Following the Columbus Suburbanization: IRS County-Migration Data
The Problem
Local campaigns are often the last to notice when their electorate changes beneath them. A township that was 80% long-term residents five years ago may now have a significant population of newcomers — people who moved from a neighboring county, from a major metro, or from out of state. These voters have no local voter history, which makes them invisible to standard propensity models built on turnout frequency. Campaigns either ignore them entirely or treat them as unknowns. But migration is not random. People who move from specific origin counties carry predictable political tendencies — and that information is publicly available.
What BMS Voter Intel Does
BMS Voter Intel incorporates IRS county-to-county migration data as an enrichment layer on the voter file, flagging recent movers and annotating their records with the political character of their origin county. This allows a campaign to identify which newcomers are likely to be politically sympathetic — and which are not — before spending any contact budget on them. It also provides a county-level trend view showing whether the overall migration flow is favorable or unfavorable to the Republican coalition over time.
How It Works (Without Revealing IP)
The IRS Statistics of Income division publishes county-to-county migration flows annually, drawn from matched tax returns. These files show how many tax filers moved from each county to each other county, and in what volume. BMS Voter Intel ingests the most recent available years of this data and overlays it against the county voter file. Voters whose registration address is recent — identified through registration date and address-history data — are flagged as potential movers and annotated with the dominant origin-county flow for their ZIP code or precinct area. The political lean of origin counties is estimated from their own precinct-level presidential results and registration composition, both public data. No individual tax data is used or accessible — only the aggregate county-level flows published by IRS SOI.
Real Numbers from the Van Buren Campaign
In Licking County, IRS migration data showed that Franklin County (Columbus and its inner suburbs) accounts for approximately 62% of Licking County's net in-migration over the most recent five-year measurement window. Franklin County is a majority-Democratic county by registration, which raises an obvious question: are the people moving from Franklin to Licking politically representative of Franklin, or are they a self-selected subset? The answer, based on the precinct-level analysis of recent-mover concentrations, suggests the latter — newcomers are concentrating in the more rural and exurban precincts of Licking, not the Newark urban core, which is a pattern consistent with Republican-leaning suburbanization rather than Democratic-leaning urbanization.
What This Means for Your Race
If your county sits in the orbit of a growing metro — Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Tampa, Chicago — you have a migration story that is shaping your electorate right now. Understanding whether that migration is helping or hurting your coalition, and where the newcomers are landing geographically, lets you make a deliberate decision about outreach rather than hoping your traditional base holds. In Licking County, the migration tail is favorable. In a different county, it might not be — and that's equally important to know before you build your field plan.
Get Beta Access
BMS Voter Intel is in limited beta for Summer 2026 — Republican and independent down-ballot campaigns in Ohio, Florida, and Illinois. Contact [email protected] or visit bullmoosestrategy.com/voter-intel to learn how migration intelligence applies to your county.