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Where do people go when they leave California and why?

The top-line number was eye-opening: About 725,000 people moved out of California in 2020 to set up new lives in one of the 49 other states or Washington, D.C.

If that were the end of it, the number – derived from the Internal Revenue Service’s Migration Data for 2021 – would’ve represented the biggest single-year exodus in state history.

But it wasn’t the end of it. While experts say the reasons are more nuanced than the gross outflow of a single year, California’s population has been shrinking steadily since 2020. Recent state data shows California’s population today is a little under 39 million, after flirting with 40 million just four years ago.

A lot of other new data shows where people are going (Texas, Idaho and Florida, as well as neighboring Arizona and Nevada). Polling reports show who is leaving (higher-income, well-educated workers recently started to join a migration pattern that traditionally has been dominated by lower-income movers). And yet other data shows at least some of the financial and social challenges causing problems in California (rising home prices, stagnant wages, crime) aren’t so different in states wooing the most ex-Californians.

“I didn’t think I’d miss it. And, in a lot of ways I was right; I don’t,” said a laughing Debbie Higbee, who last year moved from Burbank to Boise, Idaho, with her husband and their three children.

“But I’m not one of those people who hate California, either,” she added. “I don’t really understand all that.

“For me, it’s fine there. And it’s not like things are perfect here, either. Both places have good and bad.”

Blip or trend?

That 725,000-person exodus was a top-line number, not a net. But California’s actual domestic migration in 2020 – with the state losing about 331,000 more people than it got back from the other states – was bracing, even to people who track this stuff closely.

“Yeah, that was big,” said political scientist Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and co-author of a blog about state politics, demographics and other issues related to California’s population.

But McGhee, echoing others who study California, was quick to add: “It was not surprising. For at least the last 30 years, California has exported more people to other states than we have imported.”

In fact, McGhee’s blog, tracked month-to-month data last year and found that from July 2021 to July 2022 California lost about 407,000 people to other states – almost certainly the biggest such shift in state history.

“There have been a handful of years in the past few decades where we had a net gain, but the typical outcome is we lose people,” McGhee said.

But, most years, it’s also been typical for outgoing domestic migration to be offset by incoming international immigration, with more people moving into California from around the world than those decamping to Texas and Idaho and the like. That wasn’t the case in 2020.

And, most years, the state’s population hasn’t been shocked by a pandemic-induced rise in deaths and a corresponding drop in births. And, most years, thousands of employers in the state didn’t impose massive layoffs for a relatively brief period, then rehire at a breakneck pace and, finally, decide to let millions of workers do their jobs from home – no matter where that home might be. All of that happened in the first year of the pandemic.

Bottom line: California’s population didn’t just grow more slowly in 2020 than it had previously, it actually contracted by nearly 359,000. That happened again in 2021, as California shrank by 114,000 people.

Then the pandemic ended but California’s population decline did not.

According to data released this month by the California Dept. of Finance, the shrink carried into last year, with the state losing about 139,000 people. State officials now estimate California’s population is about 38,940,231, the first time it’s been under 39 million since 2015.

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