Are demographics really destiny? The 19th-century philosopher Auguste Comte, credited with the aphorism, emphasized that population trends are the most reliable predictors of a country’s long-term trajectory. Comte actually said “demography” was destiny, which makes more sense, but the idea that a nation’s future can be predicted by figuring out where people are moving is still a solid theory.
In 2002, Democrats John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which significantly revived the “demography is destiny” argument. They proposed that growing minority populations and professional classes would create an inevitable advantage for the Democratic Party — a thesis that has been a central point of debate in U.S. politics for over two decades.
It was debatable until the elections of 2020 and 2024, when millions of black males, Hispanic males, and younger white males abandoned the party that had done nothing for them and dipped a toe into Republican waters when Donald Trump ran for president.
So much for “demographics is destiny.”
Now that the Judis-Teixeira theory of Democratic Party supremacy has died, all of a sudden, sociologists are claiming “demographics are destiny” was never a correct interpretation of the facts.
In fact, there’s a lot more to demographics than race or gender. There’s the very real and consequential fact of people “voting with their feet.” As it stands now, those votes are shifting massively toward red states.
The latest data, for the year ending July 1, 2025, show that seven of the top ten states gaining residents from elsewhere in the country are all governed by so-called Republican trifectas, in which the party controls the governorship and both legislative houses—including Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The remaining three states in the top ten—North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada—went for Trump in 2024 and have divided governments that lean Republican. Of the 22 states where Republicans control all branches of government, only three lost population to net migration in the last year. In two of those, Mississippi and Nebraska, the net decline was less than 1,000. In all, Republican states gained a net of nearly 345,000 people from other places.
By contrast, Democratic states dominate the list of places with the biggest outflow of residents. Nine of the ten states losing the most population are Democratic, led by California, with a net loss of 229,000 residents, and including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois. A notable addition to the bottom ten is Colorado—a politically competitive state as recently as 2019 but dominated by Democrats since. Unlike California and New York, which have seen net outmigration for more than a decade, Colorado’s fortunes have only recently turned, but dramatically so, as the state recorded the eighth-highest net loss of residents last fiscal year. Only four of the 15 Democratic trifecta states last year gained residents: Washington, Oregon, Delaware, and Maine. In all, Democratic-led states lost about 495,000 residents to net migration.
Even more significant is that these are long-term trends. 10 years ago, Gallup asked residents of every state whether they intended to move elsewhere. Analysts found “a strong relationship between total state tax burden and desire to leave one’s current state of residence.”
“It wasn’t clear whether most of those discontented residents wanted to move elsewhere specifically because of taxes, or whether taxes were just a marker for a big-government ethos that pervades other areas of life as well, but the result was the same,” wrote Steven Malanga in City Journal.
The blue states are in a demographic doom loop. They need to create high taxes to pay for the numerous goodies they give to residents, but that leads to an exodus of wealth and people. To make up for the losses, blue states import and encourage illegal aliens to settle there. But illegals are a huge drain on the state treasury, leading to the need to raise taxes, and the loop closes on itself.
The latest Census numbers illustrate why Democrats have been anxious to welcome immigrants (legal or not) and see that they get counted in the decennial tally. With the border effectively closed, the populations of states like California, Hawaii, and New Mexico are declining, and they’re stagnating in New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Meantime, populations are growing significantly more in Southwestern and Southeastern states like Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Compounding the problem is that Democratic-leaning states have some of the lowest total fertility rates. In 2023, nine of the 11 states with a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman or less were Democratic states. The blue state with the highest birth rate, New Jersey, ranks only 18th nationally, behind such Republican trifectas as South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, and Utah.
These demographic shifts are showing up everywhere from politics to economics. In the last 20 years, Florida and Texas alone have gained nine electoral votes, while New York, Illinois, and California have lost six. Projections based on current population trends suggest that, in the next Census, Texas and Florida may each pick up two or more votes, while California and New York could each lose two or more electors. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin are among those states which could lose a single vote.
The pandemic ripped the curtain away from the demographic challenges of blue states and the advantages of red states. Red states recovered far more quickly in 2022, already adding back 341,000 jobs, while “Democratic states were still struggling with losses of 1.3 million positions from Covid lockdowns,” according to Malanga.
The blue states are in the process of “managed decline.” Like a game of musical chairs, no Democratic politician wants to be caught in the open when the music stops.
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