WASHINGTON — California, along with states in the Northeast and Midwest, will lose out on political representation for the next decade after apportionment results announced Monday send House seats to the South and Southwest.
The once-a-decade reshuffling of the 435 House seats will give six states more representation at the expense of seven states on a razor-thin margin. According to the population totals released Monday, Texas gains two seats, while Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Montana and Oregon each gain one. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each lose one.
New York lost its 27th seat to Minnesota — by 89 people.
The Census Bureau’s results come about four months later than planned, after the pandemic, natural disasters and decisions by the Trump administration hampered the count and its processing. The agency plans to release the next wave of census results — detailed data used for legislative redistricting — in August.
“Census takers have a hard job to begin with, and trying to count people during a global pandemic made it even more challenging,” Acting Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin said during a press conference announcing the results.
Overall, the country grew to 331 million people, a 7.4% increase from the 2010 census. The average House seat will represent 761,169 people, up from 710,767 following the 2010 count.
The apportionment results announced Monday reflect the latest step in the waning political power of the Northeast and Rust Belt states and a transition to the South and West over several decades. New to that club is California: the Golden State lost a House seat for the first time in its history despite a more than $180 million campaign to bolster the population count.
Apportionment margins can be razor thin, and in 2000 the difference came down to 856 people. The apportionment process will likely spur litigation, similar to the two Supreme Court cases launched by Utah in 2000.
The Supreme Court has generally sided with the Census Bureau in decisions about how to count people, but legal experts have wondered whether that will hold following a historically troubled census.
The Census Bureau last year missed its statutory Dec. 31 deadline for apportionment results for the first time. On top of that, the agency said it may not deliver the detailed data needed for redistricting until the end of September.
The delays in the data distribution started in March 2020, as the agency suspended many in-person counting efforts due to the coronavirus pandemic. The agency restarted those efforts over the summer, but was then hampered by a record wildfire and hurricane season.
After ending the in-person operations in October, the Census Bureau found issues with hundreds of thousands of records, which it said could take months to fix. On top of that, the agency had to figure out how to count millions of people across the country who had relocated amid the pandemic.
In addition to the apportionment of House seats, census results are used to draw legislative districts and guide more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending annually.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in both chambers introduced a bill earlier this month to extend the agency’s deadlines, providing legal cover for the Biden administration plan to deliver final census results as late as September. Ohio and Alabama launched separate federal court cases to force early release of the data, both of which are still pending.
Biden nominated a permanent head for the agency, prominent statistician Robert Santos, earlier this month but the Senate has not taken up the pick yet.
