Democrats will lose ground in the 2030 census 📉
Population projections show blue states will lose seats in the next apportionment, costing Democrats more electoral votes in the Electoral College than Republicans
🍺 What’s on tap 🚰
Today’s newsletter features:
Opening Bell: Must-read items about elections and politics.
The Frontrunner: Population projections based on new 2025 state-level estimates show blue states will lose seats in the 2030 apportionment, which will cost Democrats electoral votes in the Electoral College.
Blake Burman on Prediction Markets: Blake Burman, Chief Washington Correspondent for NewsNation, runs a Substack where he tracks political prediction markets. This week, he looks at how long the partial federal government shutdown will last, who Republicans will nominate in Texas’s U.S. Senate race, and whether Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow on Groundhog Day.
Around the Corner: Upcoming elections we’re tracking at DDHQ.
🔔 Opening Bell 🐏
Must-read items about elections and politics.
In Saturday’s special election runoff between two Democrats, former Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee defeated former Houston City Council member to fill a vacancy in Texas’s 18th Congressional District. After he is sworn in, Menefee will cut the House Republican majority to 218-214, with three remaining vacancies. Menefee will now have to turn around and seek a full term in the redrawn 18th District, where he will face Democratic Rep. Al Green and Edwards in the March 3 Democratic primary.
In a rare Thursday election, New Jersey will hold a Democratic primary on Feb. 5 in the special election for the state’s 11th Congressional District, left vacant by newly-inaugurated Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The race features 11 active candidates (and 13 on the ballot), including former Rep. Tom Malinowski and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill. However, sizable outside spending by AIPAC against Malinowski could hurt his chances. Other major Democratic contenders are Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way; Passaic County Commissioner John Bartlett; and Analilia Mejía, the former political director of Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. The winner will face Randolph Mayor Joe Hathaway, the only Republican candidate to file, in the April 16 general election.
Last Thursday, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar formally entered Minnesota’s gubernatorial contest. The longtime senator had already hinted at a possible campaign for governor after Democratic Gov. Tim Walz abandoned his bid for a third term in early January. She is all but guaranteed to become the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s nominee for governor. And, in what could be a blue-leaning midterm year, she will likely be favored in the general election against the eventual GOP nominee.
Also on Thursday, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan announced a campaign for California governor. A Democrat, Mahan joins an already-crowded race with at least eight high-profile Democratic contenders. Although the June primary is still some months away, there is at least some danger that the party’s large field could sufficiently fragment the Democratic vote to make it possible for two Republicans to finish first and second in California’s top-two primary system. If that happened, Democrats would be locked out of the general election, which would hand Republicans the governorship of the country’s largest blue state.
Please subscribe to our Polling Memo! The weekly writeup, which now comes out on Tuesdays, features key trends based on DDHQ’s polling averages. If you’re already a subscriber to The Bellwether, you can receive the memo in your inbox by clicking on your account settings and opt to receive the Poll Memo (see the image below).
📈 The Frontrunner 🥇
Why the 2030 apportionment could help Republicans more than Democrats
Quick summary:
New projections for the 2030 apportionment suggest that red states will likely gain U.S. House seats and blue states will probably lose ground. In the projections, Texas gains four seats, Florida gains two to four, and Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina each gain one. Conversely, California is on pace to lose four seats, while New York and Illinois might lose one to two.
The projected seat changes will affect the Electoral College, too. They would increase Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral vote haul to 322, up 10 votes from his actual result. While political conditions could change quite a bit by 2032, this would lower the bar for what the GOP needs to win. In 2024, Republicans needed to win at least four of the seven key swing states to win the presidency, including the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania. But under these projections, Republicans would only have needed the Sun Belt trio of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Last week, the Census Bureau released new estimates for the population of the United States and its individual states. While overall growth slowed, state-level trends remained largely similar: The fastest-growing states are in the Sun Belt and Interior West, while slower-growing (or shrinking) states are mainly found along the West Coast and across the Frost Belt.
Naturally, these trends will have political ramifications. Different organizations and experts quickly took the updated population estimates and made projections about the apportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2030 census. Using somewhat different approaches, redistricting expert Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon University, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the American Redistricting Project all released projections detailing the potential gains and losses each state might experience in the next round of reapportionment. And on the whole, states that President Donald Trump carried in 2024 are in line to gain ground, while states that then-Vice President Kamala Harris won look set to lose it.
The projections differed in small ways, but broadly agreed about the likely state gainers and losers. Taking the median change of these projections, Texas (four seats) and Florida (three seats) appear on their way to the biggest gains, while Georgia and North Carolina could each add one seat. Three states in the Interior West — Arizona, Idaho, and Utah — are also on course to gain one apiece. Conversely, the biggest loser is likely to be California, which is trending toward a four-seat decline, and New York, which could lose two. Six other states — Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — are projected to each subtract one seat.
Should these projections come to pass, the 2030 gains for Texas and Florida would rank among the largest in the past few decades. Dating back to 1970, Texas’s four-seat gain would equal the third-largest raw increase in seats in a single reapportionment, trailing only California in 1990 (seven) and 1970 (five).
Meanwhile, California and New York would sit among the largest losers in the same period. In fact, a four-seat decrease for California would rank as the second-largest decline in reapportionment cycles since 1970, trailing only the five that New York lost following the 1980 census.
These projected seat swings would not only affect each state’s representation in the House of Representatives, but they would also influence the outcome of presidential elections. A state’s total number of electoral votes in the Electoral College, which determines the presidential winner, is the sum of its House seats plus its two senators in the U.S. Senate. For instance, California presently has 52 House seats and 54 electoral votes. In all, the Electoral College has 538 electoral votes based on the states’ 435 representatives and 100 senators, plus three electoral votes assigned to the District of Columbia in accordance with the 23rd Amendment.
And the electoral vote news is better for Republicans than Democrats. Looking at the 2024 presidential election, Trump defeated Harris 312-226 in the Electoral College, reaching (and surpassing) the 270 needed for a majority and victory. The projected seat changes would have increased Trump’s electoral vote haul to 322, a 10-vote increase. Just to put that in perspective, that would be akin to adding a medium-sized blue state to the GOP’s total — say Minnesota, which currently has 10 electoral votes (but is projected to lose one in 2030).
These shifts in electoral votes would take away the Democrats’ most common path to victory in recent years: the fabled “Blue Wall” battleground states across the Frost Belt. Democrats have long had a path to 270 electoral votes if they carried blue-leaning states and the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump narrowly carried all of those states in 2024, but had Harris won them (on top of the states she did carry), she would have garnered exactly the 270 electoral votes needed to win. However, the projected electoral vote change would have made it so that Harris only reached 258 electoral votes.
As a result, Pennsylvania, which Trump carried by 1.7 percentage points, would no longer have been the “tipping-point” state in the 2024 election. That is, if you lined up all the states (and congressional district-level results in Maine and Nebraska) from most Republican to most Democratic by margin, Pennsylvania delivered the 270th electoral vote to whomever won it. Yet these apportionment projections would move the tipping-point state farther to the right, making Georgia (Trump +2.1) the decisive state based on the 2024 results.
In a way, these trends only make it more necessary for Democrats to compete in the states that they narrowly won in 2020. With the Blue Wall’s reduced clout, Democrats would likely have to more consistently win Arizona and Georgia to get to 270, or also flip North Carolina, which has often been a “close, but no cigar” state for Democrats. But given the shifts in recent elections, the necessity of competing in those places is not really a huge change for Democrats. After all, Democrats lost the Blue Wall states in 2016 and 2024, and Trump’s margin of victory in Georgia and North Carolina in the latter was not that different from his edge in Pennsylvania.
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are in line to gain significant ground in red-leaning places like Texas and Florida, as well as make small gains in solidly red states like Idaho and Utah. This contrasts with the sizable projected Democratic losses in California and New York, two of that party’s largest safe states. As long as the GOP retains the upper hand in Texas and Florida, they will not need to carry quite as many highly-competitive states as Democrats to win presidential races. In 2024, Democrats had to win three of the seven main swing states — the three in the Blue Wall — to reach 270. Under these projections, Republicans would only need the three competitive but light-red states that we could call their Red Wall — the Sun Belt trio of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina — to reach 270. (Nevada was the other state among the core seven swing states in 2020-24.)
However, while these projections could be deleterious for Democrats, we should not overstate how determinative they will be in future presidential elections. Even though our political situation is quite polarized, we can expect shifts in the party coalitions and changes in the electorate to alter the political status quo as we know it. So, while the GOP stands to gain among the states it carried in 2024 and has tended to win in recent years, hypothetical Democratic gains in Sun Belt states could quickly alter the political calculus. For instance, if Texas became consistently competitive, the GOP would risk the loss of the bedrock of the party’s Electoral College foundation.
Additionally, the projections are just that — projections. They certainly suggest some states are likely to gain or lose seats in reapportionment, but the finer details of one seat here or there is difficult to predict. Moreover, these projections are extrapolated from population estimates that cover the first half of the 2020s. Population estimates unsurprisingly run closest to the final census figures in the years closest to the actual census, whereas ones produced in the middle of the decade are not quite as on target. Additionally, the decennial census itself is an imperfect exercise — the enumeration process tends to undercount or overcount the population in different states, which in turn can affect the final apportionment figures.
Lastly, political efforts and judicial rulings could change how apportionment works by 2030. Trump and other Republicans have pushed for apportionment to be based only on the citizen population rather than the population as a whole. Trump has even called for a mid-decade census that excludes anyone not in the country legally. Any legislation or executive action to these ends will go through lengthy legal challenges, but it is unclear how this could play out by the next time the nation reapportions the House. On that score, we will just have to wait and see. The same goes for finding out how many people live where in 2030.
🟢 No Red Or Blue, Just Green 📗
Blake Burman on prediction markets:
Trump’s Texas Decision
I wrote last week how Trump has yet to endorse in the Texas Senate primary, but that could soon be changing. He told reporters Sunday that he is “giving it a serious look.” That comment seemingly lead to some market movement, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ticking down and Senator John Cornyn rising:
The polling shows a tight race here, but the prediction markets see it differently. IF President Trump decides to endorse here, that would likely shake things up.
“They say whoever I endorse wins. That’s probably right,” Trump said Sunday.
Texas saw a renewed focus over the weekend as a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat that’s normally gone red. President Trump distanced himself from that race, but it clearly got his attention. So what’s the overall picture like?:
There’s been movement in which party will win the Senate race there. Yes, the belief is that the seat (currently occupied by Cornyn) will remain in Republican control. However, the margin there is as close as its been with it ticking to a 65-35 at this point in the predictions markets.
You can read the rest of Blake’s post on his Substack!
📆 Around the Corner 📌
Notable upcoming elections:
February 5, 2026
NJ-11 Special Election Primary
March 10, 2026
GA-14 Special Election (runoff likely)
April 7, 2026
Wisconsin Supreme Court General Election
GA-14 Special Election Runoff (if necessary)
April 16, 2026
NJ-11 Special Election
Check out our 2026 Primary Primer for more information about the regular primaries happening in 2026!v
Voting Democrats moving from California to Texas will still be blue voting democrats. And if enough move, Texas could turn Blue :-)
The Red Wall framing is brillant. What strikes me is how this creates asymetric coalition pressure where Democrats need near-perfect turnout across diverse states while Republicans can focus resources more narrowly. The shift from Pennsylvania as tipping point to Georgia also means the median voter moves rightward which compounds the electoral challenge. I've been thinking alot about how census methodolgy changes could layer on top of this but honestly even without those fights the demographic momentum alone reshapes presidential strategy for a generation.