New data from the Census Bureau shows that America’s population growth has stagnated in the last years of the decade, as declining immigration rates and an aging population precipitate in the coronavirus pandemic that halted migration within the U.S.
The consequence is likely to be a fierce battle over the reallocation process that will follow the department’s release of official population data early next year.
Estimates suggest that two states in particular – Alabama and New York – will spend the next few weeks on needles, waiting to see which state will win the 435th seat in the House of Representatives.
If the redistribution were to take place based on the new estimates, the Texas delegation to the House of Representatives would increase by three seats, the Florida delegation by two and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon would add an additional chair.
At the lost end is New York, which will see its delegation to Congress reduced by two seats. California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia could lose a seat. In the case of California, it would be the first time since the creation of the state that it lost a seat in a round of redistribution.
The latest figures are a Christmas gift for Alabama. For most of the decade, population estimates suggested that New York would lose only one seat and Alabama would also lose one seat.
“For the most part, Alabama has lost the biggest demographic changes towards the southern states. The new reports provide a small ray of hope that Alabama may be starting to take advantage of some of that growth, ”said Robert Blanton, head of the political science department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
But both New York and Alabama must wait for the final numbers from the Census Bureau – not July 1 estimates, but the formal 10-year count on April 1. And the margins are so close that neither can plan the estimates: Alabama appears to have held its seventh seat by a margin of just 6,210 residents, and estimates show that New York lost its 26th seat to just 24,430 people.
To complicate matters, several legal challenges to census counts can throw all estimates into chaos. The Supreme Court said last week that it is premature to decide whether the Trump administration can exclude undocumented immigrants from the reassignment data that will grant states seats in the House.
“All of this is showing how close these population estimates are and how in fact there could be changes in distribution, depending not only on what the Supreme Court does, but clearly only on the population numbers themselves,” said Kimball Brace, a demographer who heads the non-partisan firm Election Data Services.
The figures released on Tuesday are estimates of annual population changes that ended on July 1, 2020, based on official 2010 census counts. According to these estimates, the United States added just over 1.1 million of residents last year, an annual rate of 0.35 percent – the lowest annual growth rate in any year since the bureau began making annual estimates in 1900.
Sixteen states have experienced a net loss of population in the past year, the numbers show, and six states – Connecticut, Illinois, Mississippi, New York, Vermont and West Virginia – have fewer residents today than when the last census was conducted in 2010.
Some experts have raised questions about the quality of this year’s census, hampered both by the challenges of counting people in the midst of a pandemic and by the efforts of the Trump administration to speed up counting and reduce follow-up procedures. Rapid counting, some concerned cities and states, can ignore their hard-to-count populations, which are disproportionately composed of minorities, rural and undocumented residents.
“All of these are population estimates. These are not final census counts. The real issue is that we don’t know how well the census was actually carried out this year, ”said Brace. “It is possible that the problems with this year’s census will really appear next month, when the breakdown numbers are published.”
The most recent figures show a continuous removal of the population from the states of the Northeast and the Rust Belt and towards the South, West and Mountain West regions.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the nine states that make up New England and the Middle Atlantic – stretching from Maine to the Mason-Dixon line on the southern Pennsylvania border – have seen their Congressional representation drop from 108 to 74 seats, if the current projections remain.
Seven states in what the Census Bureau calls the Midwestern region, from the Canadian borders of North Dakota and Minnesota to the south to Kansas and Missouri, have seen their delegations shrink from 54 to 28 seats, according to estimates.
Delegations from the five Pacific coast states, including Alaska and Hawaii, which joined the union in 1959, are said to have grown from 13 to 71 seats. The eight states in Mountain West will see their combined delegations grow from eight seats at the turn of the last century, before Arizona and New Mexico joined the union, to 34 seats today. These eight states have added 10 seats in just the past three decades.
Both the South Atlantic region, from Maryland to Florida, and West South Central, which includes Texas and its three neighbors to the north and east, were the beneficiaries of northern population drainage in the past century. Only Texas has doubled its delegation since the reallocation process that took place after the 1910 census, while the Florida delegation has grown sevenfold, from four to 29 seats, at the same time, assuming current estimates remain.
“The relative change in population and seats in the Northeast, Midwest and, for the first time, California and the South and Southwest is not a new trend, but it reflects the change of decades that has had political and economic consequences, at least for the balance of power between states and regions in the Chamber, “said Charles Franklin, research director at the Marquette School of Law, who analyzed the new population data.
“This process will continue.”