Goodbye, Gavin: More Californians Fleeing to Arizona, Florida While Fewer Opt for Texas

California is losing hundreds of thousands of residents to more conservative states, but the number headed for Texas has slightly dropped, with more opting to make Arizona or Florida their new home.

New state-to-state migration figures released Thursday showed that while the flow of Californians to the Lonestar State has been the largest interstate movement in the last two years, the amount has decreased as Texas real estate prices grow.

There was a slight but noticeable decrease from more than 107,000 people fleeing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) state for Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) in 2021 to just over 102,000 in 2022, the Associated Press reported. However, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saw the number of ex-Californians in the state of Florida jump from about 37,000 people in 2021 to more than 50,000 in 2022.

The number of residents who left California for the swing state of Arizona leapt from more than 69,000 to 74,000 in the same period of time.

Within the last year, the “Golden State” has faced a net loss of more than 113,000 residents, taking into account new births as well as people moving into the state. In total, the AP reports that “more than 343,000 people left California for another state last year, the highest number of any U.S. state.”

As Breitbart News reported in April, California lost roughly half a million people between the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic and mid-2022.

Despite California being the most populous U.S. state, housing costs are among the main motivators for people running for the hills, according to Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

“We are losing younger folks, and I think we will see people continuing to migrate where housing costs are lower,” Pastor told the outlet. “There are good jobs in California, but housing is incredibly expensive. It hurts young families, and it hurts immigrant families.”

Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that the second-largest state-to-state movement is from New York to Florida, which generally remained the same from 2021 to 2022 with about 92,000 movers.

“Overall, more people living in one U.S. state moved to a different state last year in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in the previous year,” the AP observed of the numbers.