Is it too early to wargame the 2028 Electoral College? Of course it is, don’t be silly — that’s why we’re going to look at 2032 today.
It’s too soon to look at 2028 because we don’t even know who the players are but ’32 is ripe because we’re halfway to the next congressional apportionment and are getting a good idea of how the biggest player in the game — the Electoral College map — is changing.
So there’s a new census at the start of each new decade and with it, Congress’s 435 seats are apportioned among the several states and, this being a zero-sum game, there are winners and losers.
According to the latest from The American Redistricting Project (ARP), the losers might as well be “bluesers” and the winners are (almost) all in the red.
GOP bastions Idaho and Utah should gain one seat each. But Florida and Texas — wow. A gain of four seats each. Florida only caught up to New York after the 2010 census and by 2030 will be one-third larger. Impressive as that is, Florida’s representation was actually delayed by Census Bureau undercounts in the 2020 census. Texas was undercounted by more than half a million people and Florida by 761,000. Those undercounts cost them one seat each. Overcounts helped Minnesota and Rhode Island hang on to seats they shouldn’t have.
Arizona is the only genuine swing state to lose or gain, adding one seat after 2030.
Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin will all lose one seat each. New York is projected to lose two, bringing the Empire State down to 26 EC votes from its historic high of 47 during the 1940s. The biggest loser is California, expected to lose three seats.
Let’s talk about California because that state’s uninterrupted flow of progressive governance — taxes, neglected infrastructure, strangling regulations — is starting to bite like a police dog on a violent perp covered in A-1 sauce.
The ARP estimates the Formerly Golden State will lose three seats but earlier estimates went as high as five. So maybe they’ve stanched the population loss since then. Or perhaps ARP is overly optimistic for Democrats. I’m leaning slightly toward the latter because if the Department of Government Efficiency and other reforms are successful, it might prove beneficial to Census Bureau accuracy. If the corrections from 2020 are on the larger end, red states could see slightly larger gains and blue states bigger losses.
And Another Thing: I must repeat that apportionment doesn’t happen until after the 2030 census and won’t affect any changes to the Electoral College until the 2032 election. Everything remains the same for 2028.
As far as I can tell from news reports, the Democrats have nobody doing D registration work in Florida or Texas on the scale that Scott Presler does. It may well be that earlier Dem efforts were successful enough that they’re nearly topped out.
Also, Democrat morale (not to mention the party’s approval rating) is tanking. “The extreme left is leading us into a ditch,” is how Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) put it. That can’t be good for registration efforts.
But back to California, where at the high estimate, congressional representation is collapsing faster than almost any state in history. Only New York in 1960 or Pennsylvania in 1930 lost more seats in a single apportionment.
In my lifetime, California has changed so much, and not for the better — something almost perfectly reflected by the state’s diminishing presence in the Electoral College. “The California Dream is just like the American Dream only better because it’s in California,” used to be the vibe. California went from having 40 EC votes the year I was born (1969) to a high of 55 after the 2010 census. That was incredible growth but now they’re trying — and failing — just to hold on to what they have.
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