Rust Belt States

Major Changes In Electoral College Coming After Census Figures In 2020, And Reapportionment Of Seats In House Of Representatives In 2022 And After

The Electoral College and Congressional Representation in the House of Representatives will change dramatically, after the Census of 2020 leads to seven states gaining electoral votes and Congressional seats, while ten states will lose electoral votes and Congressional seats starting in 2022 for the lower house of Congress, and for the Electoral College in 2024 and 2028.

The big winners will be Texas and Florida, gaining 3 and 2 seats and 3 and 2 electoral votes. Also gaining one seat and one electoral vote will be Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Montana, and North Carolina.

The ten states that will lose one seat each and one electoral vote are:

California (first time ever)

New York

Pennsylvania

Illinois

Ohio

Michigan

Minnesota

Rhode Island

West Virginia

Alabama

Rhode Island will now only have a Representative at Large, and Montana, which had gone in recent decades from one to two to one member of the House will again have 2 seats in the lower chamber of Congress.

The “Rust Belt” continues to lose in the Northeast and Midwest, while the South and the West, generally called the “Sun Belt”, continues to gain seats and power, although California losing is a surprise. They will still have 52 (instead of 53) House seats and 54 (instead of 55) electoral votes in the 2020s.

New York has lost for seven decades in House seats and electoral votes, from a high of 45 and 47 in the 1930s and 1940s to 26 and 28 in the 2020s. while Florida in the same period has grown from 8 and 10 in the 1950s to 29 and 31 in the 2020s!

Sunbelt States (Texas, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina) Will Make Rust Belt Mid West (Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio) No Longer Factor In Future Presidential Elections By Mid 2020s And After

In the midst of constant rehashing of the 2016 Presidential Election results, one point is being lost by political observers.

The nation is changing demographically very rapidly.

What happened in Virginia on Election Day this year is a sign of the future. Suburbanites, women, minorities, white collar educated, those under 45, and Independents swung over massively to the Democratic Party.

Those trends are not temporary, but permanent, as the older generation, which tends to be more conservative, dies off over the next decade, and the percentage of more educated people grows, and as the percentages of Latinos and Asian Americans start to change Sun Belt states.

So the near future is clearly that the states of Texas, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina will turn Blue, while the Rust Belt Mid West, not as populated with the groups that helped to make Virginia as Blue a state as it is (Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio) may go back and forth from Red to Blue, but in the Electoral College, the Rust Belt Mid West will matter much less than it did in 2016, assisting the victory of Donald Trump.

So one can say with a great amount of assurance that by 2024 or 2028, the Democrats will have the electoral advantage in the Electoral College, and are unlikely to lose it, as the Republican Party continues to alienate even their base of less educated and rural voters, and as the Sun Belt turns Democratic long term.

Of course, as part of this transition, the Democratic Party needs to move to the Left, be more progressive and liberal,and not come across as a moderate alternative to the Democratic Party, as that is the future of the party, to act more like it is the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson. This is what the groups which helped the Virginia victory desire for the future.