California
I moved from California to Idaho because my home state changed politically. I love my new conservative community.
- Philip Wiseman and his wife moved to Idaho because they were fed up with California’s politics.
- The retirees made a large spreadsheet to decide which Republican-leaning state to move to.
- They ended up in Eagle, Idaho, and love the conservative values of the community.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Philip Wiseman, a 70-year-old retiree who moved from California to Idaho with his wife in 2021.
They’re part of a trend of conservatives moving to red states. Data compiled by Idaho officials showed 78% of voters who moved from California to Idaho registered as Republicans between 2020 and 2023.
The median home price in the California town the Wisemans lived, Monte Sereno, was $5.5 million in September 2024, according to Redfin, compared to $748,000 in Eagle, Idaho, the town they moved to.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
We moved to Idaho from Northern California three years ago this December.
My wife is a fourth-generation Californian, and I moved there in 1985. We loved the state. It was the coolest state to live in forever. I worked in semiconductor sales for Silicon Valley firms and my wife worked in healthcare. We got married in 2011 and built a beautiful home in Monte Sereno, just outside of Los Gatos. It was a really beautiful neighborhood and area.
We just were very obviously conservative. We had friends that were like-minded but the city itself and the surrounding area is quite liberal. And we knew that we couldn’t talk politics with our neighbors.
Our best friends across the street put up a Biden sign in the front yard. I thought, “Are you serious?” We have a lot of respect for those people. And then they doubled down on Biden. I couldn’t believe it.
We always say we didn’t leave California. California left us.
Over time the decisions that the politicians and the governors and the district attorneys and all of these people started making were just really wrong. Everything from being a sanctuary state with protections for undocumented immigrants to some of the highest taxes in the country to not prosecuting criminals, among other reasons. It’s just insanity.
Over time, I felt like it was death by a thousand pinpricks. We got to the point where we decided that we just couldn’t put up with it any longer.
We miss our California and what California used to be. It’s still beautiful. You fly over it and you realize, “God, the state is so pretty. It has so much to offer.” But it’s just so screwed up. We had to get the hell out.
We’re sad about it every day. We think about it all the time.
We made a huge spreadsheet to decide which red state to move to
Once we decided to leave, which was a huge decision, the question then became, “Where are we going to go?”
We looked at several different states. My wife put a huge spreadsheet together with average rainfall, average snowfall, average sunny days, average rainy days, average distance from our daughter, who lives in Nevada, to a major airport. It had to be red, obviously, as red as we could find, and we’d love it to have been a state with no state income tax, but more importantly, we looked at what it costs to live there.
Some states we considered were Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, and Florida.
A big spreadsheet later, we ended up coming to Idaho.
I knew a guy that had used to live here and asked him what he thought of the area, and he said it was great and we should look at the Boise area. So we did.
We didn’t know a soul. We came up here and looked around and found a realtor to show us around. We probably made three fact-finding missions up here looking at different areas and neighborhoods. When we finally moved here, we rented for a year, and we looked at neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood.
We ended up buying a house here in Eagle, and we’ve been loving it ever since. We’ve been here just about two years now.
We love the Eagle area because it’s very conservative and there’s a lot of like-minded people. It was easy to make friends here. People are polite and friendly. They wave all the time. We’re both retired now, so this is our forever home.
Eagle is also full of people who moved here from California for basically the same reasons we did. And not just Californians; there are also people from Oregon and Seattle.
I used to love California but things changed as I got older
I moved to California when I was around 30. I just turned 70. When I was a younger man, I didn’t pay much attention to politics. California was wonderful. The beach, the ocean, the food, my career.
But over time, you grow up, you grow older, you grow wiser, you get married, you have a child, and you start noticing things more. The more you pay attention, the more things piss you off.
I think it’s best for conservatives to live in conservative neighborhoods. Liberals can live in their own neighborhoods. It didn’t used to be that big a deal, so I hate to say that because it does suck. But I’m just noticing the fact is all.
California
Kamala’s California problem
In the final days of the presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump never missed a chance to tie his opponent to California. It was a critique that required no elaboration—though true to form, Trump didn’t shy away from providing an overheated one. At his Madison Square Garden rally in October, he proclaimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was a “radical-left lunatic” who “destroyed California.”
Breathless rhetoric notwithstanding, it is a problem for national Democratic ambitions that California—the state most associated with the party’s rule—is now synonymous with the top issue of the election: the rising cost of living.
For the first time in recent memory, housing costs emerged as a major presidential election issue. (Experts agree that it’s the last major driver of inflation.) And while Harris promised to oversee the construction of 3 million homes over her term, that wasn’t enough to shake the California stigma.
As of 2024, California has the most expensive housing of any continental U.S. state, with a median home price that is more than eight times the state median household income. (A healthy ratio is considered between three to five times the state median income. The ratio in Texas is four.) As a result, working- and middle-class Californians have virtually no path to homeownership.
Locked out of homeownership, half of California renters spend at least a third of their income—for many, up to 50 percent—on rent. And they’re the lucky ones: Nearly 200,000 Californians and counting are homeless.
On some level, rank-and-file Democrats understand that the state is a problem. Ask a progressive in swing states like North Carolina or Wisconsin what she thinks about California, and she will likely try to change the topic of conversation. (Could you imagine a conservative having the same reluctance about Texas?)
Where millions of Americans—myself included—once knew California as a place where friends and family went off and claimed their slice of the dream, the Golden State is today better known as the source of embittered migrants making cash offers on homes.
Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of people have voted with their feet and left the state. Sluggish population growth over the 2010s led California to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 reapportionment. (On net, red states picked up three seats in that election.) Amid declining immigration, the state has started losing population for the first time in history.
In 2022 alone, an estimated 102,000 Californians moved to Texas. They weren’t fleeing the perfect weather or the high-paying jobs—by and large, they were pushed out by the cost of living.
Occasionally, California’s progressive NIMBYs celebrate this unhappy exodus as a way of flipping other Mountain West states blue. Yet this year, Nevada voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 20 years. Even before the election, the polls acknowledged that Arizona was a lost cause for the Democrats.
It turns out that forcing people to abandon their home state in search of an affordable home doesn’t exactly engender party loyalty. Indeed, it may be having the opposite effect: Surveys out of states like Texas suggest that new arrivals from California might actually be more conservative than the locals.
Of course, Kamala Harris isn’t the reason California has a housing crisis. Democrats aren’t even solely to blame—the zoning that has made it illegal to build housing in California has been backed by NIMBYs of the right and left, and it was Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan who signed the state’s infamous environmental review act into law.
But the state has been under Democratic supermajority control since 2011. Outside of the unusual case of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican who backed Harris for president, they have effectively run the state since 1999. The undecided voter might be forgiven for wondering why this issue has only gotten worse under a quarter century of Democratic governance.
Immediately after the election, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom—who has made no secret of his presidential ambitions—called for a special session to address how California will respond to anticipated attacks on reproductive rights, immigrants, and the state’s climate policies by the Trump administration. The proclamation makes no mention whatsoever of the cost-of-living issues that likely handed the election to Trump.
There is a small but growing cadre of pro-housing Democratic state legislators who have taken up the cause of cutting through the red tape and getting California building again. And they’ve had some successes: Since 2017, the state has legalized granny flats, abolished parking mandates, and streamlined permitting. But all too often, reform efforts have been stymied by members of their own party.
It’s too late for Kamala Harris. But the next Democratic nominee for president had better hope those reformers are successful.
California
California Lottery Powerball, Daily 3 Midday winning numbers for Nov. 11, 2024
The California Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Nov. 11, 2024, results for each game:
Powerball
03-21-24-34-46, Powerball: 09, Power Play: 3
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily 3
Midday: 9-4-2
Evening: 5-6-3
Check Daily 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily Derby
1st:4 Big Ben-2nd:12 Lucky Charms-3rd:6 Whirl Win, Race Time: 1:44.41
Check Daily Derby payouts and previous drawings here.
Fantasy 5
07-10-29-30-34
Check Fantasy 5 payouts and previous drawings here.
Daily 4
3-7-9-7
Check Daily 4 payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Desert Sun producer. You can send feedback using this form.
California
Sales slump fails to curb climbing Southern California home prices
The region’s median home price was up 6% in September, despite transactions falling to a near-record low, CoreLogic reported.
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