The first batch of once-every-decade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows a United States that is growing less quickly but still seeing its population shift to the South and the West.
The data released Monday was relatively basic — containing national and state-level population figures and details of how they affect states’ representation in Congress. Still, it contained some surprises and pointed to some consequential trends.
Five takeaways from the new census data:
MORE SLUGGISH GROWTH AHEAD?
The U.S. population grew to 331 million, a 7.4% growth rate from the last time the Census Bureau counted every person in the country, in 2010. Those may sound like big numbers, but it’s actually the second slowest rate of population growth the census has ever recorded, just behind the 7.3% growth in the 1930s.
That decade’s slowed growth was rooted in the Great Depression. Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse.
But while U.S. population growth recovered after the Great Depression, demographers are not optimistic it will pick up anytime soon. Most forecast even slower population growth in the decades to come. Americans are getting older — the median age in the U.S. is 38, up one year from 37 in 2010. Immigration had been dropping even before the pandemic effectively shut it down. And many Republicans have largely turned against the idea of immigration, legal or illegal, a new political barrier to the country adding more population quickly.
“Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
That has potentially grim consequences for the nation’s future. “The big demographic advantage the U.S. once enjoyed over other rich nations has evaporated,” John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, tweeted after the census data release. “Now there are more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger.”
THE GREAT MIGRATION CONTINUES
The U.S. population may be growing more slowly, but it continued its 80-year-long trend of shifting to the South and the West.
Florida, Montana and North Carolina each saw enough growth to add a congressional seat, while booming Texas gained two. Colorado and Oregon also gained new seats, while Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania lost seats.
The snapshot tells a familiar story: Americans have moved out of the industrial Midwest and Northeast, chasing jobs, more affordable housing, growing new suburbs and vibrant cities.
But, strikingly, the longtime symbol of Americans’ search for the new and the next wasn’t part of that story. California’s growth rate wasn’t enough to retain its 53-seat delegation in the House. The nation’s most populous state lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history, a fact that is already forcing debate over whether Democrats’ control of state government is to blame.
GOOD NEWS FOR THE GOP — FOR NOW
Those population changes will be quickly translated into political shifts. The census data officially kicked off the redistricting process, in which states will redraw congressional and statehouse districts to adjust for the new headcounts.
The news Monday was generally good for Republicans. They control the redistricting process in Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which account for four of the seven new seats.
The two Democratic states that gain seats — Colorado and Oregon — won’t give that power to their Democratically controlled legislatures. In Oregon, Democrats have agreed to give GOP lawmakers equal say in exchange for a pledge not to hold up other legislation. And Colorado’s voters took the drawing of district lines away from state lawmakers and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.
The new seats are only part of the often cutthroat redistricting fight. As soon as August, the Census Bureau is expected to release detailed information showing, down to the block, where almost every person lives. New legislative maps will be redrawn in each state to ensure equal representation. But one party can gain advantage by packing rivals into a single district, or spreading them out so that they can never win an election.
Right now, the GOP controls more statehouses overall and has an edge in growing states. Republicans only need to net a handful of seats to win control of the U.S. House.
“I think Republicans, when all this is done, will be in great shape to retake the House majority in 2022,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which is coordinating the GOP redistricting push.
But there will be limits. Many of the new residents of those states are young and voters of color, groups that lean strongly Democratic. It may be hard for Republicans to maintain their edge for much of the decade, regardless of how they draw their lines.
TROUBLE COUNTING LATINOS?
In fact, the process was expected to go even better for the GOP. Texas had been predicted to gain three seats, Florida two and Arizona one. Those shortfalls were a shocker for demographers, and there were so few details in the data it was hard to understand what happened.
One possibility is that Latinos weren’t properly counted. Latinos make up a large segment of the population in the three states that didn’t gain expected seats. Trump unsuccessfully pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, sparking allegations that he hoped to intimidate immigrants or people in the country illegally from participating in the process. The actual count started during the coronavirus pandemic when it was especially hard to reach certain populations.
It may be that the gap between expected gains and actual ones is the first sign of a Hispanic undercount. But it’s too soon to tell without the more detailed data due out in the fall.
“The initial results are surprising enough that once more details are released, we will be able to better determine to what extent the Latino population was fairly and accurately counted,” said Arturo Vargas, president of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said he wasn’t ready to “sound the alarm” about an undercount yet, noting that growth among Latinos may have helped New York avoid losing a second House seat.
A GAME OF INCHES
This census count was a tough one for New York. Growth has been slowing for years and there’s been a particular exodus of people from its upstate region north and west of New York City. But, during a Monday news conference, Census Bureau officials revealed the state was 89 people short of dodging the demographic bullet of losing a congressional seat.
Congressional reapportionment is a zero-sum game, with states divvying up the 435 House seats based on population. Minnesota barely edged out New York to avoid being the last state to lose a seat. If New York had counted 89 more residents, and all other states stayed the same, the state would have kept its seat and Minnesota would have lost one.
Minnesota, which had the nation’s highest self-response rate, also secured the last House seat in 2010.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. population growth has slowed to the lowest rate since the Great Depression, the Census Bureau said, as Americans continued their march to the South and West and one-time engines of growth, New York and California, lost political influence.
Altogether, the U.S. population rose to 331,449,281 last year, the Census Bureau said Monday, a 7.4% increase over the previous decade that was the second slowest ever. Experts say that paltry pace reflects the combination of an aging population, slowing immigration and the scars of the Great Recession more than a decade ago, which led many young adults to delay marriage and families.
The new allocation of congressional seats comes in the first release of data from last year’s headcount. The numbers generally chart familiar American migration patterns: Texas and Florida, two Republican Sunbelt giants, added enough population to gain congressional seats as chillier climes like New York and Ohio saw slow growth and lost political muscle.
The report also confirms one historic marker: For the first time in 170 years of statehood, California is losing a congressional seat, a result of slowed migration to the nation’s most populous state, which was once a symbol of the country’s expansive frontier.
The state population figures, known as the apportionment count, determine distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year. They also mark the official beginning of once-a-decade redistricting battles. The numbers released Monday, along with more detailed data expected later this year, will be used by state legislatures or independent commissions to redraw political maps to account for shifts in population.
It’s been a bumpy road getting this far. The 2020 census faced a once-in-a-century coronavirus pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, allegations of political interference with the Trump administration’s failed effort to add a citizenship question, fluctuating deadlines and lawsuits.
Texas was the biggest winner — the second-most populous state added two congressional seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Colorado, Montana and Oregon all added residents and gained a seat each. States losing seats included Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The new numbers contain some surprises. Though Texas and Florida grew, the final census count had them each gaining one fewer seat than expected. Arizona, another fast-growing state that demographers considered a sure bet to pick up a new seat, failed to get one. All three states have large Latino populations that represent about half their growth, and this could be an early sign that Hispanics shied away from the Trump administration’s count.
Still, Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he wasn’t ready to “sound the alarm” over the underperformance of states with large Hispanic populations. He noted that he believes Hispanic growth helped states like Colorado and Oregon each gain seats and prevented states like New York and Illinois from losing more.
Congressional reapportionment is a zero sum game, with states divvying up the 435 House seats based on population advantages that can be strikingly small. If New York had counted 89 more residents, the state would have kept its seat and Minnesota would have lost one, officials said. Minnesota, which had the nation’s highest self-response rate, also secured the last House seat in 2010.
The reshuffling of the congressional map moved seats from blue states to red ones, giving Republicans a clear, immediate advantage. The party will have complete control of drawing the congressional maps in Texas, Florida and North Carolina — states that are adding four seats.
In contrast, though Democrats control the process in Oregon, Democratic lawmakers there have agreed to give Republicans an equal say in redistricting in exchange for a commitment to stop blocking bills. In Democratic Colorado, a nonpartisan commission will draw the lines, meaning the party won’t have total control in a single expanding state’s redistricting.
The overall numbers confirm what demographers have long warned — that the country’s growth is stalling. Many had expected growth to come in even below the 1930s levels given the long hangover of the Great Recession and the drying up of immigration, which came to a virtual halt during last year’s pandemic.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., warned that even a recovering economy may not change the trend with the population aging rapidly and immigration contentious. “Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,” Frey said.
Meanwhile, Americans continue to move to GOP-run states. For now, that shift provides the Republicans with the opportunity to shape new congressional districts to maximize the influence of their voters and have a major advantage in upcoming elections — possibly enough to win back control of the U.S. House.
But in the long term, it’s not clear the migration is good news for Republicans. Many of the fastest growing states are increasingly competitive political battlegrounds where the new arrivals — including many young people and people of color — could at some point give Democrats an edge.
“What’s happening is growth in Sunbelt states that are trending Democratic or will soon trend Democratic,” Frey said.
That means Republicans may be limited in how many favorable seats they can draw as Democrats move to their territory.
“It’s going to be harder and harder for the Texas Legislature to gerrymander advantageous congressional districts” for Republicans, said William Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston. “Texas hasn’t flipped blue yet as a state, but the blue population centers are growing really fast.”
Fulton, who moved to Texas from California, said his new home has become “the new California — the big state that’s adding a lot of population.” He believes California risks becoming the new Northeast — which he characterized as a stagnant, crowded area that retains wealth and intellectual clout but loses innovators to more promising places.
Despite California’s slow growth, the state still has 10 million more residents than Texas.
North Carolina and Texas, Fulton said, are positioned to become the intellectual powerhouses of the new economy, as the South has snatched away major manufacturing industries like automobiles from the Rust Belt. “We are 10-20 years away from the South and the West being truly dominant in American culture and American society,” Fulton said.
But population booms also bring new burdens, like increased traffic, rising home prices and strains on an infrastructure already grappling with climate change — vividly illustrated when the Texas power grid failed in the winter storms of February.
The pattern outlined in the the Census data was one started in the 1930s with the development of modern air-conditioning and has been steady since then. The change in the pattern this time was California.
Home prices have soared in California, contributing to a stream of residents leaving for other Western states. Those relocations helped turn Colorado and Nevada into Democratic states and made Arizona competitive.
“That’s the California exodus, blue state immigrants,” Frey said. “Californians are taking their votes and moving to other places.”
The power shift is also being driven by Hispanics. Over the decade, Hispanics accounted for around half of the growth in Arizona, Florida and Texas, according to figures from the American Community Survey, a Census Bureau program separate from the decennial census.
The legal deadline for turning in the apportionment numbers was Dec. 31, but the Census Bureau pushed back that date to April because of challenges caused by the pandemic and the need for more time to correct not-unexpected irregularities.
More detailed figures will be released later this year showing populations by race, Hispanic origin, gender and housing at geographic levels as small as neighborhoods. This redistricting data will be used for redrawing precise congressional and legislative districts.
President Joe Biden sent Monday’s numbers to the Capitol, where the House clerk has 15 days to notify governors.
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THE WINNERS
TEXAS — The Longhorn State is the big winner, adding two congressional seats courtesy of 4 million new residents. Demographers say people moving from other states like California have contributed a significant chunk of the growth. The nation’s second most populous state will now have 38 congressional representatives, behind only California.
FLORIDA — The nation’s third most populous state adds one congressional seat because of a population gain of more than 2.7 million. This boosts its House delegation to 28 and Electoral College votes to 30, furthering the Sunshine State’s importance in presidential elections.
COLORADO — Population growth around Denver helped Colorado gain an extra seat, its first new House seat in 20 years. The mostly college-educated transplants have helped Colorado go from being a solidly Republican state to a competitive swing state to, now, a solidly Democratic one — though the state’s districts will be drawn by a nonpartisan commission.
MONTANA — By gaining a congressional seat, Montana goes from having a single House representative to having two. The gain marks a rebound for Montana, which had two congressional seats for most of the 20th century but lost one after the 1990 census.
NORTH CAROLINA — Fueled by retirees and job seekers, North Carolina’s population boom is earning it an extra seat, raising its House count to 14. The gains have been concentrated in the Charlotte and Raleigh areas.
OREGON — Oregon is getting a new congressional seat for the first time in 40 years, going from five House members to six. Although Democrats control state government, they have agreed to give up their advantage in redrawing the state’s political districts for the next 10 years in exchange for a commitment from Republicans to stop blocking bills.
THE LOSERS
CALIFORNIA — While California is still the nation’s most populous state, its stagnant growth over the past decade causes it to lose a single seat for the first time in 170 years of statehood. Its number of House members goes from 53 to 52 for a state that has been a symbol of limitless growth and endless possibilities since the Gold Rush of the 1800s.
ILLINOIS — Illinois goes from 18 to 17 House members, continuing a 40-year streak of losing congressional seats.
MICHIGAN — The number of House members representing Michigan drops from 14 to 13, particularly because of population losses in the Upper Peninsula.
NEW YORK — There was no question New York was going to lose a congressional seat, but the suspense lay in whether it would be one or two seats. The Census Bureau says New York lost its seat by a mere 89 people. The loss of one seat reduces its House delegation from 27 to 26 members.
OHIO — Sluggish population growth over the past decade causes Ohio to lose a single congressional seat, continuing its streak of losses every decade since 1960. The adjustment reduces the Buckeye State’s House seats from 16 to 15.
PENNSYLVANIA — Although Pennsylvania remains an important presidential battleground, its influence will be diminished by the loss of one Electoral College vote. Its House delegation drops from 18 to 17 members.
WEST VIRGINIA — A decadeslong exodus of residents finally causes West Virginia to lose a congressional seat, reducing its representation in the House from three to two members.
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