by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner at WirePoints
The battle for the presidency is heating up as potential candidates Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Illinois’ Gov. J.B. Pritzker continue to go after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Newsom just ran ads decrying the lack of “freedom” in Florida. And Pritzker recently traveled to Florida to give a speech ripping the state and Gov. DeSantis’s policies of “racism, homophobia and misogyny” and declaring that DeSantis is “just Trump with a mask on.”
Listening to just those two, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Americans have been leaving Florida in droves – not only to escape DeSantis but also the policies set by the previous two decades of Republican governors.
To the contrary, Florida is the big winner when it comes to the state-to-state competition for migrating Americans and their money. California and Illinois, meanwhile, remain two of the nation’s biggest losers.
The most-recent state-to-state migration data released by the Internal Revenue Service shows Florida netted a gain of 167,000 residents (tax filers and their dependents) in report-year 2020 – the most in the nation. In contrast, the IRS data shows California lost 263,000 residents and Illinois lost 101,000 residents that same year…
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