- Philip Wiseman and his wife moved to Idaho because they were fed up with California's politics.
- The retirees made a large spreadsheet to decide which Republican-leaning state to move to.
- They ended up in Eagle, Idaho, and love the conservative values of the community.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Philip Wiseman, a 70-year-old retiree who moved from California to Idaho with his wife in 2021.
They're part of a trend of conservatives moving to red states. Data compiled by Idaho officials showed 78% of voters who moved from California to Idaho registered as Republicans between 2020 and 2023.
The median home price in the California town the Wisemans lived, Monte Sereno, was $5.5 million in September 2024, according to Redfin, compared to $748,000 in Eagle, Idaho, the town they moved to.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
We moved to Idaho from Northern California three years ago this December.
My wife is a fourth-generation Californian, and I moved there in 1985. We loved the state. It was the coolest state to live in forever. I worked in semiconductor sales for Silicon Valley firms and my wife worked in healthcare. We got married in 2011 and built a beautiful home in Monte Sereno, just outside of Los Gatos. It was a really beautiful neighborhood and area.
We just were very obviously conservative. We had friends that were like-minded but the city itself and the surrounding area is quite liberal. And we knew that we couldn't talk politics with our neighbors.
Our best friends across the street put up a Biden sign in the front yard. I thought, "Are you serious?" We have a lot of respect for those people. And then they doubled down on Biden. I couldn't believe it.
We always say we didn't leave California. California left us.
Over time the decisions that the politicians and the governors and the district attorneys and all of these people started making were just really wrong. Everything from being a sanctuary state with protections for undocumented immigrants to some of the highest taxes in the country to not prosecuting criminals, among other reasons. It's just insanity.
Over time, I felt like it was death by a thousand pinpricks. We got to the point where we decided that we just couldn't put up with it any longer.
We miss our California and what California used to be. It's still beautiful. You fly over it and you realize, "God, the state is so pretty. It has so much to offer." But it's just so screwed up. We had to get the hell out.
We're sad about it every day. We think about it all the time.
We made a huge spreadsheet to decide which red state to move to
Once we decided to leave, which was a huge decision, the question then became, "Where are we going to go?"
We looked at several different states. My wife put a huge spreadsheet together with average rainfall, average snowfall, average sunny days, average rainy days, average distance from our daughter, who lives in Nevada, to a major airport. It had to be red, obviously, as red as we could find, and we'd love it to have been a state with no state income tax, but more importantly, we looked at what it costs to live there.
Some states we considered were Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, and Florida.
A big spreadsheet later, we ended up coming to Idaho.
I knew a guy that had used to live here and asked him what he thought of the area, and he said it was great and we should look at the Boise area. So we did.
We didn't know a soul. We came up here and looked around and found a realtor to show us around. We probably made three fact-finding missions up here looking at different areas and neighborhoods. When we finally moved here, we rented for a year, and we looked at neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood.
We ended up buying a house here in Eagle, and we've been loving it ever since. We've been here just about two years now.
We love the Eagle area because it's very conservative and there's a lot of like-minded people. It was easy to make friends here. People are polite and friendly. They wave all the time. We're both retired now, so this is our forever home.
Eagle is also full of people who moved here from California for basically the same reasons we did. And not just Californians; there are also people from Oregon and Seattle.
I used to love California but things changed as I got older
I moved to California when I was around 30. I just turned 70. When I was a younger man, I didn't pay much attention to politics. California was wonderful. The beach, the ocean, the food, my career.
But over time, you grow up, you grow older, you grow wiser, you get married, you have a child, and you start noticing things more. The more you pay attention, the more things piss you off.
I think it's best for conservatives to live in conservative neighborhoods. Liberals can live in their own neighborhoods. It didn't used to be that big a deal, so I hate to say that because it does suck. But I'm just noticing the fact is all.