What America’s Relocation Boom Means for Election 2024
After bouncing around the American West in her twenties, Jordan Rocheleau and her husband packed up in 2022 for a new life in the Midwest.
They were lured to Madison, Wisconsin, by its buzzing economy, relative affordability and outdoorsy culture — and also by politics. Rocheleau liked the college town’s progressive leanings and reasoned her vote would count more in the swing state than in the succession of Republican strongholds she’d lived in before.
The pandemic’s economic, lifestyle, and work disruptions sent millions of middle-class Americans on the move. Rocheleau was one of the record-setting 16.1 million US residents who moved to another state in 2021 and 2022 combined, according to Census Bureau estimates.
“We were like, ‘It’s time to get a forever home,’” said 32-year-old Rocheleau. “And we wanted to be in a community where that was possible and we could live sustainably for our financial future.”
The burst of migration is set to be a powerful force in November’s presidential election. Dane County, where Rocheleau put down roots, illustrates why: The Democratic bastion has grown faster than any other large county in Wisconsin, meaning the influx of new residents will play a key role in deciding whether President Joe Biden wins a swing state critical to his bid to return to the White House.
The population shifts are more pronounced in some battleground states than others, and they don’t uniformly favor Biden. But in aggregate, they offer a reason for optimism for the president’s campaign, even as polls show him trailing his likely opponent, Donald Trump: A Bloomberg analysis of state population forecasts found swing-state counties that Biden won in 2020 will have on net gained almost twice as many people by election day as those that voted for Trump.
With Monday’s Iowa caucuses marking a kickoff to the presidential selection process, those patterns will shape how this year’s campaign is fought on the ground as much as its eventual outcome.
Economic Transformation
Wisconsin, like other places in the industrial Midwest, has bled manufacturing jobs in recent decades. That blow has been cushioned by expansion in other industries, with the most rapid employment growth in Dane County these days found in sectors such as tech, biotech and health care, said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.
Madison and its surrounding area quietly have become a hot spot for software developers, sitting behind only Silicon Valley and Seattle in the density of people in that profession, Brandon says. That’s one reason the federal government recently designated Madison as part of a hub for tech investment.
Rocheleau found work at one of the employers that exemplifies that reshaped economy. She’s a recruiter at Epic Systems, a tech company in the health-care sector that has been a catalyst for growth.
Epic hired more than 3,000 people in 2023. The number that work at its corporate campus — a quirky expanse where buildings have elaborate themes like Alice in Wonderland or Harry Potter — has grown 47% in the past five years to 12,750, according to the company.
That means Epic employs at least twice as many people at its Verona, Wisconsin, headquarters as General Motors Co. does at any of its largest plants in the US.
“I call it the Epic effect,” says David Egan-Robertson, a former state demographer now at the University of Wisconsin.
Epic also has helped make Dane County’s demographics younger, Egan-Robertson says. The median age of its employees is 26 and most recruits are recent college graduates.
Dane County, which is a whiter and wealthier place than the US overall, already has almost 29,000 more people than it did in 2020, according to state demographers. That growth exceeds the 20,682-vote margin by which Biden won the state’s 10 electoral college votes in 2020. Over the same period, many of Wisconsin’s rural and Republican-leaning counties have seen populations decline.
It’s hard to know how many new Dane County residents share Rocheleau’s politics, but data offer some clues: A Bloomberg analysis of tax-filing data kept by the Internal Revenue Service found almost twice as many people who moved to Dane between 2020 and 2021 came from counties won by Biden in 2020 than those won by Trump.
A separate analysis for Bloomberg done by Placer.ai, which uses mobile phone data to track migration patterns, found the biggest sources of out-of-state migrants to Dane County in the last three years were metropolitan Chicago, the Minneapolis area, and Los Angeles County — all Democratic-leaning places.
Counting people is hard, and state demographers’ population forecasts don’t always agree with Census Bureau estimates, which for some states point to smaller gains.
Still, by November’s presidential election, around 30 million Americans — the equivalent of the population of Texas — will have moved to a different state since 2020, even if migration recedes to a pre-pandemic pace.
In Georgia, where Biden beat Trump by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020, the population will have grown by almost 395,000, according to state forecasts. Most of that growth is in metro Atlanta counties that Biden won handily in 2020. Likewise, in Nevada, Las Vegas home Clark County will have added almost 125,000 people by the time the election is held.
State forecasts show Maricopa County, Arizona, which Biden won narrowly and where 2 million ballots were cast in 2020, will have 337,000 more residents on election day 2024. Biden’s razor-thin 2020 margin there suggests that capitalizing on that growth may not be as easy as in Wisconsin, Georgia or Nevada.
The relocation boom is not a tailwind for Biden everywhere. In North Carolina, the growth in red counties appears to have more than offset the rapid growth in the Raleigh-Durham metro area’s blue suburbs, according to state forecasts.
Tailwind for Democrats
Epic’s appetite for young, college-educated workers — groups that recently have voted for Democrats — is itself a tailwind for the party in Wisconsin.
It also may help that Epic’s 80-year-old founder, Judy Faulkner, has been a major Democratic donor and encourages political engagement. Employees get paid time off to vote and volunteer for political campaigns.
“I think that’s an important thing,” Faulkner said in an interview. “My family was always politically active. It’s important to do your duty and vote.”
Rocheleau, for example, plans to volunteer for Democrats this year. She took time off in 2023 to work on a phone bank for Judge Janet Protasiewicz, the eventual victor in an April Wisconsin Supreme Court special election widely perceived as a referendum on abortion rights. (Almost one in five of Protasiewicz’s votes came from Dane County.)
The influx of new people into Dane County thanks to the growth of companies like Epic hasn’t gone unnoticed by local political organizers.
Alexia Sabor, who leads the county Democratic party, says its neighborhood teams are quick to identify new arrivals and make sure they are registered to vote. “More people means more voters. And we know that we are a particularly important county when it comes to turning out the vote for Democratic candidates,” Sabor says.
Carlene Bechen, who helps run one neighborhood team, doesn’t have to go far to find them. There are 38 new $500,000 to $700,000 single-family houses in what used to be a farm field next to her suburban home, she says, built for people like those coming to work at Epic and Exact Sciences, another rapidly growing company headquartered in the Madison area.
Her group is canvassing those new residents and “so far the kind of response we’re getting is super positive.”
The population boom in Dane County is a big part of the strategic calculation the state Democratic party is making to win races in Wisconsin, says executive director Devin Remiker. “You see such staggering growth in a county that seems to be trending more and more Democratic. That is almost unrivaled in some places in the country.”
‘A Difficult Demographic’
Republicans are not conceding the turf.
Brandon Maly moved from Florida to Dane County to work on GOP Senator Ron Johnson’s successful 2022 reelection campaign. He liked the area and decided to stay. Early last year, Maly, now 23, was elected chairman of the county Republican Party — an organization without many staffers or much infrastructure to compete against a prodigious Democratic machine.
His mission: Raise the share of the presidential vote Trump or another Republican gets in Dane County from the 23% Trump won in 2016 and 2020. If Republicans get to 30% one day, Maly says, they will regularly win statewide elections. If they don’t, their future in Wisconsin looks grim.
“I’m telling Republicans across the state — congressmen, senators, state party members and people in other counties: ‘If we don’t invest in Dane County, you can kiss every statewide election goodbye,’” Maly said. “You can’t just give up on the fastest-growing county in the state.”
To do that, Maly says, local Republican organizers are using data to identify new arrivals who might be persuadable. His challenge, though, is apparent when he goes to social events at his synagogue.
“Everybody under 35 that raises their hand, they work at Epic,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘I’m in politics’ and then they all assume I’m a Democrat. We kind of stop that conversation there.”
The occasional Epic employee turns up at Republican gatherings Maly organizes, he says. But mostly he views them as an enigma. “It’s a difficult demographic for us,” he says of the young college-educated workers. Even if Republicans tried to chase them with digital ads, he says, “I don’t know what we’d target them on at this point in time. Because they’re economically well-off. They don’t care about crime,” he said. “I’m not sure what to get those individuals on.”
Maly says he may have a chance with this group over the long term with the help of more investment by state and national Republican parties. In the meantime, his goal this year is to get discouraged Republicans in Dane County to get out and vote.
Construction Boom
The challenge for Republicans is that Dane County’s growth has coincided with declining GOP margins in Milwaukee’s suburbs and shrinking populations in other parts of the state, says Craig Gilbert, a former journalist affiliated with Marquette University Law School who studies the impact of demographics on Wisconsin elections.
“This has been going on for a while. And it’s super meaningful politically,” Gilbert says.
The 2024 election will test that theory — and how widely it applies. Rapidly growing states like Georgia and North Carolina are seeing major changes in the composition of their electorates, while others like Pennsylvania are becoming more urban as they fight to maintain population.
Dane County’s growth is far from over. The expectation of more growth to come has fed a boom in housing construction. According to data compiled by Egan-Robertson, the University of Wisconsin demographer, 21% of housing units built in the state in the last decade were in Dane County, which now accounts for less than 10% of the state’s population.
Bechen, the Democratic organizer whose suburban home is on the edge of a new development, has seen how the search for middle-class prosperity can change a place dramatically — and make for a moving target for political campaigns.
“I used to be the last house on the dead-end street,” Bechen said. “And two years ago, the hillside that was cornfields and soybeans transformed into two roads and a cul-de-sac.”
Rocheleau’s bungalow isn’t one of those new builds. It was constructed in 1925, and she and her husband are chipping away at renovations. For now, she says, their wandering days are over. At least, “until we think about if we want to retire somewhere else.”
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