Last week’s Fox News debate between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom revealed several inconvenient truths about California and Gavin Newsom. One is that California’s poorly designed economic policies have delivered record high housing costs and homelessness, high tax rates, high energy costs, and failing public schools, despite enormous school spending. Another is Newsom’s unwillingness—to the point of absurdity—to own any of those policy mistakes.

The debate began with Fox News host-turned-moderator Sean Hannity presenting a graph that showed California has been losing population to Florida. Hannity then asked DeSantis and Newsom to comment on California’s net outmigration to Florida. Newsom stated emphatically that California had reversed the outmigration trend in the previous two years, with California gaining more Floridians than the number of Californians lost to Florida.

“You mean the last two years, more Floridians going to California than Californians going to Florida?” Newsom said. “That’s going to be fun to fact-check,” he added with a smirk, suggesting not so subtly that the Fox News graph was misleading. And a bit later in the debate, Newsom stated, “We’ve already established that more people are moving from Florida to California.”

But California’s net population outflow has not reversed in the last two years, as Newsom claimed. The rate of California’s population outflow to Florida has in fact accelerated. In 2022, California had a net loss of 22,144 residents to Florida, up from 2021’s net loss of 12,772. Before Newsom became governor, the net outflow of Californians to Florida averaged about 5,000 residents per year.

These data on California’s population losses........

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