Welcome to Thursday, May 7, 2026. Hope your caffeine levels are adequate and your existential dread is at a manageable 4 out of 10. Today is the National Day of Prayer. It’s also National Password Day (Change them to something other than “Password 123”). It is also the International Day of Planetariums.
1664: French King Louis XIV inaugurates the Palace of Versailles.
1700: William Penn begins monthly meetings for black people advocating emancipation.
1718: French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founds the city of New Orleans.
1789: The first presidential inaugural ball honoring George Washington takes place in New York City.
1847: The American Medical Association is founded in Philadelphia.
1867: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite in England, the first of three patents he receives for the explosive material.
1915: A German submarine sinks the RMS Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland, with 1,198 lives lost.
1934: World’s largest pearl (14 pounds) found at Palawan, Philippines.
1941: Glenn Miller records “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for RCA Victor; it becomes the first gold record.
1942: The Battle of Coral Sea ends, stopping Japanese expansion.
1945: German Third Reich General Alfred Jodl signs documents of surrender to the Allies at Reims, France; the Soviet Union refuses to recognize it.
1966: The Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday, Monday” hits number one.
Birthdays today include: David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian; Johannes Brahms; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; George “Gabby” Hayes, American actor; Josip Broz Tito, communist revolutionary and leader of Yugoslavia; Edwin Land, inventor of instant photography and co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation; Darren McGavin, actor; Totie Fields, comedienne; Teresa Brewer, pop and jazz singer; Johnny Unitas, Baltimore Colts QB; Jimmy Ruffin, singer; Johnny Maestro, rock vocalist; Thelma Houston, singer; and Tim Russert, journalist and host of NBC’s Meet the Press.
Happy birthday if this is your day.
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America’s great population shuffle has turned into must-watch television. The destinations — and the exits — tell you everything you need to know about why people are packing up. Amanda Macias at Fox Digital this morning cuts to the chase:
Texas and Florida are drawing the largest number of new residents, but South Carolina is growing faster than any other state as Americans continue to relocate across the country, according to new IRS data.
The trend highlights a broader shift toward the South, as Americans say they’re making the move for lower taxes, more jobs and higher quality of life.
The Heritage Foundation agrees, and the data doesn’t exactly leave room for debate — people are fleeing large blue-state cities and landing in red-state metros and mid-sized cities. From July 2024 to July 2025, California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts watched residents head for the exits in significant numbers, while every single one of the top five destination states — North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona — was red. Yeah, I know, big shock, right?
City Journal lays it out this way:
The latest data, for the year ending July 1, 2025, show that seven of the top ten states gaining residents from elsewhere in the country are all governed by so-called Republican trifectas, in which the party controls the governorship and both legislative houses—including Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The remaining three states in the top ten—North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada—went for Trump in 2024 and have divided governments that lean Republican. Of the 22 states where Republicans control all branches of government, only three lost population to net migration in the last year. In two of those, Mississippi and Nebraska, the net decline was less than 1,000. In all, Republican states gained a net of nearly 345,000 people from other places.
Gee, there’s something of a trend here.
By contrast, Democratic states dominate the list of places with the biggest outflow of residents. Nine of the ten states losing the most population are Democratic, led by California, with a net loss of 229,000 residents, and including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois. A notable addition to the bottom ten is Colorado—a politically competitive state as recently as 2019 but dominated by Democrats since. Unlike California and New York, which have seen net outmigration for more than a decade, Colorado’s fortunes have only recently turned, but dramatically so, as the state recorded the eighth-highest net loss of residents last fiscal year. Only four of the 15 Democratic trifecta states last year gained residents: Washington, Oregon, Delaware, and Maine. In all, Democratic-led states lost about 495,000 residents to net migration
Every survey on the matter points to one common thread: the politics running the places people are abandoning. Sure, they’ll dress it up as “cost of living” or “quality of life” — comfortable euphemisms for the same thing. Strip away the polite language that attempts to neatly avoid the obvious, and one factor drives both of those complaints every single time: the governing policies are the very reason they can’t leave fast enough.
Taxes, crime, the regulatory nightmare: all of it. It’s all down to leftist policy. Consider this take on the matter from Australia:
Individuals and families are not the only ones leaving. Companies are too, and they’re taking the jobs with them.
Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Elliot Management, JP Morgan Chase, Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo: All have made moves to get out of New York City, taking the tax income and the jobs with them. Clearly, the policies that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has enacted have pushed these people over the edge. Mamdani’s solution? An exit tax. I can’t wait to see that one in the courts.
New Jersey is another prime example:
California wins the “I’m outta here” movement. Hands down, no contest — they are the undisputed champion of leftist policy disasters. They’re seeing both people and businesses that have been in the state for generations, throwing in the towel and raising dust for places like Texas. The state leads the nation in homelessness, a crown it has earned through spectacularly stupid governance. Housing costs as a result of that governance built the crisis, but Sacramento’s masterstroke of a solution? Slash homelessness funding by 50%, dropping it to a measly $500 million in the 2026-27 budget.
Even if Sacramento hadn’t torched half the housing budget, what do subsidies actually accomplish? They arm more people to chase the same number of homes. Supply stays flat. Demand spikes. Rents soar. Masterful work, all in the name of affordability. Nice job, Gavin.
The one-party state apparently skipped the economics lecture — the one where someone draws a supply-demand curve on a whiteboard and explains, slowly, what happens when you juice demand without touching supply. Remedial Economics 101. They missed it.
But here’s the real problem for the rest of us. The blue areas of the country don’t just export people and businesses — they export clueless voters. People who have no idea why they’re having to leave, who never once connected the disaster around them to the ballot they cast. They packed their U-Hauls — good luck finding one, by the way, given the staggering volume of one-way trips heading out of the state — crossed state lines, and pulled the same lever in their new home. They manufactured a catastrophe, fled it, and now they’re recreating it, block by block, in states that didn’t earn it.
They turned paradise into a cautionary tale, and now they’re the virus, spreading the ideology that wrecked their last home into every new one they touch.
The question is whether reality ever lands. Whether the act of leaving — of having to leave — finally cracks something open in their thinking. You’d hope so. You’d think the evidence would be impossible to ignore by now. And yet — here we are.
Thought for the day: Why does a bag of ice have a nutritional statement on it?
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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