Category: Demographics
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Housing Costs and Fertility Rates
From the Institute for Family Studies: The US fertility rate hit a record low in 2025. But fertility rates vary significantly across states, ranging from under 1.4 children per woman in states like Vermont and Oregon to over 1.9 in Nebraska and South Dakota. IFS’s Family Structure Index found that housing affordability explains 25% of this variation…
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Graph of the Day: the Young Adult Happiness Gap
From the Institute for Family Studies: For over a decade, happiness has been in free fall among young adults. The share of young adults ages 22 to 35 who reported being “pretty” to “very” happy has fallen by 12-percentage points since 2010. Notably, these declines in happiness have been concentrated among the unmarried. From 2010…
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Family Exodus
From Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey with the Institute for Family Studies: The 2026 Family Structure Index spotlights red states’ growing dominance on the family front. Take family migration. From 2019 to 2024, there has been a steady exodus of families from Blue to Red America—370,000 families from blue to red states. In fact, going back to 2008,…
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When People Vote with their Feet…
more move to red states, and red counties in blue states. From Issues & Insights: The past five years have seen a massive migration of Americans out of heavily Democratic counties and into ones where Donald Trump won majorities in each of the past three elections. … Most analyses of internal migration patterns look only…
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Graph of the Day: K-12 Enrollment Projections
See the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service analysis here.
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Virginia’s Population Reached 8.88 Million in 2025
The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia has published its mid-decade population for Virginia and its localities. Summary from the Weldon Cooper website: Virginia’s population reached 8.88 million as of July 1, 2025, an increase of more than 248,000 residents since the 2020 Census. Between 2020 and 2025, the state’s…
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Uh, Oh, Virginia a Net Out-Migration State in 2025
Virginia dropped from a net in-migration state in 2024 to a net out-migration state in 2025, according to the latest U-Haul Growth Index report. The Old Dominion dropped from a 17th rank in net in-migration to 36th. The net loss was narrow though, only 0.2 percentage points. I’d love to see a regional breakdown —…
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Demographic Change and Virginia Republicans
by James C. Sherlock The author attended a Virginia Republican convention a decade or so ago. He found it strange. He had the same unfortunate experience with too many members of both parties in the General Assembly. Since then, he has avoided advising the Virginia Republican Party leadership. But here goes. Republicans will have…
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Domestic Migration: Virginia’s Lost Decade
by James A. Bacon Virginia lost a net of 120,000 residents through domestic migration (excluding foreign immigration and emigration) over the decade between tax years 2011-12 and 2021-22, according to the Unleash Prosperity “Vote with your feet” database. That was the 9th worst performance among the 50 states. That out-migration translated into a loss of…
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Map of the Day: Where the Old People Are
The 2020 Census reported that approximately one in five Virginians (22.6%) were aged 60 and older, placing Virginia in the United Nations’ “aging society” category, writes Sol Baik for the Weldon Cooper Center’s StatChat blog. The “Eastern Shore” counties, clustered to the east and west of the Chesapeake Bay, had the highest percentage of seniors…
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Ethiopians, Unite!
Who knew that many of the unarmed security guards at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport are of Ethiopian origin? For that matter, who knew there were so many Ethiopians working in any capacity at Reagan National and Washington Dulles International? Or that many have worked there as long as 15 years? Or that many are…
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Passing the Baton
by James A. Bacon I’m old enough to remember — waaaay back in the early 1980s — when Richmond was the dominant business center in Virginia. But as editor of the start-up Virginia Business magazine in 1986, it quickly became apparent that the mega-trend business story of the era was the extraordinary economic and demographic…
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What’s Driving Richmond’s Population Growth? Dynamic Economy or… NoVa Refugees?
by James A. Bacon The Richmond metropolitan area continues to dominate population growth in Virginia, as shown by this map published by Axios-Richmond. (Click here to access interactive features.) This represents a sustained reversal of a decades-long trend in which population growth had been dominated by Northern Virginia. What’s going on? Axios doesn’t speculate about…
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Virginia’s Fertility Rate — Nothing to Write Home About
Following up on yesterday’s post showing the variation in birth rates by Virginia locality… the National Center for Health Statistics map above provides a breakdown of fertility rates by state. Virginia falls in the middle of the pack (but bottom half) with a fertility rate for women aged 15–44 with 55.3 births per 1,000. It…
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Random Stats of the Day: Birth Rates
For the edification of Bacon’s Rebellion readers, I’m presenting some data compiled by Jim Weigand, our Lynchburg correspondent, on birth rates in Virginia. The table above shows the 10 localities with the highest birth rates. The thing that stands out: they’re all cities. What’s with the City of Fairfax, by the way? The birth rate…