Tim Henderson, Stateline

As President Donald Trump sends mixed messages about immigration enforcement, ordering new raids on farms and hotels just days after saying he wouldn’t target those industries, he has hardly mentioned the industry that employs the most immigrant laborers: construction.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is going after construction workers without legal status to meet its mass deportation goals — even as the country has a housing shortage and needs new homes built. A shortage of workers has delayed or prevented construction, causing billions of dollars in economic damage, according to a June report from the Home Builders Institute.

Almost a quarter of all immigrants without a college degree work in construction, a total of 2.2 million workers as of last month, before work site raids began in earnest. That’s more than the next three industries combined: restaurants (1.1 million), janitorial and other cleaning services (526,000) and landscaping (454,000), according to a Stateline analysis of federal Current Population Survey data provided by ipums.org at the University of Minnesota.

Within the construction industry, immigrant workers are now a majority of painters and roofers (both 53%) and comprise more than two-thirds of plasterers and stucco masons. U.S. citizens in construction are more likely to work as managers and as skilled workers, such as carpenters.

Many immigrant workers are likely living here illegally, although there are some working legally as refugees or parolees, and others are asylum-seekers waiting for court dates. There’s also a small number of legal visas for temporary farmworkers, construction workers and others.

The pool of immigrant workers Stateline analyzed were employed noncitizens ages 18-65 without a college degree, screening out temporary workers with high-skill visas.

About half of the immigrant laborers in construction are working in Southern states, including conservative-leaning Florida, North Carolina and Texas, where there is more building going on, according to the Stateline analysis. Another 584,000, or one-quarter, are in Western states, including Arizona, California and Nevada.

In recent months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, has conducted construction worksite raids in Florida in Tallahassee and near Ocala, and in South Texas and New Orleans, as well as more immigrant-friendly California and Pennsylvania.

Roofers may have been the first targeted by new workplace raids because of their visibility, said Sergio Barajas, executive director of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance, a California-based advocacy group with chapters in five other states.

“That’s the first place we heard about it. Roofers are right out there where you can see them,” Barajas said. He added that all segments of construction work have been targeted for ICE raids, and that even some legal workers are not showing up for work out of fear.

“Six or eight weeks ago, I would have said we weren’t affected at all. Now we are. There’s a substantial reduction in the number of workers who are showing up, so crews are 30%, 40% smaller than they used to be,” Barajas said.

In residential construction, a system of contractors and subcontractors opens the door to abuses, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Lopezlira said contractors hire workers, often immigrant laborers, for low-wage jobs and pay them in cash, to save money on benefits and make the lowest possible bid for projects.

“It becomes a blame game. The developers can say, ‘I hired this contractor and I thought he was above board and paying people a decent wage.’ And the contractors can say, ‘I rely on subcontractors,’” said Lopezlira. “It becomes a race to the bottom.”

In many places, residential construction draws more immigrant labor because of looser state and local regulations and lower pay. But in some states with weaker unions and rules that are less strict, such as Texas, the commercial construction industry also employs many immigrants who are here illegally.

Commercial construction costs are 40% lower in Texas than they are in large Northeastern cities where unions are more powerful, said David Kelly, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan.

“The large difference [in cost] suggests workers and their employers in some regions are not paying for income taxes, overtime, Social Security or unemployment insurance,” Kelly said in an email. “Since undocumented workers have limited employment options they may be more willing than others to accept these conditions.”

Despite political claims that Democratic policies result in immigrants taking jobs others need, noncitizen immigrant laborers were about 7% of jobholders nationally as of May — about the same as 2015, according to the Stateline analysis.

That share has hardly budged over the past 10 years, including in 2019 under the first Trump administration, dipping to 6% only in 2020 and 2021.

In construction, however, the share of jobs held by immigrant laborers has increased from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2024, according to the analysis. Immigrant laborers have gotten more than a third of the 1.5 million jobs added between 2015 and 2024, as home construction reached historic levels.

A list of 14 states, 298 counties and 200 cities deemed immigration sanctuaries by the Trump administration has disappeared from a government website but continues to hang over the heads of officials who face threats of losing federal funding.

“We were placed on a list with many other sheriffs across the nation for no clear reason and no clear cause,” said Sheriff Charles Blackwood of Orange County, North Carolina, a heavily Democratic county that nevertheless complies with a new state law requiring cooperation with immigration arrests.

“The list is gone. Am I satisfied that it was rectified? Yes. Am I satisfied that it’s over? No,” Blackwood said.

The list went up May 29. It called out the “cities, counties, and states that are deliberately obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws and endangering American citizens.” The White House had already threatened “suspension or termination” of federal funds to them.

Along with counties and cities, the list named the whole states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia as “state sanctuary” areas.

There was immediate reaction from some areas, not only Democratic states and counties with court-tested legal policies of declining cooperation with deportation, but also conservative areas mystified by their inclusion.

“We figure it must be some kind of mix-up. We certainly support our fellow law enforcement agencies,” said James Davel, administrative coordinator for Shawano County, Wisconsin, which was included despite no apparent immigration sanctuary policy. The county voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 by more than 67%.

One possible explanation: The county board passed a resolution in 2021 declaring Shawano a “Second Amendment Sanctuary County” as a sign of “vigorous support of the peoples’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

The list disappeared from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security website in a matter of days, after the National Sheriffs’ Association complained that many counties were erroneously included.

“It was quite the debacle,” said sheriffs’ association spokesperson Patrick Royal. “We are working with the administration to resolve as much as we can.”

But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a television appearance that the list would come back and was largely accurate.

“That list is absolutely continuing to be used and it is going to be identifying those cities and those jurisdictions that aren’t honoring law and justice,” Noem said in a Fox News interview June 1.

Courts have so far upheld local laws that limit cooperation with federal immigration arrests. California won a lawsuit on the issue in 2017 under the first Trump administration, and the same federal judge issued an injunction saying federal funds couldn’t be withheld on the basis of immigration cooperation during a new trial on the issue.

The national sheriffs’ association president, Sheriff Kieran Donahue of Canyon County, Idaho, said in a May 31 statement that the list “was created without any input, criteria of compliance, or a mechanism for how to object to the designation.” He said it was “an unfortunate and unnecessary erosion of unity and collaboration with law enforcement.” Canyon County was not on the list, though the city of Boise was.

The pushback from sheriffs was a sign of how seriously flawed the list was, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

“The real problem is, how are they defining sanctuary?” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “To have pushback from an association that is typically quite supportive of this administration and their agenda points to problems with definition.”

Watauga County, North Carolina, was on the list when it first appeared May 29 but came off before it was taken down. The county’s congressional representative, Republican Virginia Foxx, said in a Facebook post that she intervened.

In the post, Foxx called it “a mistake … made during the Biden administration that resulted in Watauga County being listed incorrectly as a sanctuary county.” She also said that “Watauga County is no longer listed” after she “contacted DHS.”

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group favoring less immigration, said her list of sanctuary jurisdictions included Watauga based on a June 2024 report from U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement listing it as among hundreds of others as “non-cooperative institutions.”

Vaughan said data she requested from ICE shows some counties in North Carolina were still not complying with all detainers this year through early February, but Watauga is not one of them.

“They should probably come off the list,” she said. “None of those sheriffs has contacted me about reviewing their policies or taking them off the map. I would be happy to do so, and have done so frequently with sheriffs in other states.”

Sheriff Len Hagaman of Watauga County told Stateline via email that he had contacted federal immigration officials and confirmed that his county, which voted Democratic for president last year by a 52% to 46% margin, had a solid record of cooperating with immigration arrests.

Hagaman alluded to an April Facebook post by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, calling out Watauga and eight other North Carolina counties as immigration sanctuaries.

“For several weeks now, I, along with other North Carolina sheriffs have had to endure gross and inaccurate misinformation regarding false allegations,” Hagaman wrote.

The Republican budget bill the U.S. House approved last month includes a surprise for the 40 states that have expanded Medicaid: penalties for providing health care to some immigrants who are here legally.

Along with punishing the 14 states that use their own funds to cover immigrants who are here illegally, analysts say last-minute changes to the bill would make it all but impossible for states to continue helping some immigrants who are in the country legally, on humanitarian parole.

Under the bill, the federal government would slash funding to states that have expanded Medicaid and provide coverage to immigrants who are on humanitarian parole — immigrants who have received permission to temporarily enter the United States due to an emergency or urgent humanitarian reason.

The federal government pays 90% of the cost of covering adults without children who are eligible under Medicaid expansion, but the bill would cut that to 80% for those states, doubling the state portion from 10% to 20%. That’s the same penalty the bill proposes for states that use their own money to help immigrants who are here illegally.

Ironically, states such as Florida that have extended Medicaid coverage to immigrants who are here on humanitarian parole but have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would not be harmed by the bill, said Leonardo Cuello, a Medicaid law and policy expert and research professor at the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

It is “wildly nonsensical and unfair” to penalize expansion states for covering a population that some non-expansion states, such as Florida, also cover, Cuello said. “It would appear that the purpose is more to punish expansion states than address any genuine concern with immigrant coverage.”

West Virginia is one of the states where lawmakers are nervously watching U.S. Senate discussions on the proposed penalty. Republican state Rep. Matt Rohrbach, a deputy House speaker, said West Virginia legislators tabled a proposal that would have ended Medicaid expansion if the federal government reduced its share of the funding, because the state’s congressional representatives assured them it wasn’t going to happen. Now the future is murkier.

Cuello called the proposed penalty “basically a gun to the head of the states.”

“Congress is framing it as a choice, but the state is being coerced and really has no choice,” he said.

There are about 1.3 million people in the United States on humanitarian parole, from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela as well as some Central American children who have rejoined family here. The Trump administration is trying to end parole from some of those countries. A Supreme Court decision May 30 allows the administration to end humanitarian parole for about 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Not many of those parolees qualify for Medicaid, which requires a waiting period or special status, but the 40 states with expanded Medicaid could be penalized anyway when they do start accepting them as they begin to qualify, said Tanya Broder, senior counsel for health and economic justice policy at the National Immigration Law Center.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of states and the District of Columbia already are considering scaling back Medicaid coverage for immigrants because of the costs.

The federal budget bill, named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is now being considered by the Senate, where changes are likely. The fact that so many states could be affected by the last-minute change could mean more scrutiny in that chamber, said Andrea Kovach, senior attorney for health care justice at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law in Chicago.

By her count, at least 38 states and the District of Columbia would be affected by the new restrictions, since they accepted some options now offered by Medicaid to cover at least some humanitarian parolees without a five-year waiting period.

“They’re all going to be penalized because they added in parolees,” Kovach said. “So that’s 38 times two senators who are going to be very interested in this provision to make sure their state doesn’t get their reimbursement knocked down.”

The change to exclude people with humanitarian parole was included in a May 21 amendment by U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican who chairs the House budget committee. Arrington’s office did not reply to a request for comment, though he has stressed the importance of withholding Medicaid from immigrants who are here illegally.

“[Democrats] want to protect health care and welfare at any cost for illegal immigrants at the expense of hardworking taxpayers,” Arrington said in a May 22 floor speech urging passage of the bill. “But by the results of this last election, it’s abundantly clear: The people see through this too and they have totally rejected the Democrats’ radical agenda.”

Some states already are considering cutting Medicaid coverage for immigrants, though Democratic lawmakers and advocates are pushing back.

Washington, D.C., Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed phasing out a program that provides Medicaid coverage to adults regardless of their immigration status, a move she says would save the District of Columbia $457 million.

Minnesota advocates protested a state budget deal reached last month with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz to phase out health care coverage for adults who are here illegally, a condition Republican lawmakers insisted on to avoid a shutdown.

Similarly, Illinois advocates are protesting new state rules that will end a program that has provided Medicaid coverage to immigrants aged 42-64 regardless of their legal status. The program cost $1.6 billion over three years, according to a state audit. The state will continue a separate program that provides coverage for older adults.

“Our position is that decision-makers in Illinois shouldn’t be doing Trump’s work for him,” said Kovach, of the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. “Let’s preserve health coverage for immigrants and stand up for Illinois immigrant residents who have been paying taxes into this state for years and need this coverage.”

Illinois state Sen. Graciela Guzmán, a Democrat whose parents are refugees from El Salvador, said many of her constituents in Chicago may be forced to cancel chemotherapy or lifesaving surgery because of the changes.

“It was a state budget, but I think the federal reconciliation bill really set the tone for it,” Guzmán said. “In a tough fiscal environment, it was really hard to set up a defense for this program.”

Oregon Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek is among the governors holding firm, saying that letting immigrants stay uninsured imposes costs on local hospitals and ends up raising prices for everyone.

“The costs will go somewhere. When everyone is insured it is much more helpful to keep costs down and reasonable for everyone. That’s why we’ve taken this approach to give care to everyone,” Kotek said at a news conference last month.

Medicaid does pay for emergency care for low-income patients, regardless of their immigration status, and that would not change under the federal budget bill.

Franny White, a spokesperson for the Oregon Health Authority, said her state’s Medicaid program covers about 105,000 immigrants, some of whom are here illegally. She said the policy, established by a 2021 state law, can save money in the long run.

“Uninsured people are less likely to receive preventive care due to cost and often wait until a condition worsens to the point that it requires more advanced, expensive care at an emergency department or hospital,” she said.

California was among the first states, along with Oregon, to offer health insurance to immigrants of all ages regardless of their legal status. But it is now considering cutting back, looking to save $5 billion as it seeks to close a $12 billion budget deficit. In May, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed freezing enrollment of immigrant adults who are here illegally, and charging them premiums to save money.

“It’s possible that other states will decide to cut back these services because of budgetary concerns,” said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF, a health policy research organization.

If the federal budget bill passes with the immigrant health care provision intact, states would have more than two years to adjust, since the changes would not take effect until October 2027.

“We have time to really understand what the landscape looks like and really create a legal argument to make sure folks are able to maintain their health care coverage,” said Enddy Almonord, director for Healthy Illinois, an advocacy group supporting universal health care coverage.

Steve Whalen loves his home state of Delaware and he’s proud to manufacture computers there that police officers use to “catch bad guys.” He said tariffs on imports from China and other countries, along with sharp cuts to government spending and the winding down of a program for small manufacturers, will make it harder for him to do that.

“We got into business to keep costs low for the ‘good guys,’ but tariffs or anything else that raises prices keeps us from doing that,” said Whalen, co-founder of Sumuri LLC in Magnolia, Delaware, which makes computer workstations for police and government investigations. Whalen has to buy materials overseas, often from China, and he said the tariffs could force him to triple his price on some workstations to $12,000.

Tariffs are the main tool President Donald Trump is wielding to try to boost manufacturing in the United States, calling the achievement of that goal “an economic and national security priority.” But the higher levies have led to retaliation and suspended shipments, and Whalen said they are just one of several Trump administration actions squeezing his small manufacturing business.

The wave of federal spending cuts, which has affected grants to state and local governments, could make his customers put off purchases. And the administration has moved to cut off funding for a $175 million state-based program that provides expert advice to smaller factories like his.

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The Delaware version of that program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, helped Sumuri fit expanded product lines into the limited space in its small-town factory.

“We were really having a tough time trying to figure out how to utilize our space efficiently,” Whalen said. “They came here and helped us organize and optimize, and it made a huge difference.”

On April 1, the Trump administration cut off funding for 10 such manufacturing programs that were up for renewal in Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming. Other state MEP programs will expire over the next year.

The administration gave a reprieve to those 10 states until the end of the fiscal year after objections from Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which manages the program, extended funding for the 10 states “after further review and consideration” and will “continue to evaluate plans for the program,” said agency spokesperson Chad Boutin.

The program has come under fire from Republicans since the George W. Bush administration first tried to end it in 2009, and again during the first Trump administration, but Congress has continued to fund it. The conservative Heritage Foundation said in a 2023 book that MEP’s functions “would be more properly carried out by the private sector.”

‘Dots don’t quite connect’

Buckley Brinkman, executive director of the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity, which works with his state’s MEP program, said it didn’t make much sense for the administration to shutter the program as it seeks to boost the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

“It’s one of those things where the dots don’t quite connect,” Brinkman said. “I mean, jeez, here’s a part of government that doesn’t cost a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things — less than $200 million a year — that’s returning 10-to-1 to the national treasury, working on a priority for the president.”

A 2024 Upjohn report found an even higher return: 17-to-1 on $175 million in the 2023 fiscal year, creating $3 billion in new federal tax revenue.

In Wisconsin, which has lost more than 138,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, some parts makers report that business is booming as manufacturers seek to avoid tariffs by finding U.S. alternatives to Chinese manufacturers, Brinkman said. But more broadly, he doubts that the tariffs will spark a manufacturing boom in the state.

“Do we want all this manufacturing back? Do we have the will to get it back? The answer to both those questions is ‘no,’” Brinkman said. “Even without the tariffs we don’t really want Americans doing a lot of those jobs that are in Chinese factories right now.”

In Delaware, the MEP helped Sumuri manage its expansion, but unpredictable tariffs and budgets are now a bigger danger, said Jason Roslewicz, Sumuri’s vice president of business development. He’s had to devote two employees to monitoring supply lines, tariff news and competitor pricing to stay afloat.

“We went from putting things together in a basement to a 19,000-square-foot facility, doing exactly what we’re supposed to do here in the U.S., and it’s all in danger of coming apart because of this problem,” Roslewicz said.

Other small manufacturers express similar concerns. TJ Semanchin, who owns Wonderstate Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin, said his business roasting and distributing coffee is in crisis because of the tariffs.

Wonderstate’s costs have almost doubled between tariffs on imported coffee and packaging materials from China, plus a cyclical rise in coffee prices. “I’m borrowing money to pay for this and at some point we’ll have to raise prices. We’ll have no choice,” Semanchin said.

An employee roasts coffee beans at Wonderstate Coffee’s facility in Madison, Wis. Owner TJ Semanchin said his costs to produce coffee have almost doubled between tariffs on imported coffee and packaging, and cyclical high prices for coffee. (Courtesy of Wonderstate Coffee)

But many Republican state officials, and even some Democrats, have backed Trump’s tariff push, including Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who credited the Trump administration with “reshoring manufacturing and restoring this middle class which has been eviscerated over the last 20 years.”

“There’s dislocation in the short term, there’s long-term opportunity,” Youngkin said in an April 15 interview on CNBC. He said his state is hearing more interest from manufacturers looking to build or expand local factories since Trump took office. For instance, Delta Star recently announced a plan to add 300 jobs building power transformers in Lynchburg.

“The president has been clear that there will be some level of tariffs, and folks are coming, and that’s good for Virginia,” Youngkin said in the CNBC interview.

Virginia’s MEP program, called Genedge, claims successes in streamlining production and quality control for local factory products including TreeDiaper, an automated tree watering device made in Ashland, and for advising EDM, a Lynchburg plastic product assembler that needed more efficient production to keep overseas competition at bay. But Virginia’s MEP is one of the state programs slated to expire in the next year.

Long-term trend

The slide in U.S. manufacturing jobs has continued on and off since 1979, and many experts say tariffs will not bring them back. Despite a modest bounce back under the Biden administration, the number of manufacturing jobs has declined from nearly 20 million in 1979 to less than 13 million today, even as the total U.S. workforce has grown from 89 million to 159 million during that period.

Manufacturing already has made a comeback

Manufacturing faces labor shortages, with many factories operating below capacity because they can’t find enough workers, according to Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University.

That doesn’t bode well for a mass reshoring of factories from China and other countries, but Miller doesn’t expect that to happen anyway.

“Firms are not planning on reshoring much of the work that was offshored 20 to 25 years ago,” Miller said. “I’m not concerned about having enough workers for manufacturing jobs that would be reshored because this isn’t going to happen.”

In a 2024 survey by the libertarian Cato Institute, 80% of Americans said America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing, but only 25% said they personally would be better off working in a factory. The Chinese government has poked fun at the idea with memes of American workers struggling to make Nike sneakers with sewing machines.

Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, said the idea of a manufacturing rebirth is a “mirage being conjured to attract the support of workers who have been underpaid in an increasingly unequal economy for the last 40 years, and are desperate for some hope of renewed upward mobility.”

Manufacturing “isn’t the magic wand to make that happen,” McCartin said.

“What we need is to raise workers’ wages and make the economy less prone to producing inequality,” McCartin said. “That mission is not at all what Trump is about. He is dealing in stale nostalgia.”

As vaccine skepticism gains a greater foothold in the Trump administration and some statehouses, some Americans may already be paying the price, with deaths from influenza on the rise.

Flu-related deaths hit a seven-year high in January and February, the two months that usually account for the height of flu season, according to a Stateline analysis of preliminary federal statistics. There were about 9,800 deaths across the country, up from 5,000 in the same period last year and the most since 2018, when there were about 10,800.

Despite that, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled or postponed meetings to prepare for next fall’s flu vaccine, when experts talk about what influenza strains they expect they’ll be battling.

The cancellations raised protests from medical professionals and state and federal officials. U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, said in a statement that her state is having its worst flu season in at least 15 years, with more deaths from flu and other causes as the state’s health care system struggles under the strain of flu patients.

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Some experts say putting off vaccine planning will only feed false narratives that discourage lifesaving vaccinations.

“These delays not only weaken pandemic preparedness but also undermine public confidence in vaccination efforts,” said Dr. Akram Khan, an Oregon pulmonologist and associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University who has studied attitudes toward vaccines.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has expressed doubt about the need for vaccines, including flu vaccines, despite evidence that they reduce deaths and hospitalizations.

Deaths fluctuate naturally from year to year depending on the severity of current flu strains and the effectiveness of that year’s vaccines. But some see a hesitancy to use any vaccine, fed by misinformation and political mistrust of government, already taking a toll on lives.

“It’s been a bad winter for viral respiratory infections, not just in the United States but across the Northern Hemisphere,” said Mark Doherty, a vaccine scholar and former manager for GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, a vaccine manufacturer.

“The U.S. does appear to be hit a bit harder, and it’s possible lower vaccination coverage is contributing to that,” Doherty said.

Flu vaccine distribution in the United States has been declining in recent years, and as of the first week of 2025 was down 16% from 2022, according to federal statistics.

The flu was a factor in 9,800 deaths in January and February, according to the analysis, using provisional data collected by states and compiled by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Florida hard hit

The highest death rates were in Oklahoma, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Kentucky, all at about four deaths per 100,000 population so far this year. Some counties in Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as Oklahoma and Kentucky, were even higher — at about six deaths per 100,000.

The highest rates have been among older people. Statistics show the deaths hit white people and American Indians especially hard.

Tragedies are happening across the country to people of all ages and races, however. A 43-year-old Indiana father died after a brief bout of the flu, according to family members. After two 10-year-olds died in Prince George’s County, Maryland, area schools drew crowds to vaccine clinics.

Doug Sides, a pastor at Yulee Baptist Church in northern Florida, has held funerals for three congregation members who died from flu — all within one month, all of them over 70 years old. That compares with only one victim of COVID-19 from his congregation during the pandemic, he said.

“Flu death is a reality,” Sides told Stateline on a phone call from a Jacksonville hospital, where he was visiting another 84-year-old congregation member who was rescued from her home with severe pneumonia from an unknown cause.

“I encourage my church members to keep their hands clean, use hand sanitizer, and to stay home if they’re feeling sick,” he said. He said he hasn’t personally gotten a flu vaccine recently because he gets conflicting advice about it — some doctors tell him to avoid them because he and some family members have cancer, while another “rides me all the time about getting a flu shot.”

“We’re all getting conflicting advice. We’re living in strange-o times,” he said. (The American Cancer Society says vaccination for people with cancer may or may not be recommended depending on individual circumstances.)

Warnings

Many states are relaxing vaccine requirements as public skepticism rises. But many are taking action to warn residents and reassure them that vaccinations are safe and can help prevent deaths, despite misinformation to the contrary.

Burlington County, New Jersey, has had the highest flu-associated death rate of any county this year, according to the analysis, with 31 deaths among fewer than 500,000 people. The county held 30 free vaccine clinics from September to January, then extended them into February because of the severity of the flu season, said Dave Levinsky, a spokesperson for the county health department.

In Oklahoma, death rates are highest in the eastern part of the state where the Cherokee Nation is centered. A state publicity campaign stresses that flu shots are safe, effective, and free at many community health centers. However, vaccination rates in the state are low compared with other states as of December, according to federal statistics: Only about 16% of Oklahoma residents had gotten flu vaccinations by then. Rates were even lower in Louisiana (just under 16%), Mississippi (12%), and Texas (10%).

States with the highest flu vaccination rates by December were Maine (37%), Connecticut, and Vermont (33%), and Wisconsin and Minnesota (31%). But even those were down since 2022.

People have become less likely to get vaccinated in recent years, a phenomenon researchers call “vaccine hesitancy.”

A report published last year in the medical journal Cureus found three-quarters of patients in a rural New York state community refused flu vaccine with comments such as “I do not trust vaccines” or “I do not believe in vaccines.” The most common reasons cited were that earlier vaccinations made them feel sick, that they got the flu anyway, or that they thought they shouldn’t need a new shot every year. (Doctors recommend flu vaccinations annually and note that even vaccinated patients who get the flu usually face less severe forms.)

And in a paper published in February in the journal Vaccine, researchers found that people refuse flu vaccinations for many of the same reasons they refused COVID-19 shots: a feeling of “social vulnerability” that leads to distrust of government and medical guidance. One hopeful sign, the report noted, is that vaccine recommendations from trusted health care professionals can turn around such attitudes.

“Unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy is deeply entangled with misinformation, political rhetoric and public distrust,” said Khan, the Oregon pulmonologist and the study’s author. “Scientific data alone may not be enough to shift public perceptions, as many vaccine decisions are driven by gut feelings and external influences rather than evidence.”

A major U.S. Supreme Court decision this summer was hailed as a conservative court’s broadside against a Democratic administration, giving red states more backing to delay or overturn policies they don’t like, such as transgender protections and clean energy goals.

But the ruling in the Loper Bright case, which granted courts more power to scrutinize federal rules, can go both ways. Experts say it will likely give blue states more leeway to attack any forthcoming policy changes from President-elect Donald Trump — ranging from immigration and the environment to Medicaid and civil rights.

The decision overturns a legal concept called “Chevron deference,” in place since 1984 and named after a case involving the Chevron oil company. That ruling granted federal agencies wide discretion in interpreting vague laws that had been passed by Congress and sent to the executive branch to sort out the details. Generally, courts deferred to the agency regulations.

Chevron deference became a superstar of the courts, cited in more than 18,000 federal court decisions.

The latest ruling wipes that all away. Experts said it will boost blue-state resistance to Trump policies. Lawsuits already are being planned in many statehouses, as California holds a special session to set aside money for legal fights, and other states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York also talk court strategy. Democratic governors in Colorado and Illinois formed a coalition in November to “fortify essential democratic rights nationwide.”

In effect, the ruling opens more federal rules to those court challenges. Blue states now have a new weapon to fight conservative federal rules on issues such as immigration, climate change, abortion access and civil rights.

Under Trump, many states might pursue Medicaid work requirements

Ironically, the original 1984 decision establishing more power for federal agencies was made by a conservative court that was paving the way for deregulation in the Reagan administration, noted Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families.

“It was a case that really opened the door to Reagan deregulation, sort of untying the hands of the [federal] agencies by saying, ‘We’re going to give you a lot of slack to start doing things,’” Cuello said.

“Fast-forward to today, and overturning Chevron really has the opposite effect,” Cuello said. “You’re handcuffing the new [Trump administration] agency from deregulating.

“It makes it hard for an agency to build out new things and it makes it hard to undo existing things,” he said. “There’s some irony to the fact that a conservative majority issued that ruling just before a conservative administration took office.”

Trump appointed three of the six justices who supported the decision.

Some Trump allies still see the ruling as a weapon against excessive regulation. Vivek Ramaswamy, chosen by Trump alongside tech billionaire Elon Musk to lead an advisory body the president-elect named the Department of Government Efficiency, said in a December post on X that the decision “paves the way for not a slight but a drastic reduction in the scope of the federal regulatory state.”

But most experts see the change as an obstacle to a new Republican administration looking to make sweeping changes but lacking enough support in Congress to pass large-scale legislation. Any proposals restricting access to abortion or attempting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid expansion will be more complicated, said Zachary Baron, a director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute.

“All these new policies are going to be challenged in court, and state attorneys general will certainly be leading the way.” Baron said. “I think there will be a lot of big legal fights to come.”

Now, it could become harder for a Trump administration to deregulate areas of the economy, crack down on immigration, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, or remove protections for gender and LBGTQ+ status. The Biden administration similarly has run into roadblocks.

“We have already seen conservative judges point to Loper Bright as one reason to block the Biden administration’s efforts to expand the reach of nondiscrimination protections, including with respect to LGBTQ+ folks,” Baron said.

For instance, federal courts in Florida, Mississippi and Texas — in response to lawsuits brought by various Republican states — prevented an Affordable Care Act rule banning gender identity-based discrimination from taking effect in July. Each ruling cited Loper Bright as one factor.

With Trump’s election, it’s now blue states that have a sharper tool to combat Republican agendas.

“To the extent that the Trump administration tries to radically rewrite these nondiscrimination protections again, he may well find that Democratic state AGs [attorneys general] will be able to successfully block such efforts as a result of Loper Bright also,” Baron said.

Congress has not approved a major immigration or environmental law for decades. That has forced both Democratic and Republican administrations to change policy through either executive order or federal regulations that can now be more easily challenged by hostile states in the courts.

Blue states prepare for battle over Trump’s environmental rollbacks

“If you like the administration that’s advancing policies, then Loper Bright is not a good thing for what would happen when states challenge those policies,” said Nancy Morawetz, a New York University law professor who helps run an immigrant legal clinic, speaking at a September conference on immigration law.

Trump’s election does not change that, Morawetz told Stateline later.

“If the administration is anti-immigrant, Loper Bright provides stronger grounds for having a court look at whether it is breaking the law,” Morawetz said. “The executive branch gets less deference.”

The court’s decision may also help immigrants themselves when they go to court to challenge federal policies on deportation and legal status, Morawetz said.

Red states looking to enact Medicaid work requirements under a more amenable Trump administration also might be thwarted by the Loper Bright decision, Cuello said. The first Trump administration lost every court challenge when it granted state requests for work requirements, he said, and Loper Bright will make it even harder this time.

“Even with the more generous standards granted to the agency [under the previous Chevron deference], those cases got shot down, and so now you would expect they’d be even more likely to be shot down,” Cuello said. “The win is harder.”

The Loper Bright decision could also hamper promised efforts by a Trump administration to unwind environmental regulations, by making it easier for blue states to challenge any changes. That would flip the script from today’s lawsuits, in which red states are fighting the stricter regulations of coal-fired power plants.

Expecting challenges, blue states vow to create ‘firewall’ of abortion protections

Red states have also fought new Biden administration vehicle pollution standards, and Trump allies have threatened to undermine scientific integrity policies seen as preventing deregulation by shielding scientists from political interference.

The Loper Bright decision went 6-2 in favor of New Jersey herring fishermen who opposed a 2020 federal rule requiring them to pay salaries for the third-party observers on their boats who were there to ensure compliance with regulations. The fishermen argued that the cost, up to $710 per day, had no legal justification and cut their family profits by 20%.

Lower courts ruled against the fishermen, saying the often-cited Chevron deference principle did not allow them to challenge the federal rule. The Supreme Court struck down the principle, ruling that courts are required “to exercise their independent judgment” on federal rules.

“Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

In a dissenting opinion joined by liberal justices, Associate Justice Elena Kagan called the deference to agency interpretations “part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds … keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest. And the rule is right.”

At 43, Sharon Reese is a housing market refugee — forced to return to her Ohio hometown after 18 years in Las Vegas, despite a successful career training dancers for nightclub acts.

“If you don’t have between $600,000 and $800,000, you’re not buying a house out there,” Reese said. “Las Vegas has lot of opportunity, and it was affordable in 2006, but it’s become unaffordable. We quit our jobs and moved across the country. We’re hoping this is the right decision for us.”

Reese and her family are unpacking at her parents’ Youngstown home, a temporary stop until she and her husband, who was a casino worker in Las Vegas, can find jobs and a house of their own with their young daughter. Youngstown is one of the last two metro areas in the country where a household with nearly any income should be able to find a single-family home they can afford to buy, according to an analysis of April data by the National Association of Realtors.

Before the pandemic, there were 20 states that were considered affordable as a whole under the group’s definition, including the presidential election swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As of this year, there is none. Even the states with the closest match between income and home prices — Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan — didn’t make the cut.

Since the pandemic, two states, Montana and Idaho, have surpassed California as the most unaffordable states for local homebuyers, according to the analysis. Hawaii and Oregon round out the list of the five least affordable states.

The Realtors’ analysis assigns affordability scores to states and large metro areas on a scale of 0 to 2. A score of 0 means that no household can afford any home on the market.

A score of 1 means that homes on the market are affordable to households in proportion to their position on the income ladder — in other words, 100% of families can afford at least some homes on the market. And a score of 2 would mean that all households can afford all homes on the market, but no state or metropolitan area even reached a 1.

The least affordable metro area was Los Angeles, which scored only 0.3, while the metro areas of Youngstown (0.97) and Akron (0.95) in Ohio were rated most affordable.

According to the latest estimates from July by real estate company Redfin, median single-family home sale prices were $175,000 in Youngstown and $239,500 in Akron. That compared with $487,000 in Las Vegas, $490,000 in Boise and $1 million in the Los Angeles area.

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The Las Vegas area, where the Reese family had lived for 18 years, had a score of 0.5 on the Realtors’ scale. No state earned an overall score of 1, though Iowa, West Virginia and Ohio came close, at nearly 0.9. The least affordable states, Montana, Idaho, California, Hawaii and Oregon, all had scores around 0.4.

Nationwide, home affordability has evaporated over the past three years as interest rates have gone up, according to a monitoring index maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It measures affordability more simply than the Realtors’ analysis, focusing solely on the ability of a homebuyer with the median household income to buy the median-priced house.

By that measure, the national affordability percentage was above 100% between January 2019 and April 2021. But it fell as low as 67% last year and remained below 70% in June, meaning a homebuyer with the median income had only two-thirds of the earnings needed to buy the median-priced house.

Home prices have increased by 47% nationwide just since 2020, according to a June report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. A major factor is that there aren’t many homes for sale: Many current homeowners are reluctant to sell because they’re locked into historically low interest rates. Meanwhile, investors have gobbled up single-family starter homes, reducing the supply.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said there are signs of more houses coming up for sale. For example, there was a 20% increase in houses and condos for sale in July compared with July 2023, according to the association.

“We are still short on inventory, but I think the worst is over,” Yun said. “We have seen mortgage rates begin to decline, so it’s less of a big financial penalty to move and give up a low interest rate. And the second factor is just the passage of time — life-changing events always occur, a death, a divorce, a new child or just job relocation, and that means changing residence.”

Along with high prices and interest rates, home buyers are getting slammed by higher property taxes and insurance costs, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Home prices in northeast Ohio might be lower because the area has a stable population, curbing competition and bidding wars, said Alison Goebel, executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center, a Columbus nonprofit aimed at revitalizing Ohio cities.

“Our population numbers have remained fairly steady in the last several decades, so we don’t have egregious demand and supply issues like you see on the West Coast and other rapidly growing areas," Goebel said.

Montana and Idaho are the least affordable states: Housing prices are exploding in both, as deep-pocketed newcomers — many of them white-collar employees working in high-wage jobs based out of state — have driven up prices beyond what longtime residents can afford.

The city of Boise scored 0.4 on the Realtors’ affordability scale, on par with the New York City area. Like Montana, Idaho has natural beauty that is attracting people who are cashing out of more expensive areas, said Nicki Hellenkamp, Boise’s director of housing and homelessness policy.

“It’s one of the Zoom boom towns, where it’s beautiful but the wages are low, and the cost of living is low. If you sell your house in Los Angeles and buy two houses here, as my uncle did, then you can have a very different standard of living,” Hellenkamp said.

It’s not just home prices — rents are up 40% in Boise since the pandemic began, she added.

“Obviously wages didn’t go up 40%, so some people have been displaced,” Hellenkamp said.

The city is working on modest proposals to help with down payments and to create more affordable apartments, she said, but building more affordable housing will mean state and federal cooperation to help solve labor shortages and soaring material costs.

“We can’t do this alone as a city. This issue is a big one,” Hellenkamp said.

Desperate for affordable housing, some cities sweeten tax breaks for developers

A state housing task force in Montana made recommendations in June to streamline construction of houses and apartments statewide and create incentives for cities to loosen zoning and allow denser housing.

A member of the task force, Kendall Cotton, said he personally found it impossible to buy a house in Montana, but was happy to recently purchase half a duplex for his growing family.

“We were thrilled to have that as an option, just to get our foot in the door and start on our journey to homeownership,” Cotton said. “Montana is an in-demand place. We’ve been kind of discovered in the last couple of years.”

Republicans and Democrats have come together to support fighting restrictive zoning, said Cotton, director of the Frontier Institute, a nonprofit policy and educational organization.

“We’re a free-market organization that tends to lead from right of center, but when I was at the governor’s press conference to support these issues, I was standing shoulder to shoulder with a Democratic socialist city council member and we were all united on this,” Cotton said.

Shallon Lester, a YouTube influencer who moved from New York to Montana and paid $1 million for a five-bedroom house in Bozeman in 2022, said she likes both the lower cost of living and the lifestyle there. Locals tend to think she’s an outsider “invading” the area, she said, but “people like me take nothing from this economy — we only give. We spend and spend.”

“People who are remote workers are sick of the cost of living in cities,” Lester added. “There’s a mass return to the concept of the simple life.”

Housing boom in most of the US could ease shortage, but cost is still a problem

Even in the Youngstown metro area, which includes a slice of Pennsylvania, housing can be a challenge for residents with low incomes. A forthcoming regional housing study has found a 4,000-unit shortage for households making less than $25,000 a year; 7,500 people are on a waiting list for subsidized housing. Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to struggle with housing costs, as are older people, young singles and families with young children, according to preliminary conclusions discussed in April.

But for many, Youngstown is a rare island of affordability. Jim Johnston, 40, a digital account executive at media company Nexstar in Youngstown, said many of his high school classmates from the area, who now live in places such as Montana, Illinois and Maryland, envy his decision to stay there and buy a $250,000 house in 2022 when interest rates were lower.

“One of them has a mortgage payment three times mine for the same size house, and a child care bill that’s bigger than my mortgage,” said Johnston. “They could put an extra $50,000 or $60,000 a year in their pockets. Remote work has opened up new possibilities for them, and they’re considering this very seriously.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

Growth in Asian, Black and Hispanic communities is transforming cities and suburban counties, especially in red states such as Florida, Indiana and Texas, according to a new Stateline analysis. The presidential swing states of Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania also were among the fastest-changing states.

Nationally, the share of the non-white population grew in 47 states between mid-2020 and mid-2023, according to the analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates released in June.

Nevada had the largest change, with the non-white population — mostly Hispanic — growing 2.3 percentage points to 54.3% of the population. Growth in the number of Black residents propelled Georgia to a near non-white majority, up about 1 point to 49.9% of state population, amid continuing Black migration that helped turn the state’s 2020 vote Democratic for president and U.S. Senate.

Hispanic growth was the dominant factor across states, in blue and red counties and in rural and urban areas, according to the Stateline analysis. Growth in the Hispanic population is coming partly from immigration but mostly from higher birth rates, the Census Bureau said in a release.

Only three states — Montana, South Carolina and Tennessee — and the District of Columbia have seen their white population share grow since 2020.

The increase in Hispanic and Black residents — and where it’s happening — could sway outcomes in the 2024 presidential race and local and state races, although these groups’ political allegiances have shifted recently. Black voters have long been considered among Democrats’ most enthusiastic supporters, but their support has declined somewhat. And Republicans are making increasing inroads among Hispanic voters.

Swing states see newcomers as Americans move from blue to red counties

Many of the largest changes were driven by Black and Asian migration to cities and suburbs in job-rich red states. The economy is going gangbusters by nearly every national metric, and the availability of jobs outside major cities has become a significant magnet.

That includes Indiana’s Marion County, home of Indianapolis, and Kaufman County, Texas, a Dallas suburb, where Black population growth helped create new non-white majorities as of mid-2023. In Kaufman County, the Black population grew 6 percentage points to 23% and the Hispanic population grew 3 points to 28%. Kaufman County elected its first African American district judge in 2020.

“We do have jobs here, and all those counties are growing dramatically,” said Lloyd Potter, Texas’ state demographer. Asian, Black and Hispanic residents are moving to suburbs from the city of Dallas, he said, and from California and New York state. Meanwhile, local white populations are aging and diminishing, with more deaths and fewer births.

“These are some of the biggest and most significantly growing urban areas in the country, and [the new census data] indicates tremendous diversification in the population. It’s been occurring for some time, but it really seems to have accelerated over the last five years or so,” Potter said.

New groceries, same politics

Kaufman County’s growing Black community remains a minority in a county that voted two-thirds Republican for president in 2020 and governor in 2022. The county commission held hearings on moving a Confederate memorial statue away from the entrance of the county courthouse in 2021, but ultimately decided not to act.

“It’s very red here. It’s super red,” said James Henderson, a longtime resident of the county who favored moving the statue. He said he sees more African Americans like himself moving to Kaufman County cities such as Forney and working remotely for Dallas-based companies. There also are more African immigrants, he said.

Whether increased racial diversity will lead to political change is an open question. Black migration to the Atlanta area in Georgia had an effect on elections in 2018 and possibly 2020, but Republicans remain firmly in charge of state governments there and in Texas.

More Hispanic families are reaching the middle class

The younger population is growing more diverse, said demographer William Frey of the left-leaning Brookings Institution think tank. But the older population, which is growing as baby boomers age and is the most likely to vote, is still mostly white, he said.

Asian growth in Collin County, another Dallas suburb, and Hispanic growth in Florida’s Duval County (home of Jacksonville) also helped turn those large counties majority non-white since 2020.

Many of the new Collin County residents are Telugu-speaking tech workers from southern India who have found an economic niche in remote work for Dallas firms, said Farhad Wadia, president of the FunAsia branded radio stations in the area. Their presence is bringing subtle changes to the community, he noted.

New transplants often hold elaborate Hindu housewarming ceremonies that include boiling milk to overflowing to signify prosperity. Stores cater to their tastes with tangy tamarind-based curries and sun-dried peppers.

“If you go into Costco here you will think you are in South India,” Wadia said. “A lot of them come from California, where they could sell their 1,000-square-foot house for a million dollars and get more bang for the buck here.”

Growing rural diversity

Of the 16 counties that turned majority non-white between 2020 and 2023, five were in Texas. Most of the 16 counties voted Republican in 2020.

They included two counties each in California (Napa and Yuba counties, both near Sacramento) and New Mexico (rural Quay and Roosevelt counties), and one each in Alabama (rural Conecuh County), Kansas (rural Stanton County), Mississippi (Lowndes County, along the Alabama border), New Jersey (suburban Somerset County) and South Carolina (Florence County, near Myrtle Beach).

In Georgia, Atlanta suburb Henry County had the largest shift of any county outside Texas, with Black population growth fueling a 7-point increase in the non-white population to 69%. The county was already majority-Black in 2020; retired basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, who bought a home in the county in 2016, helps the local sheriff’s office with community relations and recently hosted a summer youth sports camp.

The number of job openings has declined sharply in every state

Hispanic growth also lifted the non-white population share in the presidential swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Texas’ Liberty County, where Hispanic growth helped drive a new non-white majority of 52% — up 7 points since 2020 — schools are bursting with new Hispanic students, said Stephen McCanless, superintendent of the Cleveland Independent School District in Liberty County.

The district, where about 88% of students are Hispanic, grew from about 10,000 to 12,000 students in the past school year and could reach 14,000 next year, he said.

The district has spent more than $17 million on portable classrooms since growth started in 2015, including $2 million in the past year, as bond issues to build more schools have been voted down.

“Tough decisions had to be made. I cut $7 million out of the budget in order to start the [next] school year without dipping into the fund balance too much,” McCanless said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

Originally published by Stateline

In recent years, millions of people across the United States have moved from Democratic cities to Republican suburbs, complicating the politics of swing states in a pivotal election year, according to a Stateline analysis.

Republican suburban counties in four swing states — Georgia in the South and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Midwest — gained the most new arrivals; heavily Democratic cities lost the most. In Western swing states Arizona and Nevada, meanwhile, the biggest people magnets have been slightly Democratic cities that are expected to be hotly contested.

Those shifts reflect a nationwide trend: In Republican counties, as defined by the 2020 presidential vote, 3.7 million more people have moved in than have left since 2020, while Democratic counties had a net loss of 3.7 million, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates and county presidential election data kept by the University of Michigan.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates released in March included people who moved within the country between mid-2020 and mid-2023, a time of pandemic dislocations, lockdowns in big cities, and the rise of remote work that fed a search for affordable housing in less crowded and more scenic settings. Those settings, as it turns out, also tend to be more conservative. The census numbers do not include births or immigration.

Whether the newcomers will vote Democratic this year, or whether they were disenchanted with Democratic policies in their former homes and will vote Republican, remains to be seen. The changes might affect local and congressional races the most, but even a few movers crossing state lines could sway presidential vote totals in swing states.

“We are looking at an election to be determined by a shift of such small numbers of people in each of these states that a few thousand votes in any one state can impact the electoral vote there,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who has edited and helped write several books on presidential swing states.

The counties gaining the most movers in Georgia (Forsyth County), Michigan (Ottawa County), Pennsylvania (Cumberland County) and Wisconsin (Waukesha County) were solidly for then-incumbent President Donald Trump in 2020. But in the three Midwest counties, Joe Biden had the best showing for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Politics in a changing county

In some of the growing counties, there has been tension as new residents bring their own expectations.

“People keep moving here because they like it, then they try to make it like the place they left,” said David Avant, who runs a business networking website in Forsyth County, Georgia. His county gained about 17,000 new arrivals between mid-2020 and mid-2023, according to the Stateline analysis.

Politics might not yet be changing in some of the red counties surveyed. In Michigan, Doug Zylstra became the first Democrat elected in almost 50 years to the 11-member Ottawa County Board of Commissioners in 2018 and was reelected in 2022, but the commission took a more conservative turn in 2023 when a new majority took office.

“The people of Ottawa County chose to replace the previous Republican-majority board, which promoted Democratic ideology and practices,” said Sylvia Rhodea, one of the new Republicans on the commission.

In a January 2023 meeting, Rhodea criticized the previous board’s diversity, equity and inclusion program as “based on the premise that county resident characteristics of being 90% white and largely conservative were problematic for businesses” and as one that “seeks to replace the American value of equality with the Marxist value of equity.”

5 Southern states had most of the nation’s population growth

“There is not a racial divide in Ottawa County, there is an ideological divide. The welcoming of people will continue, but the ideology that tries to divide us has to end,” Rhodea said in the meeting.

The Rev. James Ellis III, who is Black and who moved to Ottawa County in April 2023, lives in the area that elected the county’s sole Democrat. He said the “racial divide” remark “feels inaccurate to me, not to mention unhelpful.” And while he said he has no party affiliation, he thinks “people on every side have a hard time listening to each other.”

Ellis grew up in Maryland and has lived in cities including Washington, D.C., and British Columbia, Canada. He attended a local seminary in Ottawa County.

“Ottawa County is not a utopia. It is an area full of wonderful citizens, lakeshore living, lots of churches and winter sports, and yet simultaneously it has power dynamics and inequities like any place that need addressing,” said Ellis, of Maplewood Reformed Church. The county’s population is about 83% white with small but growing Asian, Black and Hispanic populations.

‘They vote for the same thing’

In Wisconsin, affluent and suburban Waukesha County has gained about 5,200 movers, while urban Milwaukee County has lost 37,000. Still, that’s not likely to change the politics of either county soon, said Steve Styza, a Republican who won an open seat on the Waukesha County Board of Supervisors in Tuesday’s election.

“Democrats are definitely trying to make as big of a push as they can to turn the most conservative counties in our state blue or purple and try to gain some kind of foothold because it is strategically important,” Styza said before the election. “If I was on the other team, I’d be trying to do the same thing.”

Why Republican-led states keep leaving a group that verifies voter rolls

Waukesha County voted almost 60% for Trump in 2020, though the roughly 38.8% vote for Biden was the highest share for a Democrat since 1964. The county’s 2022 vote for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was slightly higher at 39.4%. Milwaukee County voted 69% for Biden in 2020 and 71% for Evers in 2022.

Like Avant in Georgia, Styza said that Democratic newcomers sometimes pose a threat to the suburban lifestyle that drew them there in the first place.

“They say, ‘Well, I gotta get out of there because of what’s going on,’ and then they vote for the same thing in a different place and then wonder why things turn out poorly,” Styza said.

In the Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada, the politics are similar, but the largest cities are still growing fast. Arizona’s Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, voted Democratic in 2020 for the first time since 1948, when Harry Truman carried the county.

In Nevada, Clark County, the home of Las Vegas, has voted Democratic for president since 1992, but the Republican vote has been growing since 2008, reaching 44% for Trump in 2020. Some of the new Republican strength could be transplants from California’s conservative inland region east of Los Angeles, said David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“In contrast, Reno, which has been voting more Democratic in recent cycles, is attracting more liberal Californians from Sacramento and the Bay Area,” Damore said. “Statewide, the vote share that the Democrats lost in Las Vegas, they gained in Reno.”

Migrating Professionals Grow Black Middle Class in the South and West

Some conservative scholars argue that residential moves from blue to red areas show a political preference or at least an attraction to the results of conservative policies.

“Every day, Americans appear to have a clear preference about the sort of state government they want. Far from flocking to states that have imposed mandates and lockdowns, they have freely chosen to move to states that focus on securing the mandates of liberty,” Jeffrey Anderson, president of the conservative nonprofit American Main Street Initiative, wrote in an analysis of state-by-state moving statistics published in City Journal in January.

Other demographers see the movement of people as a search for housing and jobs that doesn’t take politics into account.

“Domestic migration [moving] across state and metro areas is not strongly affected by politics but by labor market and housing conditions,” said William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution. He added that movers from blue to red states “could make their destination states less red — Arizona and Nevada are good examples.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.