Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom held their much-ballyhooed debate on Thursday, as the supposed moderator, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, struggled to keep the peace.
Amid the jabs between the two governors, the debate opened with a debate about people voting with their feet — that is, which state gained the most population in recent years.
Newsom challenged the “fact-checkers” to debunk his claim that more Floridians moved to California than vice versa.
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Breitbart News accepted that challenge and found Newsom was being disingenuous or deceptive at best, or at worst, simply lying.
To recap, according to a transcript of the debate, Hannity opened with a question about Americans “leaving blue states in droves in favor of red states.”
During 2021 and 2022, he added, the “stark” numbers revealed that California lost roughly 750,000 residents to other states, while Florida added about 454,000 residents from elsewhere.
Newsom eventually responded by arguing, “You mean … more Floridians going to California than Californians going to Florida? … By the way, that’s going to be fun to fact-check.”
Newsom then dodged the question directly, and then flatly stated twice that more Floridians were moving to California than the other way around over the last two years.
DeSantis challenged that claim.
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“The numbers speak for themselves,” he said. “We have way more people moving to the state than leaving. Gavin can’t say the opposite. More people are leaving California than are moving into California.”
DeSantis noted that migration included Newsom’s own in-laws, who relocated to Florida near the beginning of the pandemic.
Newsom responded by saying “it’s a fact” three times about his own assertion, and Hannity opted to move on rather than forcing Newsom to explain how he could refute data that Hannity himself posted to open the skirmish.
Breitbart News columnist Joel Pollak, however, clarified that issue.
Pollak judged Newsom’s claim “mostly false,” and added that the “raw numbers favor Florida,” while the California leader was relying on a “per capita” migration rate.
He went on to cite reporting by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee from Thursday that proved DeSantis was correct.
The Chronicle reported, “It’s true that more Californians are moving to other U.S. states than are moving in, and that a greater number of people are moving into Florida than are leaving. … The flow between California and Florida also favors the latter state. About 50,700 Californians became Florida residents from 2021 to 2022, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That’s 22,100 more than the 28,600 Florida residents who moved to California.”
The Bee added in its own report that a “record number of people are fleeing California for Florida.” Further, the paper noted, “New data from the census bureau show that more people left California for Florida in 2022 than in any year going back to at least 2005. … An estimated 37,464 people left California for Florida in 2021, while 24,692 headed this way – a net gain of about 13,000 residents for Florida. The exodus to the southeast increased even more last year, the data shows.”
Pollak noted that Newsom’s reliance on “per capita” migration favored California because it is nearly twice as big as Florida in population.
He referenced a study by Penn State University, which reviewed 2021 Census Bureau data, that calculated 1.16 per 1,000 Floridians moved to California in 2021. On the other hand, 0.96 Californians relocated to Florida that year.
Yet, as Newsom did not mention, and Hannity did not ask, the Penn State study actually found that nearly 13,000 more Californians moved to Florida than the other way around.
Newsom’s “per capita” claim emerged during his earlier tussle with Hannity back in June, which led the left-wing “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact to declare at the time that Newsom was right about more people leaving Florida for his state.
Yet as Pollak wrote, “Newsom has to reframe the raw numbers to make his point. But he misses the overall point: California is losing residents, and Florida is gaining them. He may not want to face the reasons for that, but he may as well admit that it is actually happening.”
As we saw on Thursday night, he didn’t.
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