All three acutally, made my building jump off the Helmsley Hotel in NYC....I know they are having problems there too....And Chicago etc....Toss in the immigration problems they are, well, not doing well....I think I posted NYC was losing 100s of thousands......
Has a turtle ever been in a horse race? Back to the blue to red states population shift. Hmm, Some creative songwriter should be changing the lyrics of Roses Are Red
to Texas Is Blue. And taking out a patent on it, cuz one day.............
Population-Growth Patterns Paint Grim Picture for Democrats
If red states continue growing this quickly and blue states keep growing slowly, Democrats’ long-term chances of winning the White House stand to be seriously imperiled.
By Louis Jacobson | Jan. 16, 2024, at 1:21 p.m. U.S. News & World Report
Sean Rayford|Getty Images
Supporters of former President Donald Trump applaud during a campaign event, July 1, 2023, in Pickens, S.C. South Carolina is one of the top five states that experienced the fastest percentage growth in population from 2022 to 2023, and voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
Coming as it always does during the Christmas break, the release of the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates usually attracts little notice beyond circles of hard-core demographers. But this year’s release offers some striking patterns that should also raise eyebrows in the political world.
If those population-growth patterns continue for the rest of the decade, it could seriously imperil the Democrats’ long-term chances of winning the White House. Each state gets one electoral vote for each congressional district, plus two for its Senate seats. So electoral votes are linked to population, but not on a one-to-one basis.
Several analyses, including one by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-congressional-maps-could-change-2030 , have projected what the electoral vote map would look like if the population-growth patterns seen in 2022-23 continue uninterrupted until the next round of reapportionment, following the 2030 Census.
1/16
For Democrats, the picture is grim.
Among red states, Texas would gain four electoral votes; Florida would gain three; Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah would gain one each.
Among blue states, California would lose four seats, New York would lose three, Illinois would lose two, and Minnesota, Oregon and Rhode Island would lose one seat each.
Among battleground states, Arizona and Georgia (both won by Joe Biden .. https://www.usnews.com/topics/people/joe_biden ) and North Carolina (won by Donald Trump) would gain one seat each, while the Biden-backing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania would lose one seat each.
“Population shifts pose a serious potential risk to Democrats in presidential politics,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.
While states used to switch partisan allegiance with some regularity, those preferences have ossified in recent decades.
“Unfortunately for the Democrats, a lot has changed over the last half century,” said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “Today the partisan outcome of almost every state is virtually assured before we even know the candidates.”
Particularly notable, and potentially problematic for Democrats, is the growing population in the South.
According to the Brennan Center’s analysis, the South “has emerged as this decade’s growth engine, adding almost 3.9 million people and accounting for nearly all U.S. population gains since 2020.” By themselves, Texas and Florida accounted for 70% of U.S. population growth during this period.
One way to gauge the political impact is to look at how Biden’s margin of victory in the electoral college in 2020 would shrink if these population shifts continue.
In the 2020 election, Biden won the electoral vote, 306-232. But already, the population changes in the 2020 Census, when applied to the states Biden won and lost in 2020, would have produced a narrower victory by three electoral votes, 303-235.
If the changes seen in 2022-23 continue until the next reapportionment in 2030, Biden’s victory would have been smaller still – only 291-247. That’s a 15-electoral-vote swing in the Republicans’ direction, just due to population shifts.
The ongoing population changes are “more negative than positive for Democrats,” said Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones.
That said, analysts suggest a few reasons for caution before assuming Democrats need to panic about these trends.
The first is that it’s still early in the decade. Historically, the official counts in the once-every-decade Census “never match the final estimates” that are taken yearly in the interim, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist.
“Among the 43 states that gained population in 2022-23, 13 of them would have lost population were it not for net international migration,” Brookings reported.
Not all the population growth from immigration will necessarily benefit Democrats. One crucial caveat is that immigrants can’t vote until they are citizens, a process that can take years. Another is that in the Trump era, Hispanics, a key group among current-day immigrants, have been shifting incrementally away from Democrats and toward Republicans.
The third – and most important – caveat for assuming that Democrats are cooked from population trends is that much of the population growth this decade in red states has come from demographic groups more favorable to Democrats.
Many of the people leaving blue states to relocate to faster-growing red states lean Democratic, said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at North Carolina’s Catawba College.
“All the growth states are experiencing a diversifying demographic population, based on race, with a potential reverse Great Migration occurring where Northern Blacks move back to their ancestral Southern homes; age, with younger people moving for employment or education and older people moving for retirement; and educational levels, since movers tend to have a higher education attainment,” Bitzer said.
Racial and ethnic minorities, younger people, and more highly educated people are disproportionately Democratic.
“It is all but certain that in most of the country’s increases in population will be driven largely by growth in communities of color,” the Brennan Center concluded in its analysis of the Census data.
This pattern has already occurred in Arizona and Georgia – two historically red states that flipped blue for Biden in 2020. While those states are hardly solidly blue yet, they are competitive between the parties to a degree they never had been before.
“Biden's wins in Arizona and Georgia, if cemented over the longer term, would be sufficient to compensate for the reapportionment losses," said Thomas Schaller, a University of Maryland-Baltimore County political scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book, “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy .. https://www.amazon.com/White-Rural-Rage-American-Democracy/dp/0593729145 .”
Schaller added that states’ political leanings have often changed over time.
“For a long time, the growth of the Far West toward Democrats generally offset the growth in the former Confederate states toward Republicans, but California's plateaued population in recent years has stalled that effect,” Schaller said. "Democrats are, however, doing far better in the four non-Utah southwestern states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada than they did a generation ago, not only in presidential races, but in U.S. Senate and gubernatorial contests as well."
The two states Democrats are eyeing most urgently to become the new Arizona and Georgia are North Carolina and Texas.
“This requires resources and infrastructure to build a grass-roots operation and a strategy that focuses on turnout dynamics,” Bitzer said.
In particular, predictions of “Blexas” – a blue Texas – have taken longer to materialize than most Democrats had hoped.
“Texas has the most rural voters in the United States, and those rural votes are not swinging toward the Democratic Party anytime soon,” said Cooper of Western Carolina University.
But if a blue Texas were somehow to emerge, it would be a true game changer for the Electoral College, likely canceling out all of the other pro-Republican shifts from the population projections, and then some.
“A blue Texas would effectively drive a stake through the heart of the Republican Party’s hopes of winning the presidency, absent a dismal Democratic candidate,” said Jones, the Rice University political scientist. “It is difficult to imagine a Republican being elected president in 2032 without Texas’s 44 electors.”
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
