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[quote=Anonymous][quote]  Economic considerations also come into play. The Census data shows more Californians moving to Virginia then to Maryland. In the most recent Census data set available, the number of Californians moving to Virginia in the prior 12-month period was 68% higher than the number moving to Maryland. This can't be explained away simply by pointing to the size of each state, since the population of Virginia is about 40% higher than the population of Maryland.[/quote]

Oh please.   You're trying to craft an argument based on isolated data points that prove nothing absent context.    The difference (in CA migrants to VA and MD respectively) in absolute terms is less than 7K people; the difference adjusted for VA and MD's population size is less than 3000 people.  For all we know that might reflect that CA and VA are two of the three US state's with the biggest (frequently PCS-ing) military populations (unlike MD which isn't even in the top ten).  Which might also account for why migration to CA from VA was twice as high as from MD over that same period.

How about another data point -- the fact Maryland has the highest average Household Income (HHI) in the nation, while Virginia is ranked tenth, lower than both Maryland and California (and btw the gap between MD and VA isn't that close -- about eight percent).   Guess that means at least at a macro/average level, Californians have the potential to increase their HHI by moving to MD while facing a decrease if they move to VA.  That's actually a silly argument to make to an individual/family - who knows what their particular circumstances are -- but it underscores why these arguments based on a single data point are kind of meaningless. 
  
As for the population growth data others here have gone on about, VA's increased by 7.88% over the last census, while Maryland's increased by 6.99%, which is a pretty negligible difference, esp if you consider that Maryland's population density (per sq mile) is already three times that of Virginia's.  Of course, population growth in both states is dwarfed by that of DC (14.9%) - does that prove that DC is automatically the best fit for transplanting Californians?

The point is, the economic distinctions between MD and VA aren't particularly dramatic, unless you happen to work for the state chamber of commerce or are some partisan/cable news warrior.  Which is exactly why it's also worth delving into cultural distinctions.   If you've never been asked by neighbors "what church do you go to?" and don't really want to live in a community where that might be a conversational ice-breaker, or don't want to raise your kids among families that use "woke" as an all-purpose term of dismissal, or in a community where some parents may seek to ban 'problematic' books from the local library - and come from a Bay Area community where that's never been an issue -- it's a lot more germane to consider where in the DMV that's a likelier possibility, rather than attaching undue importance to, say, whether one state's population growth rate was almost 1 percent higher than another's over the preceding decade.

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