Democrats’ future crisis: The biggest states that back them are shrinking

1 With America’s population shifting

With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term.

If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower.

“At the end of the day, Democrats have to be able to win in the South or compete in the South” if they want to control the levers of government, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Otherwise, it’s a really uphill battle every time.”

The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12.

The South’s gains

Li’s latest projection, which was released late last year, is based on the last two years of population changes and shows the South gaining more House seats than it has had in history. It would be the continuation of a decades-long trend of the population shifting from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and inland West. Americans and immigrants are gravitating toward warmer climates, cheaper housing, lower taxes and plentiful jobs.

2 The Brennan Center projects

The Brennan Center projects that California will lose four seats and New York two in the 2030 census. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin would lose one seat each. Except for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are swing states, all of those states have consistently backed Democrats for president and sent Democratic majorities to the House.

No GOP strongholds are projected to lose seats. Florida and Texas are projected to pick up four seats each. Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina and Utah are forecasted to each gain one. All of them backed Trump for president last year, though Arizona and North Carolina were competitive, and all have Republican majorities in their U.S. House delegations.

3 A changing map

A changing map

Entering Election Day, there was a broad consensus that Harris would comfortably win 226 electoral votes and Trump 219, with both campaigns fighting over seven battleground states to reach the 270 electoral votes required to win. Those seven battleground states had 93 electoral votes — and Trump won all of them.

If the projected map for the next decade were used in 2024, Trump’s electoral college margin would have been even larger. He would have won the Electoral College 322-216 instead of 312-226.

On the flip side, Democrat Joe Biden still would have won in 2020 with the projected map for the 2030s, but the margin would have been closer. Instead of a 306-232 victory, Biden would have beat Trump 292-246.

Harris could have won last year by keeping the “Blue Wall” — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — along with one congressional district in Nebraska, a state that splits its electoral votes. In the next decade, that won’t be enough, according to current projections. The Blue Wall strategy combined with safely Democratic states would net just 258 electoral votes, 12 short of victory.

4 How do Democrats remain relevant?

How do Democrats remain relevant?

To control the White House, House or Senate, Democrats will likely need to do better in the three southern swing states. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean conservative but have elected Democrats at a statewide level.

Alternatively, they could try to achieve their long-elusive goal of turning Texas blue or reverse the recent trend toward Republicans in Florida, once a swing state that has shifted hard to the right.

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To be sure, Republican dominance in the 2030s is not a foregone conclusion. Not long ago, Democrats thought they were building an insurmountable majority due to their strength with voters of color and a growing Latino population across the country. But that fell apart when Trump and the GOP began making inroads with the Democrats’ traditional working class base.

Hispanic voters were more open to Trump than they were in 2020. And while Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won, according to AP VoteCast. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden.

Democratic resurgence will require much more investment in state parties and a frank assessment of how to appeal to parts of the country that supported Trump, said James Skoufis, a New York state senator running to be chair of the Democratic National Committee.

“It requires a reorientation of how we speak with voters,” Skoufis said. “It requires emphasizing our working class values again. And if we’re being honest with ourselves and we’re owning some of what just happened two months ago, we need to shed this perception that we are an elitist party.”