Since 2019, Minnesota has the 15th highest rate of domestic out migration in the United States

Gov. Walz’s desperate push for the Vice Presidential slot on the Democratic party ticket this November has invited a number of appraisals of his record.

The Big Picture

The Minnesota Reformer‘s Christopher Ingraham has contributed “How Minnesota changed during Tim Walz’s tenure:” “The Reformer has compiled a series of charts showing Minnesota’s trajectory on a variety of metrics, before and after Walz, that together offer a birds-eye view of the quality of life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” he notes. “Caveats abound: Governors aren’t kings, and have limited ability to directly shape the numbers shown here.” This is an excellent point worth bearing in mind.

Ingraham notes that: “Many of Walz’s most consequential decisions, like the response to an unprecedented pandemic or the implementation of universal free lunch in schools, aren’t easily captured in a chart.” This isn’t quite true.

In our 2022 report “The Cost of Lockdowns and Shutdowns: Part I: Counting the economic costs of government policy responses to COVID-19,” we examined the economic impact of shutdowns and lockdowns in 51 U.S. jurisdictions and found that:

Minnesota’s government policy responses to COVID-19 cost each resident $1,866 in lost GDP by the end of the first quarter of 2021, or $7,464 for a family of four: this was the 15th biggest hit in the United States.

Figure 1 summarizes this.

Figure 1: Per capita GDP loss resulting from state and local anti-COVID-19 measures, Q1:2021

Of course, you may say that this was a price worth paying to save lives. Further analysis would need to be conducted to discover whether jurisdictions that paid a higher “cost” in terms of lost GDP “bought” better mortality outcomes as a result. Our paper was explicit about not tackling that question.

As for free school meals, that policy is a means towards the end of better health outcomes for kids. Do we see those? Time will tell, but it is worth noting, as Figure 2 shows, that Minnesota already has a rate of “food Insecurity” below the national average – and so do all our neighbors. Once again, the Upper Midwest stands out in a good way even with widely diverging state government policies: Maybe its the social capital again?

Figure 2

Population

It is notable that when Ingraham gets his charts, he leads with population. This is clearly a hot button issue.

He writes that:

For most of the 2010s, Minnesota’s population was growing more slowly than the United States as a whole, according to census data. But that changed in 2018, the year before Walz took office, when statewide population growth ran about one tenth of a percentage point above the national average.

The numbers held at that level for several years and were subsequently scrambled due to the pandemic. By 2022, when comparable numbers were again available for both the U.S. and Minnesota, both had fallen sharply.

This strikes me as a little opaque. Looking at Census Bureau population data for 2010-2020 and 2020-2023, we see that Minnesota’s population grew in the four years of Gov. Walz’ administration (2019 to 2023) by 0.4%, fractionally below the growth rate for the United States overall of 0.5%. But if we look at the four preceding years (2015 to 2019), we see that Minnesota’s population grew more quickly than that of the United States generally, by 2.8% compared to 2.4%, as Figure 3 shows. Under Gov. Walz, Minnesota’s population growth has cratered — as it has for the United States generally — but that cratering has been worse here.

Figure 3: Population change

Ingraham goes on to say:

One reason Minnesota’s population growth has slowed is that more people are now moving away from the state than into it, a trend that’s apparent in many other cold, northern states.

This is partly true and partly false. It is true, as we have long noted, that Minnesota loses residents on net to other parts of the United States. But it is not the case that this is being driven by temperatures.

Figure 4 shows the total net domestic migration since 2019 for each state as a rate per 100,000 of the population of that state in 2019. We see that, on this measure, Idaho – with a lower average temperature than 38 of the 50 states – scores best. Hawaii, on the other hand, with the highest average temperature in the United States, saw the second largest net loss of residents over this period. If we quantify the relationship between the rates in Figure 4 and average temperatures, it isn’t statistically significant. “Its the temperature” is one of those old comfort blankets the state media has traditionally consoled itself with but which is now rather motheaten.

Figure 4: Total net domestic migration 2019-2023 per 100,000 of the 2019 population

And what of our state? We see that Minnesota has seen a rate of outflow to other parts of the United States since 2019 which is worse than in 35 0ut of 50 states. The rate for the five years previous was -133 of the 2014 population which ranked Minnesota worse than 21 states.

We are told that: “Earlier this year the Walz administration announced efforts to turn those numbers around,” but these are unlikely to succeed. In a previous discussion, I referred to:

…this paper by economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Mathilde Muñoz, and Stefanie Stantcheva that: “review[s] a growing empirical literature on the effects of personal taxation on the geographic mobility of people and discuss[es] its policy implications” and finds that: “There is growing evidence that taxes can affect the geographic location of people both within and across countries. This migration channel creates another efficiency cost of taxation with which policymakers need to contend when setting tax policy.” More specifically: “This body of work has shown that certain segments of the labor market, especially high-income workers and professions with little location-specific human capital, may be quite responsive to taxes in their location decisions.”

And yet, as I noted last year:

By enacting $10 billion of tax hikes over the next four years, the state government has made Minnesota even less attractive to potential residents than it was. It seems as though the DFL’s plan is to offset the additional “push” factor of higher taxes with “pull’ factors such as expanded welfare and extreme social policies. Will it work? Watch this space.