WASHINGTON (October 17, 2023) Majority Leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, speaks at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Gathering at a Historic Synagogue, Sixth & I, in Washington, DC. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour)
In Debbie’s great piece today, Trump: Perhaps Many Bad Things, but Not Racist, she noted an observation by Michael Barone that deserves special attention from all readers:
“It’s an interesting political experiment because there wasn’t a lot of electioneering in these states.”
Most of the campaign focused on the seven swing states, all which Mr. Trump carried. “The 43 nontarget states”—of which Mr. Trump carried 24 and lost 19 three times in a row—“provide a proving ground for public opinion. And we see that in the biggest states, with the kind of governance there is, the Republican Party gained.”
The level of polarization among the states outside the Swing 7 appears to be high. If that’s true, the future could be rough for Democrats. According to The American Redistricting Project, the states that voted for Donald Trump could pick up 12 electoral votes in the 2030 Census redistricting. Daniel McCarthy explained why that’s so bad for Democrats, writing at Real Clear Politics:
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 Kamala 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 Donald 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.
Read more from McCarthy here.
Your Survival Guy has discussed the trends driving Americans away from blue states toward red states extensively in his Super States series. Here’s a sample:
- Has Chicago Finally Had Enough?
- Death and Taxes: Know Your Estate and Inheritance Tax
- Not All of America Will See Equal Opportunities
- California’s Gas Pump Price Controls
- Wealthy Young Americans Are Fleeing High Tax States
- Bill Belichick Tackles “Taxachusetts”
- The U-Haul Salesman of the Year Award Goes to….
- Your Long-Term Greener Pastures Plan
