After the 2020 Census count, some blue states are going to lose seats as several red states are set to gain seats in the House of Representatives.
The Republican stronghold of Texas is set to gain two seats. The purple state of Colorado, red states of North Carolina and Florida, and the blue state of Oregon will each add one more seat. And red Montana will add another district, Bloomberg News reported.
Texas will gain the newest seats in the U.S. House of Representatives under new Census numbers released Monday, while states in the Northeast and Midwest lose seven in a shift of political clout to Republican strongholds before the 2022 midterms.
New York would have kept all 27 seats in the U.S. House if the Census Bureau had counted 89 more people in the state, all other things being equal. Instead, it lost one, Census officials said.
The bureau released its decennial count of state populations Monday, reshuffling the 435 House seats among the 50 states to account for population changes over the last decade.
Those changes alone could be enough to decide the balance of power: Democrats hold a narrow advantage in the House now, with a margin of fewer than half a dozen seats.
The states gaining seats are largely ones that former President Donald Trump won in 2020, while states President Joe Biden won — including the so-called “Blue Wall” states of the industrial North — are losers.
Texas will gain two seats. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will also each gain a seat.
Because the size of the House has been capped since 1911, those new seats must come at the expense of seven states: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
It is unknown which districts in these states will be cut as that information is not going to be available until August.
“We don’t know yet how good the census is,” Kimball Brace, director of Election Data Services, said.
“The bigger issue is that indeed we have seen all decade a continuation of this trend of leaving the Northeast and the Upper Midwest and heading South and heading West. The issue is whether or not that will continue or to the degree that it continues,” he said.
Because Republicans control so many of the state legislatures Democrats are concerned about the lines being drawn in favor of the GOP.
“Redistricting could likely determine who controls the House of Representatives in 2022, but also going into the next decade,” Nate Persily, a redistricting expert from Stanford Law School said.
“Texas will gain the most new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives under new Census numbers released Monday, while states in the Northeast and Midwest will lose seven seats, shifting some political clout to Republican strongholds before the 2022 midterms,” Sen. John Cornyn said on Twitter.
“Census Bureau is out with Congressional reappointment for the next decade- Texas adds 2 House seats, California actually loses one & New England dodges the bullet. Overall bad news for the Democrats,” another Twitter user said.
This is an excerpt from Conservative Brief.
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