According to an article in the Daily Mail, for the first time in 171 years, the population of the state of California has shrunk. It lost over a 180,000 people last year, the equivalent of the populations of Santa Barbara and Santa Monica combined.

And along with this, the state also lost a seat in the Federal congress because of the population loss and maybe not coincidentally so has New York.

People are leaving largely because of the woke politics of the Democrat party and the social problems that come with it. Most are moving to states run by Republicans such as Texas and Miami.

The reasons for leaving are many. The Daily Mail provides a partial list:

Families and firms are being driven away by the high cost of living, crime fears, hefty taxes, inadequate housing, interfering officials, persistent political failures, red tape, raging wildfires and the squalor of streets littered with homeless drug addicts.

Others are citing the politics and the pessimism that has enveloped the state:

Yet perhaps the most profound problem confronting California is the pessimism that plagues so many families in the state. ‘People can’t live a middle-class lifestyle on a middle-class income, so they feel frustrated and many move,’ said Dowell Myers, an expert at the University of Southern California on demographic change. One Berkeley University survey last year found more than half of registered voters had thought about moving out of the state, blaming housing costs, high taxes and concerns over the dominant political culture.

READ: California nightmare: How high taxes, rampant crime, suffocating wokery, streets littered with homeless addicts, and years of liberal policies are blamed for ruining the Golden State… as thousands of families flee to Republican Texas and Florida

While those on the left are quick to blame COVID for California’s first population decline, a San Francisco study revealed that three times as many people died of Fentanyl overdoses in the city last year than of COVID.

But not only are people fleeing so are businesses including some major tech companies such as DropBox, Digital Realty Trust ($36 billion company), and Stitch Fix ($8.3 billion). Other major players have left including Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Tesla, along with its CEO Elon Musk. READ: List of companies leaving California grows, citing high tax burden, cost of living

Others are leaving indirectly. While they still have offices in California, expansions are taking place in other states.

The Book of Exodus provides a current tally of the continually expanding list of the companies who are leaving California.

RELATED: Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.