among the top locations his conservative clients choose to move to, he’s seen a big spike in the number of people who want to relocate to South Carolina in the past two years. He said his company currently has about 5,000 clients who are considering moving to the state soon.
Many of his clients are coming from places like California, Washington state, and Oregon, he said.
I really like South Carolina. In fact, in my latest book I ranked it number 3 out of all 50 states.
I would just recommend staying away from the coast and the major population centers.
In addition to a mass migration from blue state to red states, we are also seeing lots of people relocate to small towns and rural communities…
The remote work boom that prompted Americans to flee urban areas for mountain hamlets and seaside towns during the pandemic continued at least through last year, according to University of Virginia demographer Hamilton Lombard. An estimated 291,400 people last year migrated from other areas into America’s small towns and rural areas, which Lombard defines as metropolitan areas with 250,000 people or fewer.
Mid-size cities are also growing, but meanwhile large cities are bleeding residents at a rapid pace…
Areas with 250,000 to 1 million people saw a net in-migration of 266,448 people last year, while areas with 1 million to 4 million people recorded only a modest gain. Areas with more than 4 million people were the big losers, shedding almost 600,000 people last year, according to Lombard’s research using US Census Bureau data.
These days there is such a hunger for a high quality of life, and most of the core urban areas in our blue states do not have that to offer at this point.
Sean Hannity is one of those that has migrated to a red state from a large city in a blue state, and he sounds absolutely thrilled to have made the move…
Sean Hannity, the prominent Fox News personality, has made the decision to sell his expansive Long Island property for $13.75 million — mere months after revealing his relocation plans from New York to Florida.
In a notable shift, Hannity disclosed earlier this year that he would be broadcasting his renowned radio show, “The Sean Hannity Show,” as well as his television program, “Hannity,” from studios in West Palm Beach.
“We are now beginning our first broadcast from my new home, and that is in the free state of Florida,” Hannity announced on his iHeartRadio show. “I am out. I am done. I’m finished.”
Good for him.
But there is no place that is perfect, and the truth is that our country as a whole is very rapidly heading in the wrong direction.
So the reality of the matter is that ultimately there will be no hiding from our growing national problems.
If we do not find a way to turn things around, our red states will eventually become just like our blue states.
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking and time is quickly slipping away.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Transplants from NY, CT, NJ, CA, WA, OR, MN, MI, MA, abd all other progressive, liberal states can STAY AWAY FROM FLORIDA. That applies to Canadians, as well. You destroyed your own states, so deal with it. You will be made exceedingly unwelcome in FL. Don’t like it? Tough, we do not care a wit how you feel.
“and one of the effects of this change is that they are relocating to places with lower life expectancy.” Yeah? Is that what you think? NY murdered 20,000 of their seniors in just one stroke and you think the State has a high life expectancy? With all the crime NYC has, I don’t see how that’s possible. Or L.A., or San Francisco, or Chicago, Or Baltimore, or Philadelphia, or Washington State. All these places have higher life expectancy than Montana or South Dakota? YOU PEOPLE ARE ON DRUGS.
This is not exactly a great thing for the Red states. Being in the state of NC I have observed people from these states migrating here for at least 40 years. Even though they consider themselves a “Conservative” their version of the concept is just “leftist lite”. They bring many of the same failed, wacko views with them to infiltrate these states and slowly turn them into the same s-holes that they left. There is no hope for our country as it is infected with a terminal case of leftism.
There should be a visa requirement. If you don’t believe in God the second amendment and didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan… visa denied
The net exodus is even worse when you consider all the illegal aliens pouring into blue-blue areas.
We LOVE South Carolina. We moved here 10 years ago from Georgia and never looked back. We own a nice house with 40 acres of reasonably priced land with several ponds, fields and woods for firewood. If you want freedom for America, we will welcome you.
Unfortunately those moving are probably mostly crazy leftist females who move to be safe but continue to vote like the murderers they are. Sucker moms.
I have a beautiful House for sale in Payson Arizona. Arizona is a red State. After the next election it will be obvious!!!
Most thought provoking, and interesting, JD. Even a blue tinted person of discernment, surely must get tired of hearing the increasing numbers who proclaim their life time 100% middle class entitlement. I share your feelings about beautiful Idaho. N. Idaho has lovely lakes, and wonderful trees; despite the joy of night time bats that flit just about ones head. As an aside, I surely believe that much of the coastal woes are directly related to influence from off shore. I call it full spectrum dominance; or full spectrum war.
My wife and I grew up in VA and, not counting our stays in various states and countries with the USAF, have lived here our whole life. We used to love VA, but recently bought some land and are building a house in WVA. Our reasons are mainly that VA is going hard commie, and that I really need the cooler temps of the mountains. But, the best part is that our real “migration” is upward…soon and very soon. In fact, we may never even move into that house! 😉