By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

When I moved to Georgia, I began to hear the phrase “stick to your ribs,” and with great established BBQ spots, as well as those moving in, there’s going to be no shortage of good eats in Cobb County.

But Georgia is about to get another sticky designation. The state again cracked the top five for being one of the stickiest in America, which means that people who are born in Georgia or come to the Peach State tend to “stick around.”

“State-to-state migration has been rising for decades, but one interesting metric is how “sticky” a state is — a term used to calculate how many people born in the state continue to reside there,” writes Josh Marcus in The Independent, in his article “The Top Five US States People Never Want To Move Away From – And The Ones They Always Leave.”

Marcus finds that Texas tops the list with more than 82 percent of residents deciding to stick with the Lone Star State. Georgia comes in at 74.2 percent, just one spot behind North Carolina (75.5 percent). Despite the flood of articles I get about how terrible California is, and how everyone is moving out, the evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the U.S. Census Bureau show California is the fourth stickiest state, coming in at 73 percent.

States like Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, and South Dakota often cite their low population numbers and inhospitable climate for ranking near the bottom (which includes Rhode Island), but then again, Utah shares some of those factors and still makes the top five for folks staying around.

Georgia also fared pretty well last year, according to the U.S. News and World Report analysis using the same data. Florida was only one percentage point behind Georgia then, so we’ll have to see what happened to the Sunshine State. In that 2023 study, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee did all right, but Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi were further behind. The map showed the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest doing okay for stickiness, with other prairie states and New England states further behind.

So perhaps it’s not just climate, as the South can get pretty hot and inhospitable in the Summer. Kim Nichols Dauner and Neil A. Wilmot, who published in Front Public Health in 2022, found that social capital could play a key role in keeping local residents happy.

In their article “Did States With More Social Capital Pre-Pandemic Offer Mental Health Protection During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional View,” Dauner and Wilmot write “Social capital is a well-known health determinant with both relational and geographic aspects. It can help mitigate adverse events and has been shown to impact behaviors and responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mental health has declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, and social capital, may serve to buffer those declines.” Additionally, the authors found “Generalized social trust and state mask mandates were significantly associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety.”

Keeping better social ties, better civic engagement, and stronger local organizations can potentially boost a sense of community that can keep people “sticking around” in places like Cobb County, well after the worst aspects of COVID-19 recede somewhat. It could explain why some want to live in Georgia and other states at the top of that sticky measure.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.