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 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.
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.
Newsom, Hochul and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker simply aren’t competitive with Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Texas’ Greg Abbott when it comes to making their states desirable destinations for ordinary homebuyers or employers in search of a business-friendly environment.
Regulatory red tape and vertiginous housing costs are driving middle-class Americans out of the biggest blue states.
If anything, the forecast for 2030 is an early warning: Unless Democrats get the cost of living under control, their biggest states will see their population plunge in the next 25 years.
Demographers at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy estimate New York State could lose 2 million people, 13% of the present headcount, by 2050.
“Conservative estimates suggest a population decrease of 1 million by 2050, but we think an even greater decline is more likely,” Jan Vink, lead analyst of Brooks School’s Program on Applied Demographics, told the Cornell Chronicle.
High rates of foreign immigration to blue states, which were generous about offering public benefits to newcomers, kept population numbers up even as birth rates fell and the sting of bad policies grew sharper.
But by voting for Trump, Americans also voted for less immigration, and now California, Illinois and New York will have to entice residents from other states to relocate if these big blues hope to hold on to their national political clout.
In the long run, governors and state governments are the key to Congress and the White House.
It’s not only Trump who defeated Harris this month – GOP governors have been beating their Democratic counterparts for years and turning the country red, slowly then quickly.
The 2028 presidential election will be the last one fought on the present electoral map.
But the elections of the 2030s are already taking shape, and several governors who aspire to the party’s nomination in ’28, such as Newsom, are only making the next decade’s fights for the House and White House much harder for Democrats to win.
As the sun sets on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it’s premature for Democrats to think about the next presidential election until they rethink the kind of governors they elect in the largest, yet shrinking, blue states.
