{T} he Census Bureau has announced its year-end estimates of state population changes, which are dated as of July 1, 2023. They once again show the continuing trend of America’s population shifting out of its bluest states and into red states, mainly in the Sun Belt. While the trend is not entirely uniform, it is a powerful one cutting across regions. The shifts in the past year have been less dramatic than they were during the Covid pandemic, when the differing approaches to emergency governance among American states presented obvious distinctions in employment, education, worship, and entertainment.
But while those trends slowed down, their direction has not changed. It remains to be seen if California in particular does any better in the mid-2023 to mid-2024 estimates, which will include a full year of immigration following the lifting of Title 42 border restrictions. As I noted in January, one reason California and to a lesser extent New York have been hit so hard by population declines during the pandemic is that they typically depend upon an influx of immigrants to take the place of Americans who tire of those states’ bad governance.
That should be good news for Republicans the next time there is a reapportionment. But then, we’re only one election cycle into the current apportionment of House seats and electoral votes, with courts and legislatures still fighting over redistricting, and already red states are underrepresented compared with their populations. That is partly because the pandemic-marred 2020 census was botched (with the help of Republican governors asleep at the switch), and partly because it came just a bit too soon to capture the big movements between states triggered by the pandemic.
By the Numbers
The biggest boom states in the past year? In terms of raw numbers, Texas and Florida dwarf everyone else, followed by North Carolina and Georgia:
In percentage terms, South Carolina was the biggest winner, with Florida and Texas close behind. All three states grew at triple the pace of the national population growth rate of 0.5 percent. Idaho, the biggest population magnet in the previous two years, slipped to fourth.
Eight states lost population. New York was by far the biggest loser, dropping over 100,000 people, 0.5 percent of its population in a single year. Five of the eight states have been governed by Democratic trifectas for this entire decade. Of the others, Pennsylvania has had a Democratic governor since 2015 and flipped the state house to Democrats in 2022, and Louisiana is a red state but with a Democratic governor for the past eight years:
Only West Virginia represents a solidly red state among the blue states bleeding population. Four other states (Alaska, Mississippi, Michigan, and New Mexico) experienced less than 0.1 percent population growth. Notice that California and to some extent Oregon can’t really blame their failures on the harsh weather of the Northeast and Midwest. Neither can Hawaii, which lost population between July 2022 and July 2023 before the catastrophic wildfire on Maui in August.
If we step back and look at the three-year period since the April 2020 baseline for the census, the ten biggest states present a similar red/blue divide, with major population growth in Florida, Texas, North Carolina (which has a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature), and Georgia against major declines in New York, Illinois, and California.
Overall, the fastest-growing states over that period are seven red states, two states with red legislatures (one of which had a Republican governor through 2022), and one blue state:
The ten biggest population-loser states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, again are dominated by the big blues, with 1.46 million fewer people living in California, New York, and Illinois than there were just three years ago:
D.C., at least, is the only one of these to be on the population-growth list for 2022–23, suggesting the resilience of its anchor tenant: the recession-proof, inflation-proof, tax-exempt federal government.
On the whole, 87 percent of the nation’s population growth came in the South, defined broadly enough as a region to include both Florida and Texas. As the Census Bureau noted, however, “four southern states — Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia — accounted for 93% of the nation’s population growth in 2022, but only 67% in 2023,” reflecting a broader distribution of growth.
Political Implications
What does all this mean for the allocation of political power in America? For now, nothing. According to calculations by the American Redistricting Project, however, current projections show a very significant shift in the next census, if expected trends hold.
These are, if anything, a less dramatic projection than a year ago, as there is one fewer seat loss projected in California and one fewer seat gain projected in Florida. But it still projects a seven-seat swing in the House, matched in the Electoral College, just from losses in New York and California and gains in Texas and Florida. Throw in another six seats leaving Illinois, Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island for Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho, and this is close to unalloyed good news for Republicans — even with the caution that the population is declining fastest in the red parts of blue states, such as upstate New York, and growing in urban areas in the red states, such as the cities and suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix.
If you think New York’s redistricting battles are brutal right now, wait until we’re dealing with another loss of three House seats in a single cycle.
You don’t have to rely on projections. I asked the American Redistricting Project how the House would be apportioned differently if we did it just based on the population shifts through July 2023. Already, there’s been enough change to net two additional seats in Texas, with a loss of two seats for California, as well as one-seat gains in Florida, Idaho, and Arizona, and one-seat losses in New York, Illinois, and Minnesota (Minnesota having only narrowly escaped a loss in the 2020 census).
If Republicans want to capitalize on those changes, they need to do two things. The first is to avoid complacency about their position in Sun Belt states, especially those such as Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina that have been trending blue or where their hold is tenuous. The second: Wait nine years.