Sun Belt states will gain House seats but the Rust Belt will lose congressional representation as the 2020 census shifts power
- The US Census Bureau unveiled long-awaited population and apportionment data on Monday.
- Sun Belt states such as Florida and Texas are set to gain the most seats.
- But many Northeastern and Midwestern states are set to lose House seats after the 2020 census.
States in the Sun Belt and West are expected to gain seats in the House of Representatives after the 2020 census, while states in the Upper Midwest and Rust Belt are poised to lose congressional representation, according to long-awaited US Census Bureau apportionment data unveiled on Monday.
Federal law mandates that the House must consist of 435 seats, each of which represents the same number of people - just over 760,000 per district. So, when it's time for the census every decade, states gain or lose congressional seats based on changes to their population and how much their population increased or declined compared to other states.
This year, the post-census redistricting winner is Texas, which is set to gain two House seats in reapportionment.
Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Montana, and Oregon are all expected to gain one House seat each.
Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia are all expected to lose one House seat each. California, for the first time in its history, is also slated to lose one of its 53 House seats.
Alabama, Minnesota, and Rhode Island were spared from losing seats although projections said they'd lose one each.
Census officials disclosed during a Monday news conference that New York would have retained its House seat if the census had counted 89 more people in the state, and Minnesota would have lost a seat instead.
The US's population clocked in at 331,449,281 people as of April 1, a 7.4% jump from the last census.
The South was the fastest-growing region in the country, with a 10.2% population increase, followed by the West at 9.1%, the Northeast at 4.1%, and the Midwest at 3.1%.
The release of state-level population figures and the resulting apportionment breakdown was pushed back from late December to April because of the pandemic.
The pandemic as well as extreme weather events and civil unrest during summer 2020 led to delays in conducting the census itself. The Census Bureau also had to resolve data errors and anomalies in the count, which are routine in every census but were compounded by the pandemic.
The final apportionment figures are largely in line with previous estimates from private firms such as Election Data Services, which predicted these shifts based on 2020 population estimates from the Census Bureau.
Those census estimates said Western states - including Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona - saw the most substantial population increases between July 2019 and July 2020, while New York, West Virginia, and Illinois lost the greatest proportion of their residents during the same period.
But the more detailed dataset that shows populations down to the county, city, town, and neighborhood levels, which comes in a file known as the PL 94-171, and is normally released by March 30, isn't expected to arrive until mid-August because of coronavirus-related delays.
States require those granular figures that show who lives where in order to meet the constitutional standard of one person, one vote. The ensuing delays in drawing new congressional and legislative districts could result in candidate filing deadlines and primary dates being pushed back in many states.
Republicans control the redistricting of the majority of House seats, after Democrats posted a disappointing showing in 2020 state legislative races, failing to wrest back control of state legislative chambers key to redistricting.
But in the past decade, some states have chosen to delegate all or part of their redistricting process to independent commissions, and courts have imposed partisan fairness standards through litigation over partisan gerrymandering in key states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.