PHOENIX — Arizona is well on its way to having a greater voice in Congress after the 2030 census.
And the state will be even more of a electoral vote prize to whoever can win in the 2032 presidential race.
Arizona is nearly certain to pick up a 10th seat in Congress once the Census Bureau gets done with its decennial count, new figures from Election Data Services show.
And since a state’s electoral count also includes the two senators to which each is entitled, that means 12 electoral votes, up from the 11 that were cast this year for Donald Trump.
It’s not just that Arizona is growing. Most states are.
But it is that Arizona is growing faster than most of the others.
The projections are based on the Census Bureau reporting this past week that there were 7,582,384 people in Arizona on July 1. Election Data Services figures that if the state keeps growing at the rate — it has since the official 2020 count — the Census Bureau will find 8,150,554 Arizonans when it releases the 2030 figures.
And with the nation’s population projected to top 352.4 million, that should be more than enough to qualify for that 10th seat in the U.S. House.
This map shows predictions from Election Data Services which states will gain and lose seats in the U.S. House after the 2030 census.
This map shows predictions from Election Data Services which states will gain and lose seats in the U.S. House after the 2030 census.
What makes Arizona’s projected faster-than-average growth so important on the national political landscape is that redistricting is a zero-sum game: There are just 435 seats in the U.S. House. And that means the states that grow slower have to give up a seat — sometimes more than one — to those where people are more likely to move.
So if Arizona is going to get a seat, it will come from one of five states that Kimball Brace, the president of Election Data Services, predicts will be losers: Oregon, Minnesota, Illinois, New York as well as California, which is projected to shed two seats.
But it’s not just Arizona that’s going to get one of those six seats.
Idaho also is expected to gain a seat, bringing its House representation up to three.
The big winners, however, are Texas which will have 40 seats in the House once two more are added, and Florida, also gaining two, bringing its House membership up to 30.
Still, even with its population lagging, California will continue to be dominant: Even with losing two seats, it is projected to still have 50 members in the House.
All that growth in “red’’ states has political implications beyond the raw numbers. Brace said it is also likely that the people moving there probably agree politically with those already there.
“We do know that people tend to move to where they become familiar and are comfortable with where they’re going to,’’ Brace said.
“Given the polarization that’s taken place so much over the last couple of years, it may be that they’re starting to feel more comfortable going back to the rural area of the country, the Midwest — or the South particularly.
A voter heads into a polling site at Ocotillo Ridge Elementary School in Vail during the November general election. If Arizona picks up a 10th seat in Congress after to 2030 census, it would give the state 12 electoral votes.
Put another way, it’s unlikely that the majority of folks leaving places like New York and Illinois are Democrats moving to places like Texas and Florida and reshaping politics there. So look for Texas and Florida to become even more Republican-dominated states — and electing more Republicans to the House.
And Arizona?
That’s a little more difficult to project.
And the key is how congressional lines are drawn here every 10 years.
In many states that process is purely political, with the decisions left to state lawmakers. And they tend to craft districts that are favorable to the party already in power in the Legislature.
But Arizonans voted in 2000 to wrest control of the redistricting process away from lawmakers — the people who for decades had drawn lines favorable to the Republican legislative majority — and instead give it to a newly created Independent Redistricting Commission, a panel of two Republicans, two Democrats and a political independent who is chosen by the other four.
The lines that panel draws — both for congressional and legislative districts — are governed by specific requirements.
Members are legally required to consider factors like respecting communities of interest, using existing political boundaries when possible and having districts of equal population, though that is measured far looser in legislative maps than congressional ones. And the commission also is required to create as many politically competitive districts as possible, where a candidate from either party has a chance of winning.
Still, that hasn’t entirely taken politics out of the mix in Arizona.
The first redistricting after the 2000 census resulted in nearly a decade of litigation after Democrat and Hispanic interests charged the panel had short-changed them.
The situation was reversed in 2010 when Republicans charged that Colleen Mathis, the independent chosen to chair the revised panel — it is reconstituted after every census — was siding with Democrats. And that played out over the decade resulting in a congressional delegation of five Democrats and four Republicans.
But a new panel chosen after the 2020 census once again resulted in Democratic complaints, this time that Erika Newberg who was the chair, was siding with Republicans and rigging the lines. Whatever the truth of that, the state ended up with its current 6-3 Republican congressional delegation.
All that will play out again after the 2030 census — when the state should have 10 seats in the U.S. House — with yet another new redistricting commission.
There’s a caveat to all these numbers.
Brace said that while there’s science involved in making projections in 2024 for where people will be in 2030, there are a lot of variables.
One, he said, is that there have been changes in how the Census Bureau does it computations.
There were problems in 2020, during the pandemic, in gathering data. That, in turn, has affected the annual update estimates the agency makes.
And there are other issues.
“The COVID crisis over the state of the 2020 decade has literally, and physically, kept people are the current abode and shut down population shifts, leading to strains on any projections to the future,” he said.
The economy itself is a factor: When people are unable to sell their homes and buy new ones, they tend to stay put.
And then are the things that just can’t be known.
Consider, he said, projections in the first half of the decade in the 2000 indicated Louisiana would gain a seat in the House after the 2010 census.
But people fled after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And by the time the official count was taken in 2010, Louisiana actually lost a congressional district.
