The unlikely California exodus: Idaho becomes a hotspot for Republicans looking to flee the golden state

Conservative Californians are fleeing the Golden State for the Potato State, and they’re thrilled about it.

A few months after moving to Twin Falls, Idaho, Russell Petti still couldn’t quite believe how nice everything was.

At the DMV, usually used as a punchline to represent bureaucratic dysfunction and municipal grouchiness, cheery employees offered help. At Chick-fil-A, workers approached the 70-year-old lawyer’s table and askedif he needed anything else, sir, like a white tablecloth restaurant. The parking lot of his local Best Buy overlooks a scenic bridge above a canyon on the Snake River.

“It’s absolutely wonderful,” Mr Petti, who moved from La Cañada, just north of Los Angeles, CA, last September, told The Independent. “It really, really is. For one thing, the people are just so remarkably pleasant and polite. It’s like moving back into a different age.” He felt like he had stumbled into Mayberry, the fictional small town in North Carolina from the 1960s Andy Griffith Show. “For a while there I thought they were putting me on,” he added.

Mr Petti is part of a substantial wave of Californians, often on the conservative side of the political spectrum, who have moved to Idaho in recent years, just one strain of the state’s complicated, much-discussed shifting population.

In 2020, during the depths of the pandemic, California’s population fell by more than 182,000 people, the first population decline in state history. Faced with this striking stat, the tabloid headlines framed the change as a symbol of dissatisfaction with something quintessentially Californian, though they couldn’t agree on what.

Maybe it was the high costs of living, or the liberal politics, or the Covid protocols, or a sense of declining