The Golden State just recorded a second consecutive year of population decline. Between 2020 and 2021, the state lost 0.59% of its population (182,000 residents). Between 2021 and 2022, it lost another 0.3% (a further 117,552 residents). California hadn’t had a population decline since its inception as a state until 2020. California, until the past decade, has been a nice place to live with expansive beaches and beautiful terrain ranging from redwood forests to desert. The weather is generally ideal. So why are residents finally leaving?

According to California state officials, the reasons for this decline were the low birth rate, increased death rate, the slowing down of immigration to California, and residents moving to other states. They are mostly correct, but they are also glossing over their policies that encouraged this population decline.

Low Birth Rate

California has the nation’s largest population of conservatives but also the largest population of leftists. Conservatives are constantly getting trounced at the voting booths, leading to an overall destruction of the California that twice elected Ronald Reagan as governor and twice voted for him as president.

The leftists in charge have preached the gospel of feminism, convincing women that waiting to start a family is a virtue because of “equality in the workplace.” That double paycheck, however, is a necessity since California has such a high cost of living. Even if some couples were inclined to start their family young, financially, it is not often very feasible. Then you also have abortion contributing to the low birth rate. California has very liberal abortion laws. In 2017, 132,680 babies were aborted there. That’s 15.4% of all 862,320 babies aborted in clinical settings in the United States. Overall, the low birth rate is a demon of their own making.

Increased Death Rate

For a while, California was able to counterbalance its low birth rate. It just needed to ensure there were more births than deaths. But COVID threw a wrench in that calculation. The pandemic ravaged the population, especially the elderly, despite the fact that California had the strictest masking, social distancing, and vaccine mandate regulations. (LAX is still making people mask on flights despite the overturning of the public transportation mask mandate by a brave Florida federal judge.)

Lower Flow of Immigrant Population

California had long touted its many sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. Many of them are now dystopian landscapes filled with homeless vagrants, drug addicts, and ground littered with human feces and other malodorous refuse. California native Victor Davis Hanson speculated: “Is the state’s suicide one Orwellian nightmarish plan? The worse California becomes, the less attractive it will be for illegal immigrants? The more who flee, the more affordable will be their abandoned homes? The fewer Californians, the less need for water and power? The more congested the ossified highways, the fewer will try to drive? The more the middle class shrinks, the more powerful the wealthy and the more dependent the poor?”

California is a paradise that is slowly being turned into an dystopian landscape through leftists’ insistence on living in their utopia instead of in the here and now. “A once-innovative rich state that is now a civilization in near ruins,” says Hanson.

California Residents Moving to Other States

This is perhaps the most telling thing of all. Native Californians are leaving in droves and fleeing to states such as Texas and Florida. Aside from the outrageously high tax rates and living expenses, other bad leftist policies are driving away residents as well. These include poor forestry maintenance and water management, electric power shortages, and high crime. The practice of leaving dead vegetation to be kindling during the dry season pretty much guarantees wildfire devastation. As for the poor water management, when one-third of the rain falls where two-thirds of the residents live, having a disdain for dams and manmade reservoirs because they’re “not natural” is a recipe for disaster. The bad electricity situation is heightened by the state’s dependance on solar power, which should work in theory, but the air is so dusty that brownouts are common. The high crime is devastating big cities. To quote Hanson again, the rules for spending time in cities such as San Francisco are:

1) Do not park your car on the street, because it most surely will have its windows smashed and its contents stolen, and the police will either not respond if called or the city would not prosecute the criminal if arrested.

2) Check the soles of your shoes before entering the hotel lobby to ensure that human feces or needle remnants are not stuck to the bottoms.

3) Do not offer food/money/“help” if walking along nearby homeless corridors, given the uncertain and possibly violent reaction that such outreach might incur.

When residents weighed the long-term cost-benefit analysis, the cons outweighed the pros, so they left.

California is only just beginning to feel the loss of its population decline. It’s been so precipitous that it lost a U.S. House seat.

Some people hold that these setbacks are not permanent. With the reopening of business in the state and the insistence of bosses that employees come to the physical office for work, coupled with the fact that California has the largest number of job openings, the siren call of this once-beautiful state may lure back some of its population. It’s also worth noting that should Roe v. Wade be overturned, California will more than likely become a sanctuary state for women seeking an abortion.

However, should the declining trend continue, it will most likely be because people are unwilling to live in a state where there is increasingly no middle class, but there is increasingly high crime, high taxes, and privileged leftist governing elites who refuse to solve the actual problems and prefer to live in their utopian fantasy.

Sadly, there’s a saying that where California goes, the rest of the country follows. Leftists want to control every aspect of our lives from Washington, DC. Federalism — a system that was established by the Founding Fathers to prevent such oligarchies — is a much more accountable system for a democratic republic because the states decide what’s best for their residents. At the same time, modern America is deeply interconnected. Hopefully, California figures it out before it drags the rest of the states down with it.

Correction: Revised to show the correct number of abortions in California vs. the U.S.