The 2010 census is sure to be controversial.
Republicans will thunder about the community organizers who get hired to do the counting, and Democrats will wail that the homeless and migrant workers are undercounted.
But in the final pre-count estimate just released by the Census Bureau, we already have a broad idea of where the results are headed and what they will mean politically.
The numbers are cause for alarm for Democrats.
Of the states gaining House seats — Texas (three) and Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington — only Washington is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984.
Of the states losing seats and electors — Ohio (two), Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — only Louisiana is reliably Republican. And the fact that there are 170,000 fewer residents of New Orleans than before Hurricane Katrina has made the state even more reliably red.
But the real shocker is California. After a consistently large gains in the second half of the 20th century, California is on track for only 9 percent growth in the first decade of the 21st. Compare that to 14 percent growth in the ’90s, 26 percent growth in the ’80s, 19 percent in the ’70s and 27 percent in the ’60s.
The nonpartisan Election Data Services projects that for only the second time in the state’s history, 1920 being the other, the state will not gain a seat in Congress after a census.
California has 10 more electors now than before the reapportionment following the 1980 census. That offsets the 10 presidential votes and House seats New York lost over the same period, helping Democrats contend with the explosive growth in the South.
Texas and Georgia alone gobbled up the 11 seats in Congress given up since 1980 by New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
If California, now an economic basket case, can’t pick up the slack for the other big blue states, Congress and presidential elections will look very different.
Democrats bet that when the economy picks up, so will immigration from Latin America, providing the kind of electoral base for the party in the Southwest that immigrants from Ireland and then southern Europe once provided in the Northeast.
But initiatives by the states to stem illegal immigration, along with rudimentary efforts by the federal government, may mean that the wave of newcomers won’t resume once the labor market improves.
And while many of the new Southerners and Westerners are more amenable to the Democratic Party than the indigenous populations, the slowing of the influx probably means that for the medium term, at least, the reddest states, like Texas, will stay red, and competitive states, like Arizona, will stay competitive.
Plus, much of the red-state growth comes from the higher reproductive rates in the South and West — the top two states by birth rate are Utah and Texas. The bottom two: Vermont and Maine. As Vermonters scoop out bowls of Ben and Jerry’s to celebrate their civil unions, out in Utah they’re breeding new conservatives by the minivan load.
Even with the population growth of the Southwest, Democrats will still have chances for big-swing elections like 2008. But the party will continue see a steady erosion of the strategic value of strongholds like Michigan and New York that made narrow presidential victories and slim congressional majorities possible in election years when the national electorate was narrowly divided.
Claiming and holding new political territory is hard and expensive, as Virginia’s 2009 election results showed. Republicans, meanwhile, will be talking to receptive audiences, including those who moved from big-government states to more free-market states.
Consider Florida, which has gained 10 electoral votes since 1980 and also become more Republican.
It’s not by accident that tax haven New Hampshire has the fastest growth rate in New England since 2000 at 7.2 percent, compared to 2.1 percent for Vermont and 3.9 percent for Massachusetts.
A bigger, more conservative New Hampshire means a smaller, more liberal Massachusetts.
With fewer people to tax, Massachusetts Democrats are raising taxes again to pay for unsustainable entitlements and a patronage system.
That will speed the exodus of the most industrious and prosperous citizens, and the Bay State will look more like neighboring Rhode Island, where this cycle has been playing out longer: a stagnant, aging, population that can’t finance the services the remaining residents demand.
The Republican Party is still a shambles, but the policies of the Democratic majority have put the GOP back in the hunt for majority status.
If Republicans find a way to press their policy advantages now and in 2012, demographics could do the rest of the work for them.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
