Two Families Got Fed Up With Their States’ Politics. So They Moved Out.

Steve Huckins, a native of Oregon, was preparing to move across the country when he went on Facebook to post a goodbye letter of sorts to his home state.

“I had planned to die here,” wrote Huckins, 59. “It’s a beautiful state. The mountains, the lakes, the rivers, the beaches. All are overshadowed by the societal and political climate.”

Huckins and his wife, Ginger, were leaving Portland, Oregon, one of the most progressive cities in the United States. They said Portland’s tolerance of homeless encampments, along with the open use of hard drugs and rising crime, had filled them with despair. So they headed 2,000 miles east, to deep-red rural Missouri.

Driving around their new hometown in June, about an hour outside St. Louis, they admired the old Victorians.

“One thing I do like about Missouri: There’s lots of American flags,” Steve Huckins said as he steered around a traffic circle where the Stars and Stripes flapped crisply on a pole. “In Portland, the American flag was offensive.”

One day earlier, in a neighboring state, another couple making a politically motivated move had a different flag on display: a Pride flag on a T-shirt.

Jennie and Jeff Noble were packing their possessions into a 26-foot U-Haul truck in suburban Iowa. Jennie Noble, 37, who was wearing the Pride T-shirt, and her husband were leaving Iowa for Minnesota.

Their only child, Julien, came out as transgender at age 11. Now 16, Julien uses prescription testosterone. After Iowa banned gender-affirming medical care for minors, criminalizing their son’s treatments, the Nobles — lifelong Iowans — concluded they had to get out.

“We are leaving due to the local politics affecting our son,” Jennie Noble said. “We are moving to Minnesota, where the laws are more favorable.”

Americans are increasingly fracturing as a people, and some are taking the extraordinary step of moving to escape a political or social climate they abhor. Democrats have left red states as Republicans have moved out of blue states, often over views on issues like abortion, transgender rights, school curricula, guns, race and other matters.

While there is no precise count of how many Americans have relocated because of politics and social issues, interviews with demographers and people who have moved or are considering moving, as well as a review of social media postings and polling, show the phenomenon is real.

In a poll in March for the Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index, 4 out of 10 adults said they were somewhat or very likely to move to a state more aligned with their political beliefs. The survey found a majority of adults, 54%, were likely to move if their state passed laws that negatively affected them.

The Huckins family and the Noble family have not met, yet their journeys mirror each other, unfolding only five weeks apart this spring. One family relocated because of a single issue — restrictions on transgender rights — while the other believed a broad swath of progressive policies had degraded their quality of life. But both families used strikingly similar language to describe their main concern: the need for personal safety.

For the Huckins family, Portland became “unsafe, unsanitary and scary,” Steve Huckins said. “We had five or six security cameras in our house.”

For the Noble family, it was their son’s safety that worried them, as Iowa Republicans passed anti-transgender laws.

“We’ve been here our whole lives,” Jennie Noble said before the move. “But when it came down to it, we have to support our son. We have to keep him safe.”

<b> A New Life in Missouri</b>

On a Wednesday in late August, four months after their move, Ginger Huckins and her husband took a drive to a farm called Shared Bounty, several miles from their new home in Troy, Missouri, a city of 15,000 in Lincoln County. They have been married for 15 years. He retired from a warehouse job with the Army Corps of Engineers last year; she ran a day care center.

At the farm, they didn’t see a worker around. So Huckins picked out a tomato, weighed it and wrote her purchase in a ledger. Payment was on the honor system, the kind of transaction they would have never imagined in Portland.

In Portland, they lived on the east side in the Centennial neighborhood, where the crime rate is high relative to the rest of the city, according to police. Their single-story house was both home and business: Huckins operated Ginger’s Joyful Day Care there for 33 years.

When a thief stole the catalytic converter out of Steve Huckins’ Ford pickup, they installed security cameras. They moved the truck behind a gate, then padlocked the gate.

The couple said the quality of life in Portland and their neighborhood deteriorated after months of protests, some violent, following the 2020 killing of George Floyd. “We had riots within blocks of our house,” Steve Huckins said.

In 2020, Oregon voters approved a measure to decriminalize possession of hard drugs for personal use. Homelessness is rampant in Portland, which for years took a hands-off attitude toward tent camping on sidewalks. And $20 million was cut from the police department’s budget in 2020 amid calls to “defund the police.”

Huckins became a frequent consumer of social media feeds devoted to Portland’s problems. While he was confined at home during the COVID pandemic, he binged on outrage.

In the end, Huckins and his wife were not driven to give up on Portland by a single incident. The last straw may have been a state effort to charge tolls on interstate highways in the city. It came on top of a tripling of their property taxes in recent years. They believed liberal politicians were leaning on homeowners to pay for programs that enabled homelessness and crime.

For years, Ginger Huckins’ daughter from her first marriage, Stacee Hord, had encouraged her mother and stepfather to move to Missouri, where her young family had settled. After resolving to move out of Portland late last year, Missouri was the obvious choice of a destination for the Huckinses because of their three grandchildren.

Since relocating to Troy, Steve Huckins has unfollowed all the Portland news feeds that agitated him during his Oregon days. On Facebook, he gleefully posted his $9 bill for weekly garbage pickup in Missouri, writing, “We paid $60 a month in Portland.”

<b> ‘Can We Move to Minnesota?’ </b>

One day in early March, Republican lawmakers in Iowa passed a law banning gender-affirming care for minors. Supporters argued that people younger than 18 were too immature to make decisions about treatments, which can include puberty blockers, sex-specific hormones and surgeries.

As the news broke that afternoon, Julien Noble, a 16-year-old who had been taking prescription testosterone under a doctor’s care, sent his parents a text: “Can we move to Minnesota?”

It had been nearly five years since Julien had come out as transgender to his parents. Delaying medical treatments until he was legally an adult, Julien said, would have prolonged the unhappiness he felt since recognizing his identity in early adolescence.

Julien’s parents married fresh out of high school in rural northwest Iowa. Jeff Noble worked in the meat department of a supermarket. Jennie Noble studied online to be a paralegal. When they were growing up, Iowa was a leader in civil rights, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2009 and adding protections for transgender people to the state’s Civil Rights Act in 2007.

“I just don’t remember it being political at all,” said Jeff Noble, 38, whose meat-cutting job gave way to a career in computer software. “I used to think I’d want to live here all of my life because people were so nice.”

But since the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump easily carried the state, Iowa has tilted sharply rightward. Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, made restrictions on transgender youth central to her agenda the past two years.

In response to Julien’s text in March, his parents said they would keep an eye on the legislation to ban treatments for minors. They believed it was possible the governor might not sign it.

On the same day that Iowa lawmakers acted in March, Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, issued an executive order to protect gender-affirming treatments for minors in his state.

The Nobles weighed whether they could simply wait things out until Julien was 18, driving to Minneapolis for his biweekly testosterone shots. That way he could finish his senior year at Ankeny High School, in Ankeny, Iowa, where he had friends.

But Iowa lawmakers soon passed another bill: The GOP majority banned students from using restrooms that did not align with their biological sex. The bathroom bill tipped the Noble family toward their decision to leave.

In late March, Reynolds signed both bills into law. That night, the Nobles made the decision to put their house up for sale. They chose a moving date in June, a few days after the end of Julien’s junior year.

They planned to keep their jobs and work remotely. In the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley in Minnesota, where they had rented a home, Julien would enter his new school at the start of his senior year.

The Nobles said they had no second thoughts about leaving Iowa.

While driving to a barbecue in Minneapolis, Jennie Noble had been pleased to see Pride and Black Lives Matter signs. Like the Huckins family, the Nobles had stopped closely following political news from their old state.

Jeff Noble still seemed stunned that in America in 2023, politics would drive a family to seek refuge across state lines.

“I don’t quite understand how it got so crazy,” he said. He didn’t even know if his parents were Democrats or Republicans when he was growing up.

His son was more concerned with the effect than the cause. “It’s like we’re one country on paper,” Julien said. “But we’re not really.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/us/politics/politics-states-moving.html">The New York Times</a>.