Newsom's Per Capita Shuffle

Leveraging Politifact for a Motte and Bailey

https://twitter.com/Freakoutery/status/1730424096272285783

That’s not a fact, it’s a lie, and it’s a collaborative lie between Newsom and Politifact, with Politifact providing the technically-correct-Motte and Gavin providing the pants-on-fire-Bailey. This behavior isn’t limited to Newsom, nor the Democrats, nor even to politicians in general. You might see this in your business or personal life. Folks in the gun control argument and other social science arguments play shell games with total numbers and per capita numbers very commonly, so examining Newsom’s tricky lie should be instructive no matter which side of which ideological fence on which you sit. Let’s begin.

The Facts

In his tweet above, Newsom states:

Newsom: More Floridians move to California than the other way around. It's a fact.

It’s a lie. Anyone can look it up themselves at the United States Census Bureau repository for state-to-state migration flows, for every year going back to 2005. The table there only presents estimates, and we’re going to strip the error bounds out for simplicity. I truncated this table for discussion, so you didn’t have to.

In 2022, 50,701 people migrated from California to Florida, and only 28,557 people migrated from Florida to California. For every one Floridian who moved to California, 1.78 Californians moved to Florida.

But this wasn’t even the biggest differential, nor the biggest ratio. In the same year 102,442 Californians moved to Texas, while only 42,279 Texans moved to California, for a ratio of 2.42 leaving California for every Texan coming in. Even more stark, 74,157 Californians moved to Arizona, while only 27,142 Arizonians moved to California. For every Arizonian that headed to California, 2.71 Californians went the other direction.

Certainly lots of Californians moved to Florida, but in terms of the differential, Florida barely cracks the top four. If such a thing is bragworthy, the governor of Arizona needs to brag about stealing Californians. It seems apparent that this ongoing dispute between California and Florida governors has little to do with their respective states and more to do with 2024 posturing.

Back to the lie. Politifact didn’t check the lie at all, even though Newsom pretends they did to win Twitter Points. Politifact did check a different statement from a June 12 TV interview:

Newsom: Per capita, more Floridians move to California than Californians moving to Florida.

Bolded emphasis is mine. This statement is true, and the phrase “per capita” does all the heavy lifting here. Effectively, Newsom is actually saying the following:

Not Actually Newsom: “Look dude, there’s a shitpile of people in California, so if my state has a net loss in immigration to yours, it’s just because California’s so big that lots of people come and go, and we’ve got a net loss to everyone right now.”

Well, yes, but the important bit is that California has a net migration loss in general. As Newsom does correctly point out, California isn’t the only state to experience this. Here’s a map.

Most of the deep liberal states are dropping, and the only states on the highest rise are conservative ones. There are some exceptions, however, such as the Mississippi delta and West Virginia - places that are too blue collar for the fleeing liberal staters to stomach.

Newsom’s per capita comparison becomes especially absurd if you consider an extreme outlier case.

We don’t have numbers on net migration between California and Midway Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, but we do know that around 40 people live there compared to around forty million in California. If 20 people on Midway moved to California, and one million and twenty moved from California to Midway, then 50% of Midway’s population would have moved to California, while only 2.6% of California’s population would have moved to Midway. Even with a one million person net differential, Gavin could say “per capita more Midway Islanders moved to California than Californians moved to Midway,” and Politifact, when faced with this immense immigration differential, would still rank his statement Mostly True.

It’s mostly true because it is true, despite being entirely misleading. Politifact also makes mathematical errors in their own fact check, at least per the census data above:

In raw numbers, close to 13,000 more Californians moved to Florida than the other way around. However, this does not account for the states’ population sizes. California has about 17 million more residents than Florida. And Newsom specified he was citing "per capita" data.

The US Census Bureau has almost double that figure in our table above, 22,000, but it’s honestly a relative quibble when dealing with forty million people. We can put the Census numbers in perspective like this:

• If you were in a town with 100,000 Californians, 392 moved to Florida in 2022.

• In your same town, 73 Floridians moved in.

• For every person in your town that got murdered in 2022, 69 residents moved to Florida and 13 Floridians moved in.

Are these state-specific numbers significant? As a resident of this small town, if you knew a total of 100 people, you’d have about a one in twenty chance of knowing someone who moved to Florida. Not huge. You’d also have a six tenths of a percent chance of knowing someone who got murdered.

The Lie

The structure of Newsom’s lie works like this:

Motte: “Actually, on a per capita basis, more Floridians move here than Californians move there.” (not stating why that is a meaningful way to look at it)

Politifcat: “This statement is correct.”

Bailey: “See, more Floridians move to California than the other way around. It's a fact. It says right there because of the word ‘Politifact.’”

Newsom does this sort of stuff a lot, especially when he talks about guns, but nobody seems to notice.

Is Politifact now going to fact check Newsom’s tweet, which lies literally by misquoting Politifact? That depends on their political biases, I suppose.

Chaser

What I find most interesting from the table up above, is basically nobody wants to move from New York to California, or visa versa, despite those states having gigantic populations. That would lend me to believe that people are moving away from California for the same reasons they’re moving away from New York. But everyone wants to move from New York to Florida. For every Floridian who moves to New York, 4.28 New Yorkers move to Florida. If Florida has any relative culture war choke hold on another state based on immigration patterns, it’s New York.

But then again, Miami is just a suburb of NYC and Cuba anyway, so that makes a lot of sense. Also NYC smells.