Sen. JD Vance. Photo courtesy of JD Vance for Senate.
At The New York Sun, Daniel McCarthy explains how blue state governors have driven residents out to red states, and by 2030, it’s projected that the population outflows will give red states 12 more electoral votes. That will have a major effect on the chances of GOP presidential candidates. But blue state politicians only have themselves to blame. McCarthy writes:
America is outgrowing the Democratic Party. That’s not a partisan claim; it’s demographic reality. Blue states are shedding population and will have less representation in Congress and fewer votes in the Electoral College after the next census.
Two nonpartisan nonprofits, the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Redistricting Project, crunched the numbers last year and came to conclusions that ought to shock Democrats into changing the way they govern places like California and New York.
States that voted for Vice President Harris this year are set to lose 12 seats in the House of Representatives, and an equal number of presidential electors, after 2030, according to the two groups’ extrapolations from Census Bureau data.
California is on track to lose four congressmen and electoral votes. New York will lose three, Illinois two, while Oregon, Minnesota, and Rhode Island are each going to be down one. Solidly Republican states will get most of the gains, with Texas picking up four congressional seats and electoral votes, Florida acquiring three, and Idaho, Utah, and Tennessee each adding one.
This year’s battleground states — all of which President Trump won — on balance come out slightly ahead of where they are now in the post-2030 projections: Arizona and North Carolina will be up one congressman and electoral vote, and Pennsylvania down one.
In an era when control of Congress depends on razor-thin and sometimes single-digit margins, the net loss of 12 seats from reliably Democratic states, and Republican states’ gains, will give the GOP an edge in the House, even if redistricting removes some red congressional seats in blue states and adds some blue seats in red states.
At the presidential level, the effect is like flipping a midsize deep-blue state to the GOP: the 12 Electoral College votes Democratic states are losing equal the Electoral College representation of Washington state today.
These are much more dramatic shifts than the 2020 Census brought about; its net result was only a slight gain for Republican states.
Why does 2030 look so much worse for Democrats?
Governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul — and Andrew Cuomo before her — bear the blame.
This decade began with blue states under strict Covid lockdowns, while Republican strongholds like Texas and Florida were open.
Those big GOP states were already easier places to start a family or business, and they handled the Covid crisis better, coming out of it with stronger economies and presenting a more attractive picture to Americans looking to migrate within the country.
Read more here.
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