Meanwhile, California and New York are losing seats as new US demographics move constituencies for the House of Representatives.
Texas, Florida and North Carolina will get more congressional seats next year, the United States Census Bureau said, as it released demographics that reallocate votes from members of the House of Representatives and the United States. electoral college.
Under the U.S. Constitution, the 435 seats in the House and the The electoral college the votes that the US president decides every four years are distributed among the 50 states based on population, with each state receiving at least one seat in Congress.
Seats are reallocated every 10 years after the decennial count.
Monday’s release of census data, which captured the entire U.S. population in April 2020, sets the stage for a battle that could reshape political power in Washington, DC over the next decade.
Texas will receive two more congressional seats and five states – Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana and Oregon – will each win one congressional seat, the census office said.
Meanwhile, New York, California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will each lose one seat.
Transferring seats to states like Texas and Florida, where Republicans control state houses, might be enough to erase A tiny majority of Democrats in the House.
In the past, Republicans in these two states have engaged in aggressive gerrymandering, a process in which the cards are deliberately redrawn for the benefit of one party rather than the other.
Each state uses census data to redraw the lines for both the districts and the thousands of state legislative seats, a process known as redistribution.
This work cannot be completed until the census releases more precise block-by-block data, which is scheduled for September. The delay has raised concerns about whether states will have time to complete the redistribution before next year’s midterm elections.
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts do not have the power to restrict political gerrymandering, although racial gerrymandering – which aims to reduce the political power of certain racial or ethnic groups – remains illegal.
The four most populous US states – California, Texas, Florida, and New York – have over 110 million people combined and will hold roughly one-third of the seats in the House.
The transfer of seven seats among 13 states was the smallest number of seat changes in a decade since the current method of calculation was adopted in 1941, officials said.
Overall, the U.S. population stood at 331,449,281 as of April 2020, a 7.4 percent increase from the previous decade, according to the Census Bureau. The rise is the second slowest in history, behind just the 1930s, officials said.
Utah’s population has grown faster than any other state, increasing by more than 18% since 2010. Only three states have lost population, led by West Virginia, which has seen its population decline by 3.2 %.
Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, grew 14.6% to a population of 689,545. Democrats in Congress recently passed a law admit the district as the 51st state, but Republicans oppose the measure.
The territory of Puerto Rico, which was devastated by hurricane Maria in 2017, saw its population decrease by 11.8% since 2010.
Wyoming remains the least populated state, with 576,851 residents.
