POLIT IC S P O L I TI C S
Should I Stay or Should I Go? A new poll looks at the Americans who say they’re considering leaving the country for good. (They probably won’t.)
By David Brady and Brett Parker
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ince the George W. Bush administration, Gallup in its World Poll has asked this question: “Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?” During the Bush and Obama
administrations the number of Americans responding positively was right around 10 percent (11 for Bush and 10 for Obama). During the Trump presidency that number (in 2017) jumped to 16 percent. In comparison (2017), the per-
centage for Latin America was 27 percent while in European Union countries it was 21 percent; in Australia and New Zealand it was below 10 percent. In 2019, Gallup acknowledged the increase in the United States and reported that this new interest in emigration was concentrated primarily among women under thirty (40 percent wanted to leave) and those who disapproved of Donald Trump (22 percent, compared to 7 percent of Trump’s supporters). The Gallup article summarized this trend by pointing out that the rise in leavers “has come among groups that typically lean Democratic and that have David Brady is the Davies Family Senior Fellow (Emeritus) at the Hoover Institution and the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Brett Parker is a research assistant at Hoover and a JD/PhD student at Stanford University. H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2022
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