Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is boasting about a “Texodus” to the Sooner State.
Dallas Morning News columnist Dallas Cothrum coined the term in a March opinion piece about migration from Texas to Oklahoma, noting that in 2023, Oklahoma had a net gain of 2,000 people.
Cothrum pointed out that the difference is slight, but that it still “reverses a long trend of Texas winning that contest.”
That delighted Oklahoma’s governor.
“[Texas was] like, ‘Hey, we don’t have to worry about competing against the coast. We’ve got to worry about Oklahoma. We’re losing more people to the state of Oklahoma right now than Oklahoma’s sending down to Texas.’ And that is an amazing stat,” Stitt said in Broken Arrow Wednesday morning.
In the column, Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell was quoted crediting the migration of Californians to the Dallas-Fort Worth area for shifting the area’s politics to the left. Pinnell said he wants “cranky CEOs from Dallas who want a more business-friendly state” to move to Oklahoma.
As part of the exodus, the column also suggested that high admission standards at Texas universities have prompted recent high school graduates to move to the Sooner State for college.
