When Jessa Davis came out as a trans woman three years ago, staying in deep-red Texas felt impossible, prompting her to sell her house in Odessa and relocate to Seattle, Washington.
Davis describes herself as a “trans refugee,” recalling that life in Texas meant living in a “pretty hostile and frankly dangerous” place where she experienced “a lot of close calls, a lot of threats.”
She had spent years volunteering with organizations advocating for trans and queer rights in Odessa before concluding she had “one life” and did not want to spend the next two decades fighting a battle she was uncertain of winning.
Now co-chair of a commission advising Seattle on LGBTQ issues, Davis has urged the city to declare a state of emergency to provide resources for the growing number of people relocating to escape anti-LGBTQ laws elsewhere.
Her story reflects what sociologists call “ideological sorting,” a concept popularized in the 2008 book “The Big Sort,” which sought to explain the deepening divide between conservative and liberal America.
A 2022 study found that “at no point since the Civil War have partisans been as clustered within individual states as today,” underscoring just how dramatically the American political map has reorganized itself.
But researchers increasingly argue the picture is more nuanced, with ideological alignment often just one factor among several driving Americans to pack up and move across state lines.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Davis is Kirby Wilbur, a conservative Seattle talk show host and former Washington state Republican chair who also describes himself as a “refugee” from his home city.
Wilbur and his wife Trina relocated to McKinney, Texas, a conservative Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, where he was struck by the affordability, noting “there were like 3,000 square foot homes with a pool for $300,000.”
The 2020 George Floyd protests, which brought what Wilbur characterized as mobs, looting, and vandalism to Seattle’s streets, sealed the decision, with the couple telling each other, “No, we can’t live this way. This is it.”
Wilbur connected with Paul Chabot, who runs Conservative Move, a specialty realty service founded in 2017 that has helped thousands of people relocate from blue states to red states, according to Chabot.
Chabot, a retired U.S. Navy commander, says his clients are not simply fleeing political opponents but rather feel “alone, alienated, ostracized,” noting that “it’s not like people are leaving just because they hate Democrats.”
On the other side, Bob McCranie launched a web page called Flee Texas in 2020, which quickly expanded into Flee Red States as demand poured in from across the country, with McCranie reporting more than 875 people now on his mailing list.
McCranie says the stakes for some clients run far deeper than neighborly political disagreements, with people asking “where would we be safe as a couple and as a family” amid ongoing legal challenges to same-sex marriage rights.
U.S. Census Bureau data for 2024 shows that roughly equal numbers of people moved between Texas and Washington in both directions, but a broader Stateline analysis found Republican counties gained 3.7 million people from mid-2020 to mid-2023 while Democratic counties lost the same amount.
Steven Webster, an associate professor of political science at Indiana University who has researched ideological sorting, cautions against overstating the partisan motivation, arguing that “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.”
Webster describes finding politically aligned neighbors as “the cherry on top,” while noting that a Democrat moving somewhere with strong public transit is acting on a practical preference that merely correlates with partisanship.
His conclusion cuts against the simplest narratives about migration: “Places shape people more than people sort into places.”
Bruce Desmarais, a professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University, found in a 2019 study that people tend to move from one left-leaning city to the next, or from one right-leaning area to another, reinforcing existing political geography rather than dramatically reshaping it.
Josh Zhang, an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, argues that party realignment rather than migration explains much of the shift, noting that “Southern whites converted Republican, suburbs of major cities converted Democratic, and the political map redrew itself without most people moving.”
Even Wilbur, who made the move to be closer to fellow conservatives, acknowledges the broader cost of geographic sorting, lamenting that “nobody talks to each other anymore” as political divisions increasingly manifest as physical ones.
Davis echoes the concern, warning against “isolating ourselves in bubbles” and arguing that physical sorting eliminates the rare but valuable opportunities for genuine cross-partisan connection, like the chance to “sit down with someone, share a beer in a dive bar in West Texas, and have a conversation about why I’m leaving.”
