We know there's been a lot of people moving to Montana since the pandemic started. Mountain towns like Bozeman, Missoula, and Kalispell are certainly drawing big numbers. But so are towns further east like Billings. And so is Butte.

But here is the topline from the latest Census numbers that recently came out. Kalispell, Montana leads the nation in total net domestic migration out of 538 micropolitan areas in the country. Bozeman came in at 4th highest.

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow with the Claremont Institute, and former Trump Administration appointee, who now lives in Bozeman. He was first to spot and filter through the Census data for the Montana specifics. He added this:

Jeremy Carl: Helena Montana was 20th overall out of 538 micro areas. And even Butte had strong growth of almost 2% from domestic migration...among MT metro areas, @BillingsMT gained 2988 people from domestic migration, Missoula gained 1522 and Great Falls gained 136 people.

Click here for his full thread on Twitter where I first spotted his analysis.

Jeremy Carl also joined us on the radio to give us his reaction and insight. One key takeaway that we both agreed upon is that these numbers are likely an undercount of the actual numbers of people who are moving into Montana. But even with those numbers, Kalispell led the nation:

Jeremy Carl: A lot of these newcomers are not, even in the more liberal areas, are not necessarily the same sort of people who were coming pre-pandemic. They tend to be more conservative voters who are maybe a little more in line with kind of historic Montana trends. But we're seeing it not just in Gallatin county, or even in some of the other big growth areas...Lincoln County added almost 1000 people. That's in the northwest corner of the state near Libby. Which is as many as it added in the previous 20 years.

 

 

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