Blue States Are Shrinking and New York Democrats Are Worried

As Hot Air readers know, the reapportionment of congressional seats is based on the census which happens every ten years. States that lose population also lose seats while states that gain population gain seats. 

Back in January when Democrats were still reeling from the fresh loss in the 2024 election, the AP published a story titled “Democrats’ crisis of the future: The biggest states that back them are shrinking.” This is a problem for Democrats because blue states continue to shrink while red states in the south continue to grow.

With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term.

If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower…

The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12…

The Brennan Center projects that California will lose four seats and New York two in the 2030 census. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin would lose one seat each. Except for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are swing states, all of those states have consistently backed Democrats for president and sent Democratic majorities to the House.

A shift of 11 or 12 seats is a pretty big deal in the US House, making it more likely Republicans will hold the chamber. Also, as the AP points out, it makes it that much easier for the GOP to win the White House.

Preparations for the 2030 census are already underway and Democrats in New York are doing everything they can to make sure as many illegal immigrant New Yorkers are counted as possible. Without them, New York’s population would be significantly lower.

A coalition of elected officials, community activists, and labor and civic leaders in New York City is already stirring ahead of the next census in 2030 amid a brewing battle over whether to include noncitizens in the population count…

More than 4.5 million migrants live in New York State, about 23.1 percent of its total population, according to a breakdown of 2023 census data from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Of those 4.5 million, about 1.8 million are noncitizens.

Jeffrey M. Wice, a census expert and adjunct professor at New York Law School, said that the state already stood to lose two more congressional seats based on current population estimates and could lose even more if noncitizens were excluded from the counts.

President Trump attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census but New York and other states sued and the Supreme Court blocked it:

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said the administration’s explanation for adding the question “seems to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

However, that’s not the end of the matter. Congress is considering a bill which would make only citizens count in the census for purposes of reapportionment.

Representative Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican, said the House bill was “about restoring fairness — only American citizens should determine American representation.”

Ciro Riccardi, a spokesman for Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose district includes the suburbs north of the city, said that counting only citizens in the census should not be controversial. “Democrats and the far-left groups who fund them need to stop trying to incentivize and normalize illegal immigration with bad public policy that is deeply unpopular with American taxpayers,” he said.

Such a bill, if passed, would reduce the number of seats apportioned to New York and California (which has a very similar number of illegal immigrants) even beyond the 6 seats they are already scheduled to lose.

But even if that bill doesn’t move forward, Democrats are concerned that the current pressure from ICE to pick up illegal immigrants away from the border will make them hesitant to identify themselves for the census. If that happens, New York’s (and California’s) number of seats would once again drop.

It’s worth noting that for all the claims Democrats make that their border politics are based primarily on empathy, they are also desperate to hold onto the political advantage that illegal immigrants have given their party in congress. Maybe if a Republican-led congress got rid of that advantage (by not counting illegal immigrants toward reapportionment), Democrats would feel differently about controlling the border.