People aren’t “fleeing” California per se, but the long-term trend across the board is people migrating to the sunbelt. California will probably lose House seats in this decade’s reapportionment. This trend has been going on for a very long time—and it’s in part why California itself happened in the first place. Bell Labs was in Manhattan and New Jersey. When Silicon Valley arose, California was a red state with low taxes, low regulation, and cheap land where you could build semiconductor factories easily. Virginia was the same way—the Dulles Tech corridor was farmland when I was growing up.