Fox News announced on Monday that “Americans are flocking from blue states to red states” as Sean Hannity, who says he has left New York for Florida, interviewed Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas.
The Governor says her red state’s economy is booming thanks to the tax cuts she’s implemented during her first year as governor. Huckabee Sanders said: “We’ve already cut taxes by $300 million. And we are going to keep working until we phase it out entirely.”
(Note: She does not mention that under the American Rescue Plan, Arkansas will receive $1.6 billion in direct state fiscal aid and $795 million in local government aid from the federal government.)
Arkansas’ economy is booming. We’ve already cut taxes by $300 million. And we are going to keep working until we phase it out entirely. pic.twitter.com/zV7N2ZaX4D
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) January 8, 2024
Huckabee Sanders added: “We’re seeing a massive influx of new people to our state” and pointed out that “people are fleeing Gavin Newsom’s California.”
Trump supporter Huckabee Sanders took the opportunity to take a swipe at Newsom by saying he’s “following the Joe Biden model, and every single thing he touches, he seems to screw up.”
While state-to-state migration data from the U.S. Census backs up Huckabee Sanders’ claim of an influx of people: 86,375 people moved to the state of Arkansas in 2022, over 10,000 more than the previous year, a minority of them (about 10 percent) came from California.
According to the same data, most of the people moving to Arkansas are coming from other red states. More than 17,000 of them came from the red state of Texas, the most of any state. Blue state California came in second with 7,783. And red states Florida (7,065), Oklahoma (5,995), and Louisiana (4,994) made the top five list.
Note: Approximately 74,000 people left Arkansas in 2022 with more than 17,000 moving to Texas, the state with the highest number of Californian transplants (105,434) in 2020-2021.
