Dallas Morning News: Torrid growth in Texas yields two US House seats, but that’s below the 3 seats expected; GOP will control the spoils
WASHINGTON – Texas gained a modest two congressional seats in the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau announced Monday, making it the big winner among states but dashing expectations that torrid growth in the last decade would yield at least three more seats.
Florida likewise received a smaller bounty than projected – one seat, rather than two – and like Texas, it has a significant Hispanic population, immediately fueling suspicion that the Trump administration's policies toward immigrants may have driven an undercount.
Five states each picked up one seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon.
Seven others lost one seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Census officials defended the accuracy of the head count, and said it was the smallest shift in House seats since the 1940 census.
The line between winners and losers was razor thin.
New York, which lost a seat, could have avoided that indignity and loss of congressional clout if just 89 more people had been counted. Minnesota ended up with that seat.
The U.S. population now stands at 331,449,281, up 7.4% from a decade ago, said Ron Jarmin, acting director of the Census Bureau.
Utah led the country with 18.4% growth. Idaho and Texas came next.
The 2020 census reflected a decades-long shift of population toward the South and West. In the South, Republicans control legislatures and the scramble to redraw district boundaries for the next decade.
That bounty could help the GOP regain and then cement control starting in the 2022 midterm elections.
"It will be a fairly hefty impact," said redistricting expert Kimball Brace, president of the nonpartisan Election Data Services.
Most projections leading up to the official apportionment showed Texas adding three seats in the U.S. House, though that hinged on whether the count would include immigrants in the country unlawfully.
Hours after taking office, President Joe Biden scrapped Donald Trump's policy of excluding those migrants, effectively handing Texas a bonus seat for Gov. Greg Abbott and GOP allies who control the Legislature to fill, once tract-level data is released in late summer and the mapmakers can get to work.
With 36 seats for the past decade, Texas already has a bigger delegation than any state but California, which has 53.
The U.S. population now stands at 331,449,281, up 7.4% from a decade ago, said Ron Jarmin, acting director of the Census Bureau.
The Pew Research Center Pew projected last July that Texas would gain three seats if unauthorized migrants were included, or two if they were not. Pew pegged the number of unauthorized immigrants in Texas at 1.7 million — 1 in every 20 residents.
When Biden ordered all migrants included in the count, Lloyd Potter, Texas' state demographer, said that under Trump's policy, Texas "definitely wouldn't have gotten three. Maybe as few as one."
It's not just the raw number of seats Texas stands to gain under Biden's policy. It's where.
The Dallas area has never sent a Latino to Congress, and with Latino population growth fueling the overall surge in Texas, Democrats will demand an end to that drought.
The most dramatic population growth has been in suburban counties — Collin, north of Dallas; Williamson, outside Austin; and Fort Bend and Montgomery, outside Houston. But that's no guarantee the new seats would go there.
"I assured the president that the census was complete and accurate," said Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo at the outset of the announcement ceremony, conducted online – reflecting the many challenges facing census takers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Winners and losers
Texas was the big winner by far after 2010, gaining a whopping four seats as Florida picked up two, and a half-dozen others each added one (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington).
All of those winners held onto their gains Monday. Texas and Florida were the only states that picked up seats in both the 2010 and 2020 apportionments.
Ohio and New York each lost two seats a decade ago, and another on Monday. Eight other states each lost one seat a decade ago – nearly all in the Rust Belt and Northeast.
"It's the pattern that we have seen nationwide since World War II," said Brace. "It's the pattern of populations heading South and heading West," chasing jobs and opportunity. "That's partly because of the invention called air conditioning."
After the first 50 seats are assigned, one per state, the rest are distributed based on population using the "Method of Equal Proportions" to rank and assign seats based on state populations.
Inevitably, some just make the cut, others just miss.
Rhode Island was the big winner after the 2010 census, gaining a second seat by just 8,000 people. That gave each resident of the tiny state the most clout per capita of voters anywhere in the country, since each district had just 527,624 people.
Much to the surprise of demographers, Rhode Island clung to that second seat this round.
By contrast, Montana has had just one at-large seat for the past decade, with just under 1 million people. On the other hand, Montanans gets the same number of senators as California, with 37.3 million residents in 2010.
And going forward, Montana will have two seats, shooting those voters to the top of the clout per capita list.
Map season begins
Apportionment is the start of redistricting.
Once states know how many seats they'll control, legislatures can get to work – though they'll need granular, census tract-level data, and that won't be available until late summer.
Computer-aided mapmaking has become ever more sophisticated in the last few decades, allowing political operatives to carefully carve up neighborhoods to achieve the desired effect.
So whoever controls the mouse controls the elections.
In Texas, that's Republicans, who kept their state House and Senate majorities last fall, to the deep disappointment of Democrats who thought they'd finally be able to end decades in the wilderness.
Republicans collected 52% of votes statewide in November. Thanks largely to the way they drew district boundaries a decade ago, though, they hold 23 of the 36 seats.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat whose district snakes from North Austin to San Antonio, welcomed the additional seats and "growing Texas voice in Washington," but warned Republicans not to engage again in "extreme gerrymandering."
"With these two additions, there is no valid reason for Texas Republicans to engage again in extreme partisan gerrymandering that distorts the true diversity of our state and divides communities of interest," he said.
Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, noted that 90% of the state's growth ahead of the 2010 census came from non-Anglos.
"The last round of redistricting maps drawn by Texas Republicans not only ignored the growth of these communities, they were also found to be intentionally discriminatory by the courts," he noted. "Texas must not repeat this travesty again."
Pandemic-related delays have pushed the timetable for redistricting. Texas, with its early filing deadline and primary, will face a scramble
The Census Bureau won't provide tract-level data needed to draw new maps for congressional and legislative seats until mid-August.
So lawmakers in Austin and other state capitals will have to wait.
"In a normal redistricting year, Texas would have its maps done by May or June," plenty of time for litigation before the candidate filing season opens in mid-December ahead of the March 2022 primaries, said Michael Li, a redistricting and election law expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, and a former attorney at Dallas' Baker Botts.
The delay will make it much more challenging to fight maps in court.
"And that's worrying. Because, again, litigation's oftentimes the key to fair maps," Li told reporters last week ahead of the Census release.
Todd J. Gillman. Todd became Washington Bureau Chief in 2009 and has covered East Texas, Dallas City Hall and politics since joining The News in 1989. He's been elected three times to the White House Correspondents' Association board, with a term ending in 2023. Todd has a Master in Public Policy from Harvard and a BA from Johns Hopkins in international studies.