What Did the Census Bureau Just Tell Us?

We are now officially more than halfway through the decade, with five years to go before the next decennial census, that pesky constitutional requirement to count everyone residing in the United States, whether they’re a citizen or not (more about that later). The last census, not unlike the elections that year, was full of controversy (over and undercounting in certain states, mistakes, etc.). Planning for the next one is well underway.

Looking for a job? The Census Bureau is hiring for temporary positions for the 2026 Census Test.

The consequences are enormous. Dozens of federal programs allocate money based on them. They portend trends that affect everyone, from urban planners to political candidates. And speaking of politics, the granddaddy of all consequences is the reallocation of US House seats and Electoral College votes, which determines how funds are allocated to these programs and where the dollars go, and which party holds political power.

Expect a few more demographic-related posts from me henceforth. My fascination with demographics comes from my political campaign experience over nearly four decades. Geodemographic targeting was a favorite “sport,” and the late political demographer and election expert John Morgan (no relation to the obnoxious Florida Democratic trial lawyer whose commercials and billboards flood the airways and highways) taught me a great deal during the late 1980s, when I was fully employed in campaigns across the United States, especially in Louisiana. John and I became great friends, especially during the Clinton presidency, when we compared notes on the mysterious deaths surrounding the Whitewater scandal.

Morgan, who passed away in 2019, is probably as responsible for George W. Bush’s 2000 election triumph over Vice President Al Gore as the legendary Karl Rove, by advising the campaign to focus on West Virginia and New Hampshire, whose electoral votes arguably provided the margin of Bush’s win (all the attention was on Florida, which ultimately proved decisive, but not without the aforementioned states). I also remember that Morgan consulted for George H. W. Bush’s campaigns.

That John Morgan-inspired fascination with election demographics led me to briefly pursue a graduate degree from the Georgetown University School of Demography. I never finished it - long, intense hours on Capitol Hill working for a very intense freshman US House member (Jon Kyl, R-AZ) and having a new child got in the way - but the interest never left.

For several decades now, there’s been a noticeable shift in population between Midwestern and Northeastern states to “Sunbelt” states, but even that has changed, and it’s worth diving into the numbers. California, for example, gained congressional seats in every census since statehood. That is, until the most recent one, when California lost a seat. Since that last census, California has lost from 1.4 to 1.7 million more people, the equivalent of two congressional seats. If that trend continues, this is how the congressional seats may look in five years. Some maps show New York and Illinois losing just one seat, and if that proves true, Florida will only get two new seats.

Remember, these are all just estimates at this point. Final results may vary. A lot.

The 2020 Census was riddled with mistakes and less accurate than the 2010 Census, and that should lead policymakers at all levels to pay very, very careful attention to planning for the next one. It should be an issue in the 2028 presidential election. The Census Bureau admits its errors from the 2020 Census. Five of the top six states with undercounts favor Republicans, led by Arkansas at over 5 five percent and Florida at over 3 percent. Five of the top 6 states with overcounts, including New York and Massachusetts, favor Democrats. I’m not accusing the Census Bureau of partisan bias or favoritism, but that’s a problem.

Many Americans have lost confidence in our elections; we don’t need to lose confidence in the census, too. Some errors are inevitable, and counting homeless persons and others is an enormous challenge. Recent failures and the growing incompetence, if not irrelevance, of the US Postal Service make it even more challenging. But that shouldn’t stop the Census Bureau from working to correct them with microscopic oversight and transparency.

Add to that the reality that we have an estimated 6.7 million new illegal immigrants in the United States today, since 2021, thanks to the Joseph R. Biden Administration’s open border policies. For all the media hype, the Trump Administration has removed an estimated 600,000 of them, most of them criminals or with court-ordered deportations. Nearly 2 million more have left voluntarily.

Some Democratic politicians supported Biden’s open border policies for just this very reason: to keep their census numbers up. New York City was a favorite destination of those migrants, but many stayed in Texas and elsewhere.

This leads to one of the ongoing debates over the census: whether to count non-citizens for purposes of congressional reapportionment. The first Trump Administration issued an executive order to do that, which was challenged in court. The Trump Administration lost. Democrats and their allies vociferously challenged it, and there’s no mystery as to why. And at least one Democratic politician says it out loud: They want open borders and migration, legal or not, to keep their numbers for redistricting purposes.

“When I hear colleagues talk about, you know, the doors of the inn being closed—ah, no room at the inn—I’m saying I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes,”

US Rep. Yvette Clark (D-NY)

The libertarian and pro-open-borders CATO Institute claims that 95% of recent migrants live in “red” GOP states where Republicans control redistricting. “About 62 percent of the three-million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement,” CATO wrote.

That didn’t stop the GOP-controlled House in 2024 from passing, on a 206-202 party-line vote, legislation by US Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) not to count non-citizens for purposes of congressional reapportionment. CATO claims that not counting them might cost the GOP a couple of seats, but it’s hard to know without the ability to ask a citizenship question, which the Supreme Court (sort of) rejected in 2019 on a 5-4 vote, deeming it constitutional but calling it “contrived” and inconsistent with the administrative record. It was a classic John Roberts, mealy-mouthed outcome. A slim majority of the court didn’t accept the rationale for the question, especially since the 14th Amendment (Section 2) clearly requires that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

“The Supreme Court's decision (Department of Commerce v. New York) sent the case back to lower courts for further review, requiring the Commerce Department to provide a more adequate justification for the question. President Trump criticized the ruling, stating it was "ridiculous" that the government could not ask about citizenship. Although the Court upheld that a citizenship question itself is not unconstitutional under the Enumeration Clause, it focused on the administration's rationale for its inclusion. Ultimately, the Trump administration abandoned its plans to include the citizenship question on the 2020 Census.”

- Freespoke AI

So it looks like the Census Bureau is stuck with counting everyone who resides in the US, whether they are citizens or not, and including them in redistricting. Who ultimately benefits will be debated for a very long time.

Meanwhile, other population trends are interesting. Just because some states, like Florida, Texas, and Idaho, are gaining population, or New York and California are losing people, doesn’t tell the whole story. This chart, which focuses on net domestic migration, begins to:

I’m not surprised, of course, by the growth in Florida and much of the Carolina coast, especially the Palmetto State. Nor am I surprised by the outflow of Californians to Idaho and Montana, and mostly rural parts of Arizona and Utah. That they show tremendous growth rates must also take into account small population baselines where they exist, but the trends are unmistakable. The growth of the “mountain south” region of upstate Georgia and Alabama, central and eastern Tennessee, and western South Carolina was very interesting and has been occurring for a while.

Then there is the “north woods” of upstate Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I was surprised by that, but it is a beautiful part of the country, if not exactly temperate this time of year. Growth rates in rural upstate Maine are interesting, too - a GOP area of the state that Trump carried in 2024. The local Democratic Congressman, Jared Golden, is retiring. That seat is likely to switch to the GOP.

For the flat and dusty western plains, it’s a different story, with the exception of counties around the Badlands and Mount Rushmore of far western South Dakota. Texas really is the tale of two states, with its “triangle” of fast-growing San Antonio, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and Houston, compared to its flat, oil-patch counties out west that are hemorrhaging population. But those are sparsely populated counties, by and large.

As an Oklahoma native, I'm not surprised by the growth of the “Greater Ozarks,” a very affordable and beautiful semi-mountainous and temperate region encompassing southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma. Some of that is the Walmart effect, with its headquarters in Bentonville, but this is also a very attractive retirement mecca around the tourist attraction of Branson, Missouri, which has long competed with Nashville for its country and western music scene.

Most of these “green” counties are Republican areas, which tells me where many of the new congressional seats are destined to go. Some western plains areas that have lost large numbers of people are Republican, too, but their populations are already small.

It’s by no means clear how much of this growth is from immigrants. While the demographics of many rural communities, such as Springfield, Ohio (Haitian immigrants, as we learned during the 2024 election), Garden City, Kansas (a large new meatpacking plant), and other towns with big, labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing, have changed, we’ll have to wait until the next census to learn more. Even Utica, New York, has become a haven for Bosnian and now African immigrants who are moving there for the burgeoning yogurt industry.

Yes, these immigrants are taking jobs that a lot of native Americans won’t do. However, there’s evidence that they are putting downward pressure on wage growth. Maybe native Americans would do them if the wages were higher, or they weren’t hopelessly strung out on fentanyl.

“The evidence is pretty clear that immigrants don’t steal jobs from local workers. Economists are in unison about that. But whether they serve to depress wages isn’t quite the same story. Most experts insist that immigrants are filling jobs the locals don’t want, but the possibility remains that locals might want the jobs if the pay weren’t so low.”

Alan Ehrenhalt, writing for Governing Magazine

One small bit of good news for West Virginia, which has lost many people over the past few decades: its eastern panhandle, especially Jefferson (Harpers Ferry) and Berkeley (Martinsburg) counties, is experiencing explosive growth. I know, because I see it, with scores of new housing developments right across the state line from tony, expensive Loudoun County, Virginia, which has stopped growing. You can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in home prices just by crossing the state line from Virginia or Maryland. And their property taxes are lower, too.

The governance and policies of West Virginia and Virginia (and Maryland) are heading in opposite directions, and neighboring counties in western Maryland and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley are casting wistful eyes at the Mountaineer State. And vice versa. It’s also not the only part of the country where some counties wish they were part of a neighboring state.

Expect that trend to accelerate as Democrats in Richmond begin imposing dozens of new tax increases and rising electricity rates from their ferocious and mindless embrace of unreliable renewable energy.

Oh, and the cost of moving from a blue state to a red one, and vice versa, is a huge indicator. Just ask U-Haul.

My home county of Loudoun, Virginia, used to be reliably Republican, but an influx of government contractors and technology companies has brought in thousands of foreign-born, highly educated Democrats, turning our county a bright shade of blue. And we have the rising taxes, unaffordable home prices, and the crazy-left politicians to prove it.

But we should also ask about whether these new domestic migrants are bringing their politics with them. The data on that question is mixed. A survey conducted by the Texas Tribune and the University of Texas at Austin more than 12 years ago suggested 57% of Californians moving to Texas identify as Republicans, so there’s that. But voting behavior in other transient cities, such as Raleigh, NC, where many northeastern refugees have resettled, suggests some political “dilution.” The same is true for once-GOP Colorado. But Colorado’s fortunes are also changing, as its population growth has dramatically slowed, at least in the Denver area.

Regardless, you can’t be a Democrat and get very excited about this new map. Red states will increase their electoral count, perhaps by a dozen or more; the GOP will likely net a dozen or more US House seats, depending on how the lines are drawn and, of course, the ever-changing dynamics of electoral politics and shifting demographic voting trends and alliances. And the sudden decline in immigration growth may accelerate or further distort this.

Nearly two decades ago, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis wrote “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” on the presumption that population trends, plus the Democratic Party’s continued appeal to working-class voters, would result in a virtual Democratic lock on American politics. That obviously changed, leading the same authors to write a sequel, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” as the GOP captured working-class voters from an increasingly woke and culturally insane Democratic Party.

Based on the newest population trends, I might have to write, “The Emerging Republican Majority.” At least when it comes to Congress and the White House. Regardless, I’m taking notes, but the ink on the script is still quite wet.

One caveat: more and more Americans appear to be rejecting both political parties. That’s a huge, emerging variable that makes this whole process up for grabs, and stands as a huge caution flag for both political parties, and maybe an opportunity for new ones.

We live in interesting times.