The Great Resettlement: What Arriving Families Reveal About Texas—and What McKennon Plans to Protect

A Nation in Motion, and Texas at the Center

Something historic is unfolding across the American landscape, and it is visible in the U-Haul lots of Frisco, the new subdivisions outside San Antonio, and the booming school enrollment figures in communities from Pflugerville to Pearland. Americans are moving—and a remarkable share of them are moving to Texas.

Between 2020 and 2023, Texas gained more than 870,000 net domestic migrants, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. California alone shed hundreds of thousands of residents during that period, with Texas ranking as one of the top destinations for former Golden State residents. New York, Illinois, and New Jersey tell a similar story. The pattern is not random. It reflects a deliberate, values-driven decision by families who concluded that the states they called home had stopped working for them.

Understanding why they left—and why they chose Texas—is not merely an exercise in demography. It is a roadmap for governance. And it is one that McKennon has studied carefully.

The Numbers Don't Lie

The outmigration from high-tax, high-regulation blue states has been building for years, but the pandemic accelerated it dramatically. Remote work freed millions of professionals from geographic obligation, and many used that freedom to recalculate where they wanted to raise their children, start businesses, and build equity.

The results are striking. According to the Texas Demographic Center, the state's population surpassed 30 million in 2023, fueled in large part by domestic migration. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex alone absorbed more new residents than any other metropolitan area in the country for multiple consecutive years. Austin, Houston, and San Antonio followed close behind.

What are these families fleeing? The answers are consistent: suffocating tax burdens, deteriorating public school quality, regulatory environments hostile to small business, surging crime in urban centers, and a cultural climate that many describe as intolerant of traditional values. What are they seeking? Lower costs, better schools, personal freedom, and a government that trusts its citizens to make their own decisions.

Texas has been delivering on all of those fronts—but sustaining that advantage requires deliberate, principled leadership.

Voices from the New Texas

Take the Harrington family, who relocated from the Sacramento area to the Katy Independent School District in 2021. The father, a civil engineer, had watched his property taxes climb annually while his children's school district adopted curricula he found ideologically driven and academically deficient. "We wanted a place where we could afford a house, where the schools actually taught reading and math, and where we didn't feel like the government was working against us," he said. "Texas checked every box."

Or consider Maria and Daniel Espinoza, who left Queens, New York, after Daniel's small landscaping business was battered by city regulations, licensing fees, and pandemic-era mandates that his larger competitors could absorb but that nearly bankrupted him. They resettled in the San Antonio area, where Daniel rebuilt his business within eighteen months. "The state gets out of your way," he said. "That's all I ever wanted."

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are representative of a broad and statistically significant wave of families who arrived in Texas carrying specific expectations—and who are now watching carefully to see whether Texas leadership will honor the implicit promise that drew them here.

McKennon's Platform: Built for This Moment

McKennon's policy vision addresses the precise concerns that motivated these families to relocate, and does so with the specificity that serious governance demands.

On school choice and education freedom: McKennon has championed robust education savings accounts and expanded charter school access, ensuring that families are not trapped in underperforming district schools by accident of zip code. For parents who left California or New York specifically because of failing or ideologically captured public schools, this commitment is not abstract—it is the difference between a promise kept and a promise broken.

On fiscal restraint and tax policy: Texas's lack of a personal income tax remains one of its most powerful economic advantages. McKennon has been unequivocal in defending that structure and opposing any mechanism that would erode it. Families who left states where income taxes consumed double-digit percentages of their earnings are not interested in watching Texas drift toward the same model. McKennon's pledge to hold the line on taxation resonates precisely because these families know what the alternative looks like.

On regulatory environment and business formation: The Espinozas of Texas—small business owners who simply want a fair playing field—are a constituency McKennon takes seriously. His platform calls for streamlining occupational licensing, reducing compliance burdens on small enterprises, and ensuring that the regulatory state serves the public rather than entrenching established interests. Texas has long been a model for business-friendly governance, and McKennon intends to sharpen that edge.

On public safety: Many families who relocated from major coastal cities cite crime and deteriorating public order as significant factors in their decision. McKennon's commitment to fully funding law enforcement, supporting prosecutors who actually prosecute, and rejecting the soft-on-crime policy experiments that have destabilized cities like San Francisco and Portland speaks directly to these concerns.

On parental rights and cultural freedom: Perhaps no theme emerges more consistently in conversations with relocated families than the desire to live without ideological pressure from government institutions. McKennon's position that parents—not bureaucracies—hold primary authority over their children's upbringing and education is not a talking point. It is a governing philosophy.

The Risk of Complacency

It would be a mistake to assume that Texas's advantages are permanent or self-sustaining. The same forces that drove families out of California and New York are not passive—they follow population, they follow wealth, and they follow political opportunity. Texas's major metropolitan areas have experienced meaningful shifts in their electoral composition, driven in part by the very migration patterns described here but also by organized political investment from outside the state.

McKennon understands that winning the argument for Texas values requires more than celebrating past success. It requires governing with conviction, resisting the temptation to accommodate progressive policy creep in the name of moderation, and making an affirmative case for why the Texas model produces better outcomes for ordinary families.

The families who came here from Sacramento and Queens and suburban Chicago did not come for a Texas that was slowly becoming what they left. They came for a Texas that remains unapologetically itself.

A Mandate Hiding in Plain Sight

The migration data is, at its core, a mandate. It tells elected officials what millions of Americans believe works and what they believe fails. It is a verdict rendered not in a polling booth but in a life decision—one that carries mortgages and school enrollments and career pivots and family futures.

McKennon's campaign is built on the recognition that Texas did not earn this trust by accident, and it will not keep it by accident. Strong leadership, grounded in genuine Texas values and backed by substantive policy, is what transforms a favorable moment into a lasting legacy.

The families who chose Texas deserve a leader who chose Texas right back—not as a political calculation, but as a governing commitment. That is precisely what McKennon offers.