The ‘Great Sort’ draws transplants pushing Florida to the right, experts say

A mass migration of Northeasterners and Midwesterners into Florida, many of them conservatives leaving Democratic states, has led to the state’s politics turning sharply to the right, experts say.

New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau this month showed that movement is continuing, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving states such as New York, Illinois and California and moving to Florida and Texas in 2022 and 2023.

“The notion of the ‘Big Sort’ … is really proving itself,” said Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst. “That’s the idea that people move based on the politics. … For a lot of retirees, places like Florida are appealing, especially if they’re already conservative.”

According to Census estimates, New York lost nearly 217,000 people to domestic migration from July 2022 to July 2023 and nearly 882,000 since April 2020. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan also lost thousands of residents in that time.

At the same time, Florida gained more than 194,000 people from other states from 2022 to 2023, the largest influx in the nation. Since April 2020, nearly 819,000 people have moved to Florida from within the U.S.

Many of those new residents may have been attracted to Florida because they see it as a right-leaning state, said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, especially amid Gov. Ron DeSantis’ opposition to almost all COVID-19 restrictions.

“Given Florida’s reputation, or at least what DeSantis has tried to sell it as, with the ‘Free State of Florida’ [slogan] … if I’m a retiree, that’s what I associate Florida with,” Coleman said.

But it also goes the other way, Isbell said, especially with headlines about the state’s new laws on abortion, schools, and gay rights, and even neo-Nazi groups.

“If you’re a liberal retiree up in the Northeast, if you’re Jewish retiree in New York City right now, you see this stuff out of Florida, the Nazis and stuff, do you really think you’re going to come down here?” Isbell said.

Even if liberals do come to Florida, they would probably avoid conservative places such as The Villages, the sprawling retirement community stretching across Marion, Sumter and Lake counties north of Orlando.

“The Villages does not have a mandate that you must be a registered Republican to live there, there’s no litmus test,” he said. “But if you’re a liberal retiree, you probably don’t care to move there, so it becomes kind of self-sorting.”

‘Kind of a constant’

It’s not just wealthier retirees, experts said. Working-class whites are also moving into the state.

Polk County, the home of former Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, “used to be more of a rural, Democratic type of county,” Coleman said. “You have a lot of migrants now from the Midwest there who don’t really have any attachment to that Democratic tradition. They vote Republican.”

In 2016, Trump did well with working-class voters in the Midwest, Coleman said. “Well, those same types of voters have been moving to Florida. Those types of trends don’t happen in a vacuum.”

Not all experts agree that migration is the main cause of the state becoming more conservative.

Daniel A. Smith, the political science chair at the University of Florida, cited instead a drop in Democratic registration among younger voters.

Republicans’ voter registration advantage over Democrats in Florida has grown to nearly 700,000 this year. There were more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida as recently as 2021.

Republicans moving to Florida, Smith said, “has been a trend for at least 60 years. … I don’t think that’s what’s causing the shift in terms of [more] Republicans. Frankly, that’s kind of a constant.”

The culture wars

Northeastern Republicans have tended to be more socially moderate than their Southern counterparts.

Despite their influx, Florida has become a hotbed of the culture wars in recent years, with DeSantis signing laws such as the so-called “don’t say gay” bill, the “Stop WOKE Act” impacting schools and bills targeting transgender people.

“Much of that can be put on the shoulders of DeSantis, for raising these issues that most of these transplants don’t give a hoot about,” Smith said of DeSantis’ focus on social issues ahead of his presidential campaign.

Coleman said he was not surprised that there’s been no larger backlash or pushback from Northeastern Republican transplants.

“If you’re attracting more fiscally conservative, culturally moderate voters? They still vote for Republicans,” Coleman said. “And if you vote for the Republicans, you don’t just get their fiscal policies, you get some of their social policies those voters would maybe have to hold their noses for.”

With DeSantis’ wilting presidential campaign, culture war politics may be on the wane, Isbell said. But those issues won’t go away any time soon.

“I still think they’ve overplayed their hand with it a bit,” Isbell said. “But the demographics will determine how governments operate. And the demographics of Florida right now say that while it’s not a Bible Belt state … you have retirees [in Central and South Florida] that are willing to just kind of go along with that.”

Smith said many transplants may simply not care about what happens in schools.

“These are folks who generally have paid high property taxes, they’ve gotten their children through public schools, and now they’re looking to wipe their hands clean,” Smith said. “… They’re happy to go into their gated communities and put those days behind them.”

Florida vs. Texas

Florida is not the only state seeing an influx.

Texas saw nearly 187,000 new residents move from elsewhere in the country between 2022 and 2023, and more than 656,000 since 2020.

But the two states are trending in the opposite direction, Isbell said.

“Florida came from the center, maybe leaning Democratic in the ‘90s, and moved further to the right, and then Texas has moved a bit further to the left,” Isbell said. “But they’re both still right of the country.”

While Trump won Texas by about 5.5 points in 2020 and Florida by 3, Coleman said he believes that could soon flip.

“One of my hot takes for the next election is that I would not be surprised if Texas ends up being closer than Florida,” Coleman said.

Jim Henson, director of The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said new residents of Texas are “younger, and almost certainly more directly economically and occupationally driven,” in comparison to Florida.

But he was more cautious about whether the states were moving apart politically.

“The inner line suburbs are getting more Democratic, but slowly,” Henson said. “But the outer areas are [still] very Republican … So I’m not entirely ready to conclude this unambiguously pushes the state in a bluer, more purple direction.”

The younger migration into Texas helped to give the state a leg up over Florida in one key area. From 2020 to 2023, there were more than 94,000 more deaths than births in Florida, while Texas had more than 407,000 more births than deaths.

All those trends will play a role in the next reapportionment of congressional districts. The Brennan Center projected that while Florida is set to get three new seats in Congress in 2032, Texas could pick up four.

‘Still very powerful’

Georgia, along with North and South Carolina and Tennessee, is projected to pick up one new district thanks to similar influxes. But one reason Georgia is not trending Republican, Coleman said, is because the Atlanta suburbs are growing while its coast is largely undeveloped.

“Just by virtue of not having much of a coastline, it can’t attract many of those types of conservative retirees,” Coleman said. “Which kind of was a net plus for Democrats.”

The prevalence of increasingly expensive retirement communities along Florida coastlines could be what starts to slow the trends.

Soaring homeowners insurance premiums and the impact of climate change, from rising seas to more and stronger hurricanes, are “slowly eroding that ‘cost of living’ argument,” Smith said. Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on heavily Republican Lee County in 2022.

“We’re seeing the housing prices going up partly because of the cost of insurance going up,” Smith said. “… People losing their house insurance because of high risk or paying a lot more is certainly a detriment.”

While “the illusion still is very powerful in drawing folks from the Northeast down to Florida,” Smith added, “the cost of living actually is a little higher in most of Florida than many of the Midwest states.”

For Democrats, though, a turnaround any time soon is not in the cards.

“There’s no realistic demographic change that will suddenly [happen] in Florida,” Isbell said. …“Democrats are going to be behind, and they’re going to have to keep slowly building back. And there’s no magic switch or demographic swing that’s going to do that for them.”

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