Democrats, forget the last election. It may be harder to win in the future. And it has nothing to do with borders or inflation or trans rights or Trump and the numbers on this spreadsheet.
They reveal how many Americans are packing up and moving from one state to another. That’s a lot, more than seven million people in 2023. Now, my colleague Benjamin Appelbaum, he writes about the economy for The New York Times.
He dug through this entire spreadsheet, two decades worth of data, and he found something that would scare every Democrat.
Millions of people are leaving California, New York, Illinois and other blue states. And they’re moving to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, the red ones. Some are drawn by new manufacturing jobs. Others are drawn by finance and tech hubs.
But it’s mostly teachers, police officers, dentists, who just want a more affordable life. People are moving to blue states, but in small numbers. In fact, over the past 20 years, 9 million more people have gone from blue to red than the other way around.
And Democrats, this is bad news for you. Why? Because the size of a state’s population determines how many Electoral College votes it gets.
The next national census is in 2030. And let’s assume that the migration flow in this spreadsheet continues until then, and see what happens.
California loses four votes, New York loses three, Illinois loses two, and other blue states like Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island lose one vote. And they go, just like humans, to those red states.
In total, this redistricting could cost Democrats 12 Electoral College votes. And don’t forget, it’s locked up for a decade until the next census.
So if your 2032 candidate wins the same number of states as Kamala Harris, they won’t get 226 votes; they’d only get 214.
Democrats have been dreaming for decades that this demographic shift will help turn red states purple.
Instead, Texas and Florida have simply become big red states. Look, a lot can change in the five years before the next census. But the blue states need to change first.
People still want to live in California and New York, but the cost of living needs to come down.
If the Democratic governors of these states want to avoid a decade of electoral oblivion, they have one job: make their states places where people can live.
