Census Results And Fallout

[GreyhoundFan]

So the first bits of info from the census have been released. Republican states are getting more electoral college votes and house members.

"New census numbers shift political power south to Republican strongholds"

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Political power in the United States will continue to shift south this decade, as historically Democratic states that border the Great Lakes give up congressional seats and electoral votes to regions where Republicans currently enjoy a political advantage, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Texas, Florida and North Carolina, three states that voted twice for President Donald Trump, are set to gain a combined four additional seats in Congress in 2023 because of population growth, granting them collectively as many new votes in the electoral college for the next presidential election as the Democratic-leaning Hawaii has in total.

At the same time, four northern states with Democratic governors that President Biden won in 2020 — Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York — will each lose a single congressional seat. Ohio, a nearby Republican-leaning state, will also lose a seat in Congress.

The data released Monday marked the start to a constitutionally mandated effort to redraw congressional districts across the country in advance of the 2022 elections, a tangled and litigious process that is likely to benefit Republican officeholders more than Democratic ones next year. That stands as a stark threat to Democratic control of the House, which will rest on a seven-vote margin, with four outstanding vacancies, once newly elected Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) takes office in the coming weeks..

The numbers are also the first to emerge from one of the most challenging population counts in the nation’s history, one disrupted by a global pandemic. Trump, during his term, also pushed to add a citizenship question and exclude undocumented immigrants from the census.

The results show that the country grew over the past decade by the second-slowest rate in history, owing to an aging population, decreased fertility and slowing immigration. A slightly lower rate of growth was recorded between 1930 and 1940, a decade that encompassed the Great Depression.

Only seven of the constitutionally mandated 435 congressional seats will be reapportioned under the latest population count. Five of the seven states that lost a House seat voted for Biden, and five of the seven newly created seats will be added to states that voted for Trump.

The full partisan effect of the shifts will not be known for months, as states must sift through population data that will be released later this year to draw new congressional district lines, resulting in hundreds of decisions by state lawmakers and independent commissions about the partisan makeup of each individual district.

Partisan line-drawers will face numerous choices between creating fewer competitive seats that will protect their incumbent reelections and more ambitious maps that could allow greater shifts in political control later in the decade as population shifts continue to transform the electorate.

But Republican control of the redistricting process in states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina is likely to increase the number of congressional contests where Republicans have a chance of winning, observers say.

“Redistricting favors Republicans, but it is not going to win back the majority on its own,” said Mike Thom, battleground director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. But, he added, “you could see many Republicans drawn into safer seats, which will free up resources to go on offense.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said that he does not expect Monday’s announcement to result in a partisan shift on its own. But by the end of the process next year, after lawmakers and commissions have drawn new district lines, he expects Republicans to have a new advantage. He said Democrats will gain between five and 15 safe seats in Congress, while Republicans pick up 20 to 30 reliable seats.

“What population shifts are going to tell us is that voters are leaving blue states to go to red states,” Kincaid said. “They are moving south and going west.”

Democrats are preparing their own plans to block Republican efforts to draw more safe Republican seats in these growing states, setting up a costly and contentious battle that is likely to be settled in the courts in states such as Florida, Texas and North Carolina.

“The reason that they are gaining seats is because of growth from voters that tend to vote Democratic,” said Kelly Ward Burton, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “The growth is happening in the Latino community, in the Black community, in the suburbs. It is an increase in young people. If they draw fair maps in those states, Democrats should pick up seats.”

In other parts of the country, the shifts in population will have a less obvious effect on partisan power. The Democratic stronghold of California will lose a seat for the first time in its history, but that will be offset by gains of congressional representation in nearby states such as Colorado and Oregon , which have both trended toward Democrats in recent years. Montana, a once-purple state that has moved to the GOP in recent years, will also gain a seat.

The census announcement was a relief for Rhode Island and Alabama, which each had been projected to lose a seat in the new count, but will instead maintain the same congressional representation over the next decade. The announcement also dashed hopes by Florida and Texas, which had been hopeful that they would add even more new seats in the new count.

Republicans will lose a member of Congress in West Virginia, where the all-GOP delegation will shrink from three to two, as the state’s population has shrunk over the past decade by 3.2 percent, the largest loss of any state in the country.

“It’s not fun and it’s a symptom of some long-standing problems we have had in West Virginia that have caused people to leave,” state Sen. Charles Trump (R) said of the continued reduction in his state’s federal power. “But I have strong hope in our future.”

Similar long-term demographic and migratory trends have affected Northern states that border the Great Lakes, where the manufacturing industry has struggled in recent decades, the population has grown older and younger people have chosen to move away. After the 1920 Census, the eight states that border the Great Lakes elected 175 members of Congress. In 2022, they will elect 113 members, a decline of more than a third.

“The Midwest states for the most part, and western New York and western Pennsylvania, they have more folks who are older and less folks who are younger,” said Rolf Pendall, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “You have more people passing away as a percent of the total, and you have fewer people being born there.”

Those same Midwestern states, however, are expected to maintain a primacy in future presidential contests, as the Frost Belt has shown a steady pattern of switching partisan allegiances in recent contests. Under the Constitution, the presidential election is decided by the electoral college, with electors assigned to each state based on the number of Congress members that they elect.

Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 306 to 232 electors in 2020. If the result was repeated in 2024 under the new apportionment, with the Democratic and Republican candidates winning same states, the Democrat would still win comfortably, by a margin of 303 to 235.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More analysis: "3 takeaways from which states gain and lose in the new census report"

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The U.S. Census Bureau announced its once-in-a-decade reapportionment totals Monday, bestowing new congressional districts and electoral votes upon certain states while taking them away from others.

All told, seven districts will move from one state to another, based upon population shifts. Here are the basics on which states gained and lost.

First, the gainers:

• Texas +2
• Colorado +1
• Florida +1
• Montana +1
• North Carolina +1
• Oregon +1

And now the losers:

• California -1
• Illinois -1
• Michigan -1
• New York -1
• Ohio -1
• Pennsylvania -1
• West Virginia -1

Below are some takeaways from the announcement.

1. The surprises

If there was one surprise in the announcement Monday, it was that we didn’t see bigger shifts. We expected as many as 10 seats to migrate from one state to another, but in the end it was just seven.

Some of the biggest news:

• Minnesota avoided losing a seat very narrowly — to the point that New York would have taken the seat if it had just 89 more people. (Respond to the census, people!)
• Texas gains only two seats, rather than three.
• Florida gains only one seat, rather than two.
• Rhode Island will not lose one of its two House seats, after all.
• Arizona doesn’t gain a seat, after all.

Fine population margins can make the difference between a state losing or gaining a congressional district and an electoral vote. And there were questions on the eve of Monday’s announcement about in which direction some shifts might land. But generally speaking, most of the above is pretty surprising.

2. The biggest winners and losers

It’s clear who the biggest winners and losers are in the current round: the small states. Montana will now double its representation in the House (going from one to two seats) and is moving from three to four electoral votes. Rhode Island, meanwhile, surprisingly maintains its two-member House delegation and its four electoral votes. West Virginia, meanwhile, loses one of its three districts and one of its five electoral votes.

Given the fine population margins, all three are big for those states.

But those are still relatively small prizes in both presidential elections and the House. And the trends over time in certain, bigger states are particularly remarkable:

• New York has steadily declined from 45 districts in the 1940s to 26 today. On the plus side, it’s the first reapportionment since then that it hasn’t lost multiple seats.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Florida has gained seats in every reapportionment over the same span, growing from eight in the 1950s to 28 today. It now takes sole possession of the third-biggest electoral vote prize and House delegation — behind California and Texas — after previously sharing those with New York.
• No, it didn’t gain three seats as it might have hoped, but Texas continues to be the winner among winners, growing from just 26 electoral votes as recently as 1980 to 40 today. That also comes with the asterisk that Democrats have made the state increasingly competitive, but they didn’t come nearly as close to winning it as they had hoped in 2020, still losing it by more than five points in the presidential election.
• California, which has confronted unusually sluggish population growth, lost a district for the first time ever.

3. The continued shift toward red states

Any time data like this drops, our reflex is to look at what it means practically speaking in our politics — i.e. which party gains. And that’s extremely valid given that we’ve just had two very closely decided electoral-college elections, not to mention a 2000 race that hinged on literally two electoral votes (all of which accounts for three of the past six elections). We also have a very closely divided House, in which the number of districts in a given state could literally decide who has the majority after the 2022 election.

To be clear, just because a red state gains seats doesn’t mean those districts will go red, and vice versa for a blue state. But seats and electoral votes migrating from red states to blue states or the other way around at least present opportunities, especially when one party or the other gets to draw the new maps through the upcoming redistricting process.

So what does the new breakdown mean from a partisan perspective?

All told, five seats will migrate from blue states to red ones — owing to population shifts from the Rust Belt, the Northeast and California to the South and other portions of the West.

Five of the seven seats being added also go to states under complete GOP control of redistricting, with three of seven being taken away coming from states in which Democrats have some measure of control over the maps. (Other states have more divided control or redistricting commissions.) That should help Republicans, at least marginally, draw a better House map for 2022.

As for the electoral college in future presidential elections, it’s more of a mixed bag. Two states that are losing seats — Michigan and Pennsylvania — went for President Biden in 2020 but also for Donald Trump in 2016. But those are states Democrats probably need to win in the near future, meaning it’s probably a bigger loss for them.

The best perspective might be how things have shifted in the electoral college over time. If we reran the 2020 electoral college with the new electoral votes by state, Biden’s margin would shrink from 306 to 232 to 303 to 235. That seems negligible. But if you overlay the 2000 presidential results — three reapportionments ago — on the current electoral vote totals, George W. Bush’s narrow win with 271 electoral votes becomes a much more decisive win with 290. That gives you a sense where things have trended.

This is the Democrats’ longer-term challenge when it comes to population shifts — a challenge also reflected both on the House and Senate maps, where Democrats need to win majorities of the popular vote to hold majorities.

That said, the shift from blue states to red states wasn’t quite as big as some expected, particularly given the lower-than-expected numbers in Florida and Texas. And if Democrats can take something away from this, it’s that blue states weren’t hit harder.

 

[Audrey2]

46 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The reason that they are gaining seats is because of growth from voters that tend to vote Democratic,” said Kelly Ward Burton, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “The growth is happening in the Latino community, in the Black community, in the suburbs. It is an increase in young people. If they draw fair maps in those states, Democrats should pick up seats.”

While this is the reason Texas is getting more seats, as well as other states, I have no belief that the districts will be drawn fairly. Republicans in general, and in Texas and Florida especially, will do their best to ensure the most unequal representation possible.

[Alisamer]

14 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

While this is the reason Texas is getting more seats, as well as other states, I have no belief that the districts will be drawn fairly. Republicans in general, and in Texas and Florida especially, will do their best to ensure the most unequal representation possible.

Yeah I think North Carolina is working right now to make things somewhat more fair, but in the past the Republicans have managed to gerrymander practically all the Democratic votes into just two districts. 

I know there are a lot of people moving here from other parts of the country right now. I'm hoping a good chunk of them move into more rural districts, not just into Charlotte and the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area). Asheville has always had a pretty granola hippie contingent, and I'm hoping that area continues to grow bluer.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

Sorry -- I posted this in the wrong thread. It is still the truth.

Edited April 27, 2021 by GreyhoundFan

[front hugs > duggs]

On 4/27/2021 at 10:28 AM, Alisamer said:

Yeah I think North Carolina is working right now to make things somewhat more fair, but in the past the Republicans have managed to gerrymander practically all the Democratic votes into just two districts. 

I know there are a lot of people moving here from other parts of the country right now. I'm hoping a good chunk of them move into more rural districts, not just into Charlotte and the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area). Asheville has always had a pretty granola hippie contingent, and I'm hoping that area continues to grow bluer.

When you look at where people moved from and to, it definitely makes sense from what I've seen. I just moved to central FL from the NY/NJ area, but am also meeting a lot of people here from the midwest. While many of the people moving to this area may be blue, these people are moving to already blue-ish areas, and I don't expect any positive blue outcome from the extra seat.

[Alisamer]

37 minutes ago, front hugs > duggs said:

When you look at where people moved from and to, it definitely makes sense from what I've seen. I just moved to central FL from the NY/NJ area, but am also meeting a lot of people here from the midwest. While many of the people moving to this area may be blue, these people are moving to already blue-ish areas, and I don't expect any positive blue outcome from the extra seat.

What I have seen here, just outside Charlotte, is people moving into the small towns around Charlotte - most people who work in the city commute in from the small towns nearby. So hopefully on a county by county basis that will expand the blue area around the city. 

I also think that the Asheville area and maybe some other mountain areas have become more attractive to LGBTQ+ people over time (though still it's not as welcoming as it should be) which might help a bit in those areas. 

I was hoping during the election that the former guy's insults to the military would shift  the Eastern part of the state where all the military bases are away from him, but it didn't do so enough to affect the outcome, apparently.

The red/blue maps in North Carolina match the ones of the US, basically - the more population density, the bluer it is. The more rural and spread out it is, the redder it is. 

[Ozlsn]

It'd be interesting to see what would happen if Congressional districts were drawn to include roughly similar numbers of people without regard for state lines, so instead of state based districts you just had federal ones.

Mind you I suspect there might be shenanigans around that too unless the line drawers were independent and non-partisan.