Why do so many people seem to hate California?
Is it the traffic? The air pollution? The crazy housing costs?
Those things are certainly part of it, said Paul Chabot, the founder of Conservative Move, a company that helps disgruntled Californians start new lives in the country’s red states.
But he added, “Politics is what has really ruined the state.”
When pollsters in 2012 asked American voters about whether they liked each state, California came in dead last.
Politics was a big reason. Of all 50 states, according to the survey by Public Policy Polling, party affiliation was most salient in attitudes about California, with Republicans far more likely than Democrats to hate the Golden State.
California’s alienation from conservative America has only deepened with the rise of Donald Trump. Chabot, who was born and raised in the Inland Empire and twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress, said the last straw for him came around the November 2016 election.
In a Facebook post at the time, he said his family looked at California, its liberal leadership arrayed in resistance to the Trump agenda, “and agreed it was time to move to ‘America,’ to find a region of our nation that embraces the values and morals we cherish.”
Speaking by phone from his new home in McKinney, Tex., Chabot, 43, said his relocation business had been contacted by about 10,000 families, mostly from California, since last spring.
He said clients commonly talked about graffiti, trash, homelessness, and the decline of the state’s once-vaunted public school system. Politicians were to blame, he added, but so were the California voters who put them there.
For all the angst of the anti-California set, many of the state’s residents report feeling quite content. The state ranks 13th nationally for overall well-being, according to a 2016 survey by Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.
And when the data is broken down by metropolitan areas, parts of California (especially along the coast) appear positively blissed out. For the study, residents were asked about their cities, jobs, health, and social lives.
Seven areas of California — Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Salinas, San Diego, and Visalia — ranked in the top 25 of nearly 190 surveyed nationwide.
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