The following day, Paul introduced me to two of his recent clients, a couple in their mid-twenties named Kurtis and Crystal. They had moved to McKinney from Long Beach, California, where they lived across from the beach and near all the shops and restaurants they could want, all within walking distance. The problem?

“Our apartment was the size of this room,” Crystal said, glancing around the small conference room we were sitting in. They paid $1,500 a month for 500 square feet and no air-conditioning.

Kurtis spent three hours driving to and from work every day, bumper to bumper on the 405. He’s an accountant, so during tax season he would wake at 5 a.m. and get home at 8:30 p.m., then do it all over again the next day.

Crystal, who was in school for social work, would sometimes have her friends over, and their bleeding hearts clashed with Kurtis’s more conservative sensibilities. Kurtis told them he doesn’t believe in global warming. “How dare you!” the friends would say. When Kurtis said he was voting for Trump, people called him a racist.

Kurtis was against sanctuary cities, the high taxes in California, and all the restrictions on gun ownership. “Homeless people need to get a job,” he added. “We shouldn’t be patting them on the back, telling them it’s okay to be homeless.”

Crystal, meanwhile, didn’t like how her social-work program downplayed religion. She said she was told not to talk about religion with her clients or to share her views on abortion or homosexuality.

They were secret conservatives, feeling like they couldn’t even talk about their beliefs. “It’s like I couldn’t walk around with my ideas,” Kurtis said.

The turning point was when they got married in Mexico and came back to a tiny apartment, to the grind of work, to the insanity of Southern California traffic. Termites invaded their apartment, and their landlord asked them to move. There has to be more, they thought.

That’s when they began thinking more seriously about Texas. Kurtis had always admired the state’s conservative values, and when he heard Paul Chabot being interviewed on a local radio show he likes, Paul’s talk of what Kurtis called “the homeless problem” in California and “crime going up because they’ve let a lot of criminals out” resonated. He got home and emailed Paul immediately.

The couple flew out to McKinney in August. The scorching weather wasn’t so bad, they thought. Instead, they noticed the lack of trash on the streets and the absence of homeless people, the manicured lawns. “It just looked like a well-taken-care-of city,” Kurtis said.