red state – After Jessa Davis left deep-red Texas for Seattle, and Kirby Wilbur escaped Seattle’s liberal climate for McKinney, Texas, both described a similar pattern: they felt alone—politically, culturally, and sometimes physically. Their stories reflect ideological so
Three years ago, Jessa Davis had an epiphany. After she came out as a trans woman, staying in deep-red Texas felt untenable. So she sold her house in Odessa and moved to the liberal bastion of Seattle, Wash.
Davis describes herself as a trans refugee. Back in Texas, she says, lived in a “pretty hostile and frankly dangerous” place. “I had a lot of close calls, a lot of threats.”
She volunteered with organizations advocating for trans and queer rights in Odessa and remembers thinking. “I’ve got one life and I don’t want to spend the next 20 years of [it] fighting a battle that I’m not sure we’re going to win in a place like Texas.” Her fight for LGBTQ rights continues. but it feels more manageable in a city she views as welcoming and supportive.
After arriving. Davis quickly became active in local issues and now serves as co-chair on a commission advising the city on LGBTQ issues. She and other commissioners have urged Seattle to declare a state of emergency to provide more resources for the growing number of people relocating there to escape anti-LGBTQ laws and hostile social climates elsewhere in the country.
Davis’ case fits a concept sociologists call “ideological sorting” — the tendency to choose communities aligned with one’s political and cultural values. The idea was popularized in the 2008 book The Big Sort, which aimed to explain the widening divide between red and blue America.
In the years since, the shift has cut in both directions. In a country that’s grown increasingly polarized, the changing demographics are reshaping where people land — and it is happening across the country.
A 2022 study found that “at no point since the Civil War have partisans been as clustered within individual states as today.” But recent research suggests the story isn’t as simple as finding like-minded neighbors and calling it a day.
Davis now lives in Seattle as she tries to make a new life where she feels safer. Across the country, others describe the same feeling from the other side of the political map. Kirby Wilbur says he also moved as a matter of survival and belonging.
Wilbur. like Davis. describes himself as a “refugee.” He tells a story that mirrors hers in tone. if not in politics. In Seattle, he says, he felt like a stranger in a strange land. He had been a local conservative talk show host and, briefly, served as Washington state Republican chair. By the time he was nearing retirement, he and his wife Trina started searching for an escape plan.
A friend told them about McKinney, Texas, a conservative Dallas-Fort Worth suburb. Wilbur had never heard of McKinney, but decided to have a look.
“There were like 3,000 square foot homes with a pool for $300,000,” he says.
In Texas, Wilbur met with Paul Chabot in 2020, who runs a specialty realty service, Conservative Move. Started in 2017, the company has helped thousands of people relocate from blue states to red states, Chabot says. But the Wilburs still weren’t ready.
Then came the 2020 George Floyd protests in Seattle. Kirby Wilbur says that after the mobs, looting and vandalism, he and Trina had their own epiphany. “We looked at each other and said, ‘No, we can’t live this way. This is it.’”
Chabot, a retired U.S. Navy commander, says Wilbur — who has since become a part-time realtor with Conservative Move — is like most of his clients. Many, Chabot says, “feel like they can’t talk politics with people on their street.”
Conservative Move, Chabot says, often helps families with children who want a better quality of life — lower crime, stronger schools and lower taxes. They also want to be somewhere they don’t feel judged for their political beliefs.
“It’s not like people are leaving just because they hate Democrats. They don’t like Democrat policies, but they really feel like they’re alone, alienated, ostracized,” he says.
On the left, Chabot’s counterpart is Bob McCranie. In 2020, McCranie started a web page called Flee Texas. “Very quickly… it got overwhelmed by people from all sorts of other places saying, ‘Oh my gosh, talk to me,’” he says. He later broadened the project, launching Flee Red States.
Since then, McCranie says, he has 40 closings related to the project and more than 875 people on a mailing list. He also says he’s helped people move out of the country.
For some clients, McCranie says, the stakes are much higher than whether they can have a political conversation over the back fence. “People are moving because they don’t feel safe in their own state, in their own country,” he says.
He points to conservative groups trying to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. McCranie says some of his clients are wondering, “Where would we be safe as a couple and as a family?”
The movement shows up in data — and in different ways depending on which numbers are emphasized. U.S. Census Bureau data for 2024 indicates that almost exactly as many people moved from Texas to Washington as went the other direction.
But a nationwide Stateline analysis paints a more one-sided picture. It says Republican counties, defined by the 2020 presidential election vote, gained 3.7 million people from mid-2020 to mid-2023. During that same period, blue counties lost the same amount. Stateline notes that the time period includes pandemic dislocations and lockdowns and the rise of remote work.
Still, broad trends can hide personal realities. Rachelle Vega moved from Austin — widely considered the most progressive city in Texas — to Santa Fe. N.M. which has some of the country’s strongest LGBTQ protections. Vega, interviewed last year by NPR, wanted a more welcoming environment for her two adult trans children.
In her new home, “There’s this sense of live and let live that is pervasive,” she told NPR.
Political sorting isn’t only happening from state to state, either. Bruce Desmarais, a professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University, says it plays out on city, county and neighborhood levels.
In a 2019 study, Desmarais and colleagues found that “people tend to be moving from one very sort of left-leaning city to the next” — like Vega — and the same is true for people moving from one right-leaning area to another.
But even when ideology matters, it’s rarely the only reason a move happens.
Take Stefanie Chiappetta’s experience. Four years ago, she and her husband, Samuel, moved from Middleborough, Mass., to Conway, S.C. Chiappetta says politics were the main reason.
In solidly blue Massachusetts, the town of Middleborough is an exception. It went for President Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a comfortable margin in 2024. Chiappetta says “more conservative” was “box one” on her list when looking for a fresh start after retirement.
Second was taxes. She and her husband had been paying nearly $7. 000 a year in property taxes in Massachusetts. but in Conway. it’s a fraction of that. she says. The last important item was the weather. Chiappetta says she and her husband both have back issues. The cold weather “was making us more miserable,” she says.
Steven Webster, an associate professor of political science at Indiana University, says Chiappetta’s list shows a caveat. “Americans do have a preference for living near co-partisans,” Webster says, and he has researched ideological sorting.
However, “things like the affordability of homes [and] living in a good school district far outweigh any explicit partisan-based motivation for choosing one location over another.”
The neighbor agreeing with you about President Trump is “the cherry on top,” he says.
Webster points out that some people choose places for reasons tied to daily life. “Just as Chiappetta gravitated to a lower-tax city and state — which often tend to be conservative — ‘a Democrat might move to an area with good access to public transportation,’” Webster says.
“While desiring access to public transportation may correlate with being a Democrat, one’s decision to move to that area is based [on] that desire rather than being with other Democrats,” he adds. “Places shape people more than people sort into places,” he concludes.
Some researchers put even more emphasis on party realignment rather than voter migration to explain the biggest share of ideological sorting. Josh Zhang. an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. writes that “Southern whites converted Republican. suburbs of major cities converted Democratic. and the political map redrew itself without most people moving.”.
In 2023, Zhang and colleagues published a study that looked at ideological sorting on a granular level. Using anonymized cell-phone data and other real-time information. they found that “people in heavily Democratic or Republican neighborhoods tend to visit places — religious institutions. schools. restaurants — whose other visitors lean the same way.”.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, says that while the general trend is understood, “geographic sorting is rarely, if ever, going to be absolute. Despite aggregate sorting, there are always going to be individual exceptions in a given area.”
Wilbur says he understands the tradeoff. Even after deciding to move closer to fellow conservatives, he readily acknowledges ideological sorting is harmful for the country. “Nobody talks to each other anymore,” he says. The divisions in political discourse, he argues, have increasingly led to physical division.
Davis feels it too. She says she’s concerned about “isolating ourselves in bubbles.” She recalls the rare occasions when she was able to break through to someone in Odessa.
What she misses isn’t just geography. It’s the chance to be heard in the same room.
“That’s the importance of being able to sit down with someone, share a beer in a dive bar in West Texas, and have a conversation about why I’m leaving — what’s happening, and why I feel I have to go.”
United States politics ideological sorting red state blue state divide LGBTQ rights trans refugee Seattle Texas McKinney Conservative Move Flee Texas Flee Red States Obergefell v. Hodges population movement remote work housing costs taxes schools