West Virginia’s population declined by almost 60,000, the biggest loss of any state.Īs Frey noted, this continues the long-term trend of population shifting from the Northeast and Midwest toward the South and West. In the Rust Belt, the numbers were much more modest.Īpart from Massachusetts (at a relatively robust 482,000) none of the other New England states gained more than 61,000 new residents apart from Minnesota (at just over 400,000), growth was also modest in the key states across the industrial heartland. The Sun Belt provided all six of the states with the largest absolute gains (with Texas at 4 million and Florida at 2.7 million topping the list) and 11 of the top 12 (with only New York breaking the string).
Of the 17 states that added the most new residents from 2010 to 2020 (at least 404,000 in each case), Frey found, 14 are located across the South and West. Again, the Sun Belt dominated on that metric. Of those 13, all but North Dakota and Delaware are in the South and the West the others are (in order of their growth rates, starting with the fastest) Utah, Idaho, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Washington, Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia and Oregon.Īnother revealing measure is the absolute number of people each state added. In his recent analysis of the census results, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, found that only 13 states experienced double-digit increases in their populations over the past decade. Though the years from 2010 to 2020 produced a slower level of total population growth than any other decade in American history except the Depression years of the 1930s, the increase that did occur tilted heavily toward the states in the Sun Belt. In terms of overall population, the key trend is the ongoing shift of American population toward states in the South and West. The big new census reports on population trends and voter turnout in 2020 each show the continuation of core underlying trends reshaping the electoral battlefield. “What’s going to happen after Biden? You are going to need someone who is going to be able to expand the map and win some of those other states.” “Demographically it’s just going to be harder and harder to win those Rust Belt states,” says Democratic consultant Abhi Rahman, former communications director for the Texas Democratic Party. While the Rust Belt states are likely to remain closely contested in presidential elections as well, the continued dominance there of blue-collar Whites, who have emerged as the undisputed cornerstone of the GOP coalition in the Donald Trump era, could make those places more difficult over time for Democrats to hold, particularly if the party transitions to a more racially diverse cast of national leaders after President Joe Biden.Īs the Rust Belt states become more challenging and the Sun Belt states more influential, the Democrats’ ability to compete for the White House and control of Congress through the 2020s may increasingly turn on whether the party can continue the advance across the region that brought breakthroughs first in Colorado, Virginia and Nevada and more recently in Arizona and Georgia. That means the Sun Belt states, most of which leaned solidly Republican until recently, are likely to grow more competitive, even as their clout in the House and Electoral College steadily increases. Simultaneously, the new census results on voting show that compared with the Rust Belt, the electorate in the Sun Belt is evolving more rapidly in a direction that benefits Democrats, with a growing share of non-White voters and a shrinking share of blue-collar Whites. But the latest Census Bureau findings on both overall population growth and voter turnout in 2020 signal that the Sun Belt will increasingly rival, and potentially replace, the Rust Belt as the central battlefield in US elections.Ĭontinuing a decades-long trend, the latest census numbers on total growth show a shift in population, and with it Electoral College votes and seats in the House of Representatives, away from Rust Belt states in the Northeast and upper Midwest – such as Ohio and Pennsylvania – toward Sun Belt states across the South and West – like North Carolina, Texas and Colorado. The battleground states across the industrial Midwest have functioned as the decisive tipping point of American politics for at least 30 years, especially in presidential elections.
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