State to lose congressional seat for first time in history

California is likely to lose a congressional seat for the first time in history after this year’s Census, with the state’s slowing growth rate trimming its political clout, according to an analysis of new population data released this week.

The projected drop from 53 to 52 seats in the House of Representatives will lead to a reshuffling of the state’s political map, and potentially divisive congressional races between incumbents in 2022. It will also shape presidential politics, as California loses one of its votes in the electoral college and other states like Texas are expected to gain as many as three new seats.

While California will continue to send the largest delegation of any state to Capitol Hill, its political haircut is a consequence of more and more people moving elsewhere around the country. Many of them are pushed out by the state’s skyhigh housing prices and cost of living, experts say. As a result, the Golden State is bucking a trend.

“What you’re seeing is a continuation of the trend that’s been happening from the 1930’s: people leaving the Northeast and Upper Midwest and going south and west,” said Kimbell Brace, the president of Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that analyzed the new Census Bureau data. “But California is the exception.”

California is the only western state likely to lose a representative in 2021. Nine other states will lose one seat, according to Election Data Services’ projection, most in the Northeast and Midwest. At the same time, Texas will gain three seats, Florida will gain two, and five other Southern and Western states gain one each.

In terms of presidential politics, red states will gain more votes in the electoral college than blue states — although the changes wouldn’t have swung the results of any recent presidential race, the firm found.

California’s population grew by less than half a percentage point in 2018 — the slowest growth rate in its 17-decade history. More people left California than those who moved here from other states or foreign countries between July 2018 and July 2019, according to state data, with a net outflow of about 40,000 people. The top destinations included Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington and Oregon.

The state only grew at all because of new births — but the birth rate is also decreasing, while deaths are on the rise as California’s millions of Baby Boomers get older.

“California is still gaining population from having more births than deaths and people moving from abroad, but we’ve had net domestic migration losses for a number of years now,” said Eddie Hunsinger, the chief of the state government’s Demographic Research Unit.

California sent only two representatives to the House when it became a state in 1850, but that number swelled as the state’s population skyrocketed over the 20th century. In the most recent reapportionment in 2011, California’s delegation stayed steady at 53 seats.

It’s too early to predict which parts of California are most likely to lose a representative. The census will take place this year, with results released by April 2021. Then the state’s citizens redistricting commission will crunch the numbers to draw new lines for congressional and legislative districts, finishing their work by August 2021, in time for the 2022 elections.

The commission doesn’t have

to take the current district lines or where each incumbent member of Congress lives into account in their decisions, which means it could draw a drastically different map for the state.

“A lot of people think this is like walking into a poker game and taking one person’s card away,” said Paul Mitchell, the head of Political Data Inc., a data firm in Sacramento. “You’re actually taking a

card out of the deck and reshuffling it.”

That could encourage more challengers to run against entrenched incumbents, and potentially give Republicans a better chance to win back some of the many seats they’ve lost around the state in recent years. It could also lead to races between members of Congress who are drawn into the same district — contests that become some of the most expensive and bruising battles in the country.

“Any incumbent-on-incumbent race is going to

be especially contentious,” predicted Howard Berman, a former Los Angeles-area congressman who lost his seat to his colleague Brad Sherman after the two found themselves in the same district in 2012. “Every member of Congress in the state will be paying close attention to those decisions.”

Of course, the state-bystate projections are just estimates for now — and the final results will depend on how willing people are to respond to the census.

A major undercount of the California’s population

could theoretically lead to the state losing even more voices in Congress. The state has larger-than-average populations considered “hard to count,” such as recent immigrants, minorities, renters and people who don’t speak English fluently.

And some noncitizens and families of undocumented immigrants could be especially worried about giving their information after President Trump’s move to add a question about citizenship to the census — even though that was shot down by the Supreme Court

last year.

Now, the state government is spending $187 million on a massive outreach campaign urging residents to complete their census forms and ensure they’re counted. Other states like Texas, which also has a large immigrant population, are spending nothing at all.

“It’s a Herculean task to try to get past decades of erosion in governmental trust and make sure people fill this out,” Mitchell said. “It’s gross negligence on the part of many states not to do at least the level of effort California is doing.”