I'm not that well versed in the US moving shenanigans, but is it that hard to escape Commiefornia if you earn the Commiefornia bracket? It's one of the most expensive states, even if you save just a tiny bit it should be enough to move somewhere cheaper, no?
A lot of Americans hardly ever leave their state and those that do usually just go to Las Vegas. The states across the country are very different and people are obviously hesitant to move to a state they've never been to, especially when they have family and a stable income in their current state. When most people do leave their state, they usually go somewhere they know its good to go, usually from either friends or family moving there first and telling them how it is. This is why so many Californians are moving to Texas, Idaho, and Arizona. It isn't just about flipping the state politically, it's because those states have their own little Californian diaspora setup like Austin, Boise, and Phoenix. And yes, they are moving to Phoenix because it was cheaper and it's pissing off locals because the tradeoff for the heat was the low prices but so many Californians moving there is fucking that up.
I'm going to add some context to this for people who aren't from the US, or are younger.
People
do leave California, all the time. They've
been leaving, in droves, for decades: IIRC the first big blow was the collapse of Cali's Cold War aerospace industry in the late 80s and early 90's. It was such a big thing that people from all these other states started complaining about "Californication" from the constant immigration of entitled rich assholes. For example, the Red Hot Chili Peppers even wrote a
mega-hit song about it with a bunch of clever alliterations and puns in it. So a lot of states and cities that used to be nice, self-contained places to live, such as...
most of Colorado, but particularly Denver;
Portland, Oregon;
Pretty much the entire state of Washington;
Austin, Texas, as well as all those little insufferable coastal towns in Texas like Corpus Christi;
Phoenix, Arizona;
Albuquerque, New Mexico;
and probably a good dozen other locations on the East Coast that I'm not aware of;
All of these got absolutely SWAMPED with millions of Californians during the 90's and early 2000s (and it continues today, for the reasons
@God's Strongest Dragoon already pointed out).
But the thing is, California is freakishly, unfairly large in comparison to almost every other state. It's got a
tenth of the nation's population in a single state, and so many immigrants coming in on top of that they don't know what to do with themselves. So the state has created a vicious cycle, where it constantly exports its incessant bullshit hyperculture to every decent location while replacing its losses with Mexicans, Pajeets, and business majors.
It is a shithole that continues to spew its nonsense into the rest of the country (and overseas for that matter, if
@The Proctor's landlords are any indication). But because of a lack of foresight from prior administration, it has an immense amount of sway over the States as well. There are millions of California minded individuals throughout the US who are tirelessly working to make their current homes a little bit closer to 1990s California, and that's not a good thing. Escaping the state itself is the easy part. The mindset that
made the state terrible is infectious, however, and continues to be a problem to this day.