California's Conservative Migration to Texas

 
One common refrain we hear is that the migration of Californians to Texas is a bad thing because TexansDon'tWantCalifornia'sLibreals(TM).  We've never found that argument compelling, especially since the 2010 election results made clear that the liberals in California have stayed put.  When Glenn Beck, Chuck DeVore, and myself have all moved to the same state in the past five years, it seems to indicate a trend.

Yesterday, we spoke to Chuck DeVore who pointed us to this poll:

 With its economic troubles, California has been losing people in droves. The plurality of those migrants have moved to Texas, as many as 70,000 in 2011 and 60,000 in 2012. Given this influx of new residents, we are fortunate to have at times asked our respondents whether they have moved to Texas from California, and though the actual number of these people is but a small subsample of our surveys, we have enough respondents to make two broad conclusions. First, these newcomers, on average, tend to be conservative. Pooling data from the May 2012 and February 2013 UT/Tribune surveys, we found that 57 percent of these California transplants consider themselves to be conservative, while only 27 percent consider themselves to be liberal (a fair guess as to the margin of error is somewhere around +/- 7 percentage points). Second, these new Texans aren’t rushing to find homes in the state’s urban centers: 55 percent are heading to the suburbs, the rest evenly dividing themselves between rural and urban locations.

Bottom Line: For economic refugees to Texas from California, conservatives outnumber liberals by more than two to one.  This is a good thing.  The Trib's wrap up says it well:

So while some may want to perceive the wave of Californians coming to Texas as part of the broader demographic trends that might eventually turn Texas purple, and then blue, the data collected to date suggest that Perry’s pitch appears to be hitting a chord with Californians who wear cowboy boots instead of Birkenstocks.

You can hear Governor Perry explain this phenomenon here.