California is suffering a major demographic reversal, one that threatens both the state’s economic future and the durability of its progressive model.
The numbers speak for themselves: The Golden State’s population has started declining for the first time, with new data from the state Department of Finance showing a population loss of 173,000 for the year ended July 1, 2021—a number that includes more than 56,500 pandemic related deaths, mostly of older Californians.
Net domestic migration hit a decade-long low, ballooning from a loss of 34,000 in 2012 to 277,000 in 2021. Over the last 10 years, California lost more than 1.625 million net domestic migrants—more than the population of Philadelphia. Altogether, 2.7 million more people—a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego and Anaheim combined—have moved to other states from California than the other way around over the last 20 years, and immigration is no longer making up the difference.
Many in the state’s media and political establishment insist that the demographic decline is a “myth” concocted by red-state haters. It’s not. The state that attracted America’s domestic migrants through the 20th century is losing millions of them in the 21st century.
This isn’t the Rust Belt of the 1970s, but the exodus out of the state and especially its metropolitan areas seems to be accelerating. From 2000 to 2020, Census Bureau estimates indicate that metro Los Angeles has lost 2.2 million net domestic migrants, metro San Francisco 400,000, metro San Diego 200,000 and metro San Jose 400,000—even as the rest of the state saw a net gain of 600,000.