And they love it here.

"As soon as I drove into Texas, literally, as soon as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, like, 'This is wonderful,' " says Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-old portrait photographer from Orange County, Calif.

"People weren't wearing masks — nobody cared. It's kind of like heaven on earth."

She says when the state of California forced her to close her photography studio over COVID-19 restrictions, she and her husband, a retired newspaper editor, knew it was time to "escape."

America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.

"We felt very out of place and very uncomfortable at times," says Tiffany Wooten, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom whose family recently relocated from conservative Indiana to liberal Austin. "We were looking at blue cities because we wanted to be with our own people."

The trend seems to be quickening as conservatives flee places with strict COVID-19 rules.

Karen Bates, a 52-year-old mortgage executive, moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with her family last year from Puerto Rico. She says the island's government was going to force her teenaged daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes, to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. She now attends a Christian school.

"She's not had to wear a mask," Bates says. "She doesn't have to get vaccinated. She's thriving on the tennis team, making straight A's. I love the freedom of [vaccine] choice in Texas."