Fascinating story from the New York Times on how people are voting with their feet and with it taking many electoral votes from the Blue States to Southern and Western Red States. In fact 12 electoral votes will move in 2030. In 2020 only four electoral votes moved to Red States - still significant. The entire story is below:
The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.
That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.
In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats.
Deeply conservative Texas and Florida could gain a total of five congressional seats, and the red states of Utah and Idaho are each expected to add a seat.
Across all of the possible scenarios in the nine states that would be considered battlegrounds in the 2032 election, Democrats would see about a third of their current winning Electoral College combinations disappear if population projections hold. However, when looking only at the most feasible winning combinations based on voting behaviors in the 2024 election, the outlook is far worse. Of Democrats’ 25 most plausible paths to victory in 2024, only five would remain.
Some groups have arrived at an even more challenging outlook for Democrats in 2032. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan organization, projected Republicans to have three more safe seats from Texas and Florida, and New York to lose one.
The Democratic Party already faces acute challenges after its disastrous losses in 2024, including fundraising woes, an electorate that slid decidedly to the right, a vacuum of leadership and a sharp decline in voter registrations.
The party is also battling President Trump’s push for red states to redraw their congressional maps in the middle of the decade in order to secure Republicans an advantage in next year’s midterm elections. While this does not directly affect a future Electoral College, it adds urgency for Democrats to expand into new areas.
The dire post-census projections put the party in a bind between two necessary tasks: investing to win in the short term, including in the midterms, and building a future in states that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades.
Still, the looming Electoral College shift presents such an existential threat to the party that many Democrats, including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, are adamant that planning for the next decade must begin now.
“There’s no doubt about it, and it’s a lot of what I talked about when I ran for chair,” Ken Martin, the D.N.C. leader, said in an interview. He added, “We have to acknowledge that there's some of these states that are red that are going to need more resources to essentially help us win down the road.”
Those gains will come at the expense of major Democratic states like New York and California, according to a New York Times analysis of population projections by Esri, a nonpartisan company whose mapping software and demographic data are widely used by businesses and governments across the world.
Rapid growth in Southern and Western red states is driving the changes to the political map, according to The Times’s analysis. Texas and Florida are each expected to gain millions of residents in the coming years, expanding each state’s population by nearly 13 percent, according to Esri.
The fastest growing Democratic state, Colorado, will expand its population by less than 10 percent. New York and Illinois are both expected to shrink by 2030, and California’s population will essentially stay the same.
Read the entire story here: NYT Electoral College getting worse for Dems.
1 comment:
Been saying this for years. Not only is deportation going to devastate them, but all the ZPG stuff and, most importantly, all the abortions are going to lay them by the heels. Lefty parasdises like San Fiasco have almost no kids.
OTOH you see a lot of "model" Red State (presumably Conservative) white cis families with 3, 4, or even 5 kids. If demography is destiny, the Demos' time is just about up.
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