I'm not sure how much I believe that. It seems likely that this census was incredibly compromised compared to past censuses, and the 0.4% decline is well within what I'd consider a plausible margin of error.
Personally, I left for a multitude of reasons, but whoever takes these statistics and concludes that "California is dying" is delusional in my opinion, at least for the foreseable future.
Less people means less demand, means less businesses, less jobs, less tax revenue, etc.
It is reversible, by changing expectations of the future, to prevent people from leaving and to attract new people, but a few years of shrinking population would make the spiral very hard to revert.
In what world would there be a conspiracy to reduce california population by 200k?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/win-trump-sup...
>The state's population estimate comes from a number of sources, including birth and death counts, the number of new driver's licenses and address changes, school enrollments and federal tax returns.
The Census normally tries very hard to find people. They do this by sending out legions of people in person to people who may not have returned their Census forms.
The "in person" part of the census was heavily compromised this year due to Covid even before you start to add in the Republican fuckery.