“I’m moving to Canada.” We’ve all heard it said. And maybe you’ve said it yourself. The notion of skipping town following the results of a big election (or simply threatening to) surfaces nearly every cycle, but the reality of picking up your life and leaving home is easier said after mainlining TikTok than done after assessing all of the necessary paperwork and house hunting from afar.
Besides, who actually leaves their hometown—their community, their friends, their job, their house—unless they feel they’ve run out of options?
Among Americans who move, typical factors, like proximity to family and job opportunities, remain priorities, but the Blue vs. Red state debate has become a salient part of the conversation. Last year, a New York Times analysis found that of the 3.5 million-plus Americans who moved since the last presidential election, the majority chose new locales that were more in keeping with their political leanings. The sentiment echoes another study from Realtor.com, which found that nearly one quarter of Americans say local and national politics highly influence their decision on where to live. (Millennials are the generation most likely to let politics influence their choice—they are the YOLO cohort, after all.) There’s even enough demand in weighing the political affiliations of one’s prospective neighbors to inspire a relatively new tech startup called Oyssey, which allows users to view election results and campaign contributions on a block-by-block basis while house hunting.
For these five Americans whose beliefs span the spectrum, politics was not only a significant factor in the decision to move, it was the major motivating force.
The Abortion Care Provider Who Left Tennessee
“Moving was the hardest decision I’ve ever made… I’m from the South. I loved where we lived. I thought it was our forever home.”
Leilah Zahedi-Spung, MD, 37, says she was the only doctor at her Chattanooga, Tennessee, medical practice trained to do abortions in the second trimester (weeks 13 to 27/28 of pregnancy). Patients experiencing miscarriages, including complex cases, were passed to her, and she took pride in her work as a high-risk ob-gyn. “I was on call for the residents all the time,” she says. “This was some of their first exposure to abortion care in that way.”
But soon after she started at the job, the federal right to abortion came under attack. The Supreme Court announced it would consider a Mississippi case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which threatened to strike down the precedent set in Roe v. Wade. It was something about which Dr. Zahedi-Spung “was deeply in denial,” until June of 2022, when the right to abortion was returned to the states. In Tennessee, that meant a near-total ban. “It was the strictest in the country,” she says.
With her life’s work upended, staying in the state made less sense. “I decided I could no longer be in a place where I was going to have to ask myself if someone was sick enough to save their life,” she says. The risk that she could be charged with a felony for providing abortion care hung over her. She had spent the previous few months talking with a former colleague who worked in Colorado, and after landing a new job there, she and her family sold their house and left for Denver in January 2023. Moving “was the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” she says, “even though when I say it out loud, it sounds like a duh decision. But I had moved to that community to take care of that community. It was meaningful to me. I’m from the South. I loved where we lived. I thought this was our forever home.”
Though the Atlanta native has never regretted moving, “the guilt [of leaving the community behind] sits with me,” she says. “I describe myself as a recovering Southerner because we have irreconcilable differences. I love the South for all the good reasons. Yet, there are some really ugly parts to the South, things that were going to hold me back, that were going to hold my children back. I was going to have to unteach my children things from school. I was going to have to buy banned books to make sure that they were learning the things that I wanted them to learn. Now, they get that at school.”
Dr. Zahedi-Spung’s family has settled into life in Colorado, enjoying the beautiful outdoors and the more liberal politics. “My husband jokes that I was locked in a Southern woman’s body. I moved here without any tattoos. Now I have five tattoos and bright pink hair.”
The Libertarian State Legislator Who Relocated to New Hampshire
“Eventually, you feel like you’re the lone samurai standing against the hordes of statism."
When Eric Brakey moved to Maine in 2011 to work for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, he was thrilled to be part of a grassroots movement. That run “cemented a real Libertarian wing of the Republican party in Maine,” Brakey, 37, remembers. Paul lost, but Brakey was inspired by the effort and ran for local office in Auburn, serving three terms in the Maine State Senate as a Republican—though, like Paul, he identifies as a Libertarian (they typically believe in limited government intervention, free-market economies, and individual sovereignty).
Over the past decade, Brakey grew disheartened as he watched out-of-staters move to southern Maine, and felt that the state was “lurching very aggressively in a more progressive direction.” After COVID, when Maine and many other nearby states enacted policies around masking, vaccines, and social distancing, Brakey saw New Hampshire as his out, or as he calls it, “the only state in New England moving in a direction of freedom.” He was particularly interested in the Free State Project, a movement to establish a voting bloc large enough to have a significant political impact. “It seemed to me to be the only Libertarian strategy working in the country,” he says.
Energized by attending events like the Porcupine Freedom Festival (which Brakey says some people call “the Libertarian Burning Man”), he decided to vacate his seat in the Maine State Senate, move to New Hampshire, and take a job as the executive director of the Free State Project in 2024.
Brakey and his wife set up their new home in Dover, New Hampshire, with plenty of help from fellow Free Staters. As he got to work, he became invigorated by the enthusiasm for Libertarian ideas—something he felt was missing in Maine. “You watch people peter off and get dispirited because change doesn’t come,” he says. “Eventually, you feel like you’re the lone samurai standing against the hordes of statism. In New Hampshire, it feels like people never got the memo that the Ron Paul campaign was over. You have so many motivated and dedicated Libertarian activists.”
In Maine, he says, “there’s a certain sense of despair, a sense that the boot of the government is going to keep stepping on our neck and there’s nothing we can do about it. [In New Hampshire], people are much more hopeful.” He attributes some of that hope to New Hampshire’s longtime reputation as a “free state.” “There’s no income tax, there’s no sales tax. You have more freedom in determining how to educate your children with universal school choice.”
It’s not all welcome wagons and easy politicking, though. Brakey knows there is “tension, primarily with left-wing progressives who would like New Hampshire to be more like its neighboring states.” He prescribes a love-it-or-leave-it approach. “They want it to be a progressive state, to which we say, ‘If you really don’t like the live-free-or-die spirit of New Hampshire, there’s every other state in New England.’”
The Mom Who Left Indiana When Her Son’s Gender-Affirming Care Was Revoked
“He doesn’t have to worry about getting assaulted or in trouble if he goes to the men’s bathroom… We’re so lucky that in Minnesota he can just be a kid.”
When Lindsay Quyle’s son Sawyer, now 16, came out as transgender in 2023, she and her three children were living in downtown Indianapolis, a city the 36-year-old describes as “a blue dot in a sea of red.”
Quyle says that when Sawyer experienced bullying at school, “leadership was doing nothing about it.” And it was impossible for Quyle’s family to ignore when the state banned gender diverse kids from using their preferred bathrooms in public schools and barred them from using pronouns outside of the ones listed on their birth certificate without explicit permission from a parent. Discouraged and frustrated, Quyle began researching other states’ policies related to trans youth. But she wasn’t 100% sure moving was the right call until March 2024—around six months after Sawyer started gender-affirming care—when the state legislature banned all such treatments for minors. That same week, they had an appointment with Sawyer’s provider, who was in tears. “I remember she looked at us and said, ‘It’s only going to get worse. If you can get out of the state, I would.’” Quyle didn’t hesitate. “Seeing how scared [Sawyer] was, it was a no-brainer.’”
Though Quyle was born and raised in Indiana, it didn’t take long for her to zero in on Minnesota, a sanctuary state for trans people. By September 2024, she found a rental house in Minneapolis and a new job working in customer relations there. They knew no one in town, knew nothing about their new neighborhood, and on top of it all, one of Quyle’s children decided to stay behind and live with her ex-husband in Indianapolis. “That’s something that keeps me up at night,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave them behind. It was a really, really impossible choice. Dealing with custody issues to leave the state with the kids was definitely soul crushing in a lot of ways and incredibly expensive. But this is what the administration is doing. It’s tearing families apart.”
At school in Minneapolis, Sawyer is “thriving,” Quyle says. “He’s been on the honor roll every quarter. The stresses he has here in Minnesota are that of a normal high school kid. He doesn’t have to worry about getting assaulted or in trouble if he goes to the men’s bathroom. He sees himself represented in the teachers at school, because there are openly trans teachers. He has normal kid problems: complaining about writing papers and petty friendship drama. If those are your biggest stresses at 16, we love that. We’ll take it. We’re so lucky that [here] he can just be a kid.”
The Realtor Who Left California For More Personal Freedom
“Unfortunately, a lot of people in California that are not conservative did not have any kind of grace towards people that had different needs than them.”
Ashley Davis, 41, and her husband found a lot to love about Southern California, where they were both born and raised—proximity to the beach, organic food, great weather. But in 2015, their affinity for the area began to wane when California passed a law that eliminated personal and religious belief exemption for public schools’ vaccine requirements. Davis says that her oldest child had suffered a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction to a routine childhood vaccination, and she strongly disagreed with the law. “We started contemplating [moving], but it took many years to figure out what was going to be the best fit for our family.”
Their frustrations with the region heightened during the COVID lockdown. Davis’s younger child, a toddler, was diagnosed with autism in the spring of 2020 and wouldn’t tolerate wearing a mask. During that time, Davis says she took her children grocery shopping, and at two different stores, managers called the police when they noticed her unmasked son. “We were constantly dealing with that kind of stress,” she says.
She says she found little empathy from other local parents, was excluded from playdates, and felt ostracized in the community. “Unfortunately, a lot of people in California that are not conservative did not have any kind of grace towards people that had different needs than them,” she says. (Davis and her husband typically vote conservative.)
That same year, she and her family took a trip to Idaho. Her son was having a meltdown—as kids do—when an older man approached, saw she was stressed, and helped her put her groceries in her car. “It was a complete culture shock,” she says.
After speaking with a friend who also had a child on the autism spectrum and who had relocated to a Boise suburb, the pull to Idaho became undeniable. Davis researched the area’s vaccine mandates and the rules around homeschooling, and soon could picture a future in Star, which, she says, is one of “the most conservative towns in the Treasure Valley. We wanted something completely opposite of where we were from.”
In 2024, they moved five doors down from her friend. “It was so our children would have a better life,” Davis says. “We wanted them to have a future and to be treated with respect.” Though she and her husband had lived in the Golden State for their entire lives, Idaho now “feels like home.” Her son is homeschooled and has tapped into the state-funded resources for kids with learning difficulties, and her daughter attends the local high school. “We now have the freedom to make decisions that work best for each child. That’s been a relief.”
Soon after moving, Davis, who was a realtor in California, got re-licensed in Idaho and has carved out a niche helping other families relocate from Southern California to Treasure Valley. Though most of the people she’s met in the area, including her clients, align with her political views, Davis has been delighted to make friends with different perspectives as well. “You can have different views in Idaho, and people are respectful.”
The people aren’t the only plus. “I love driving past different cornfields and seeing highland cows and horses and goats and sheep. When my Ring camera goes off it’s because someone’s horse or goat got out. That’s the kind of shenanigans we’re dealing with.”
The Expat Who Didn't Want to Stay for Another Trump Presidency
“I didn’t want to feel like a second-class citizen.”
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Violet Robinson, 45, took the day off work and kept her two daughters home from school. They drove from their home in Jersey City, New Jersey, to the beach. As she looked out towards the crashing waves, she wondered, “What are we going to do?”
Robinson had been troubled by Trump’s first term—by the sheer possibility of his ascension to the nation’s highest office, and then by his policies and violent rhetoric. “Being Black in America is really, really tough. After Trump’s first term, it became even worse, because people weren’t trying to hide [their racism] anymore,” she says. During Joe Biden’s time in office, when her family struggled due to inflation, she started watching YouTube videos of Black families who left the US for countries like Portugal and Spain. She began to consider moving abroad, especially if Trump got another term.
So she started to prepare for a future outside the country, asking her ex-husband for full custody of their two daughters—now ages 5 and 11—and getting his blessing. At the time she worked for an online betting company, but she also launched a side gig doing digital marketing and AI automation, which granted her a flexible schedule, a way to bolster her savings, and a remote career she could continue doing abroad.
When her fears were realized in November 2024, Robinson’s decision to leave the US for Spain solidified. “I really love their lifestyle. There’s no hustle culture. It’s very much about enjoying life and having a slower pace.”
Robinson spent six months arranging the paperwork, legal documentation, and applying for visas. By July 2025, she was on the ground in Spain, and soon she was apartment hunting in Alicante, a city on the Mediterranean coast with a large international population. “There were a lot of Black and Latin people, a lot of English-speaking people. There’s a beach four blocks away. It felt special and like home.”
Shortly after her arrival, Robinson found a two-bedroom apartment with a bathtub and bunk beds for her daughters—exactly what they had been looking for. Since then, her children have enrolled in the local school, and they’re learning Spanish and participating in activities like ballet and swimming (and for half the price it would cost in the US). “I’m making the same money, but it stretches more.”
Robinson is finding community in the area herself, too. She’s befriended a fellow Black American mom she met at the local playground. “We hang out all the time. We are each other’s support in this process—two Black women who left the US because of how insane it was for us. We just sit down and we’re like, ‘Isn’t this nice?’” She knows not all of Spain is an idyllic place to live—especially for Black people—but Robinson feels “so much more comfortable here than back home. I have a sense of peace that I didn’t have. I didn’t know life could be this good.”
