Pacific Northwest unlikely to gain U.S. House seats in 2020 reapportionment, data indicates

Short­ly before Christ­mas, the Unit­ed States Cen­sus Bureau released its 2014 State and Nation­al Pop­u­la­tion Esti­mates. Strik­ing­ly, the data released by the Cen­sus Bureau shows that the Unit­ed States’ pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing at slow­est rate since 1937. There is a par­al­lel: Then, as now, we were wit­ness­ing a com­bi­na­tion of recov­ery from a weak econ­o­my and a strict immi­gra­tion policy.

The aver­age year-to-year pop­u­la­tion growth has steadi­ly declined since 1990, which was the peak of the Echo Boom, mean­ing the increase in the fer­til­i­ty rate in the 1980s and 1990s as Baby Boomers reached their prime years for childbirth.

From 1990–2000, the aver­age year-to-year pop­u­la­tion growth was 1.30%, but only 0.924% from 2000 to 2010. That being said, Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion growth has reached a nadir not seen since the Great Depres­sion, with a year-to-year pop­u­la­tion growth of only 0.746% from 2013 to 2014.

Region­al­ly, as has been the case for decades, pop­u­la­tion growth in the West and South great­ly out­paced that observed in both the Mid­west and North­east in the past year (1.09% and 1.05% vs. 0.26% and 0.22%, respectively).

At the state lev­el, North Dako­ta out­paced the oth­er forty-nine states with 2.16% pop­u­la­tion growth in the past year, while six states — West Vir­ginia, Illi­nois, Con­necti­cut, Alas­ka, New Mex­i­co and Ver­mont — suf­fered pop­u­la­tion loss­es greater than in any year since 1991.

Among larg­er states (defined as those with pop­u­la­tions greater than eight mil­lion) only Texas, Flori­da and Geor­gia wit­nessed pop­u­la­tion growth greater than 1.0% in the past year, while Ohio, Michi­gan, Illi­nois and Penn­syl­va­nia had less than 0.2%.

While cen­sus reports give a great deal of soci­etal infor­ma­tion (age, ances­try, fam­i­ly size, com­mut­ing, com­put­er and inter­net use, edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment, health insur­ance, hous­ing, immi­gra­tion, income, lan­guage use, pover­ty, race, and so on), they also offer clues as to what may hap­pen in the next round of redistricting.

The size of the Unit­ed State House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has been fixed for more than a cen­tu­ry at four hun­dred and thir­ty-five vot­ing mem­bers.

As a result, when seats are reap­por­tioned after a cen­sus, some states lose seats, while oth­ers gain them. This not only affects the rel­a­tive leg­isla­tive strength a par­tic­u­lar state has, but it also changes the make­up of the Elec­toral College.

The Elec­toral Col­lege is set at five hun­dred and thir­ty-eight elec­tors, based on there being four hun­dred and thir­ty-five U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and one hun­dred U.S. Sen­a­tors, as well as three elec­tors from the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. Con­se­quent­ly, it redounds to a zero-sum par­ti­san game as the addi­tion of a con­gres­sion­al seat to a blue state is a blow to Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial prospects and vice versa.

In the Pacif­ic North­west, pre­ced­ing the 2010 cen­sus, there were mul­ti­ple reports that Ore­gon and/or Wash­ing­ton appeared poised to gain an addi­tion­al seat.

Back in 2008, Kim­ball Bruce, pres­i­dent of Elec­tion Data Ser­vices, indi­cat­ed that Ore­gon was in a good posi­tion to gain a 6th Con­gres­sion­al seat.

“Ear­li­er in the decade, we did­n’t see Ore­gon gain­ing a seat, but Ore­gon is now show­ing a strong poten­tial,” he said at the time.

As it turned out, it was Wash­ing­ton that gained an addi­tion­al seat, not Ore­gon. After com­ing so close in 2010, we might be tempt­ed to think that Ore­gon would be in line for a new seat in 2020, but the data casts doubt upon that prospect.

It could be said that con­gres­sion­al appor­tion­ment is anal­o­gous to the selec­tion and seed­ing of teams for the NCAA men’s bas­ket­ball tournament.

While there is some sub­jec­tiv­i­ty in the selec­tion process for the NCAA tour­na­ment and none with con­gres­sion­al appor­tion­ment, both process­es both use a numer­ic val­ue in rank­ing and decid­ing which are in and which are out.

The con­gres­sion­al appor­tion­ment process uses what’s called “pri­or­i­ty val­ue” and the NCAA uses some­thing called the RPI (Rat­ing Per­cent­age Index) for seed­ing tour­na­ments. It should be not­ed that many posi­tions are auto­mat­ic: Each state has at least one U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, where­as the NCAA allo­cates one bid for each team that wins its con­fer­ence tournament.

There­fore, as with the NCAA tour­na­ment, we can con­sid­er those Con­gres­sion­al seats near the break point to be “on the bubble.”

That being the case, we can do a bit of brack­e­tol­ogy, where we make pro­jec­tions on what con­gres­sion­al seats will be in or out fol­low­ing the next cen­sus in 2020.

As back­ground, the afore­men­tioned “pri­or­i­ty val­ue” is cal­cu­lat­ed using the Huntington–Hill method, also known as the Method of Equal Pro­por­tions, due to it result­ing in a min­i­miza­tion of the per­cent­age dif­fer­ences in the pop­u­la­tions of the dif­fer­ent con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts. The cal­cu­la­tion is actu­al­ly very sim­ple, as it is the geo­met­ric mean of a state gain­ing its n^th seat and not gain­ing that seat or (n‑1). This equates to , where D is the “divi­sor.”

Then we divide a state’s pop­u­la­tion by the divi­sor for gain­ing that seat num­ber, n, and the result equates to its “pri­or­i­ty value.”

Thus, for Cal­i­for­nia, whose 2014 pop­u­la­tion esti­mate is 38,802,500, obtain­ing a sec­ond Con­gres­sion­al seat has a pri­or­i­ty val­ue of 2.74 x 10⁷, which is equal to or . For Cal­i­for­nia to add a third Con­gres­sion­al seat, the pri­or­i­ty val­ue is 1.58 x 10⁷, or . But for Texas to obtain a sec­ond seat the pri­or­i­ty val­ue is 1.91 x 10⁷ or .

There­fore, Cal­i­for­ni­a’s 2nd Con­gres­sion­al seat has the high­est pri­or­i­ty val­ue, next Texas’ 2^nd Con­gres­sion­al seat, then Cal­i­for­ni­a’s 3^rd Con­gres­sion­al seat.

It is note­wor­thy that we begin by cal­cu­lat­ing the pri­or­i­ty val­ue for a state gain­ing a sec­ond con­gres­sion­al seat, since the Con­sti­tu­tion, in Arti­cle 1, Sec­tion 2, Clause 3, dic­tates that “each State shall have at least one Representative.”

Thus, once we account for there being at least one rep­re­sen­ta­tive from each state, there are three hun­dred and eighty-five con­gres­sion­al seats left to be divvied up among the states using the Hunt­ing­ton-Hill method with the high­est three hun­dred and eighty-five pri­or­i­ty val­ues for indi­vid­ual con­gres­sion­al seats being grant­ed and those with low­er pri­or­i­ty val­ues not.

Below is a chart, fol­low­ing the 2010 Cen­sus, of the con­gres­sion­al seats with pri­or­i­ty val­ues ranked from 371 to 400, i.e. the final fif­teen con­gres­sion­al seats grant­ed and those 15 Con­gres­sion­al seats that fell just short.

As is obvi­ous, the final con­gres­sion­al seats award­ed were (in order): Cal­i­for­ni­a’s 53^rd, Flori­da’s 27^th, Wash­ing­ton’s 10^th, Min­neso­ta’s 8^th and Texas’ 36^th, while those falling just short were North Car­oli­na’s 14^th, Mis­souri’s 8^th, New York’s 28^th, New Jer­sey’s 13^th, and Mon­tana’s 2^nd.

Ore­gon’s 6^th Con­gres­sion­al seat was ranked 393 fol­low­ing the 2010 cen­sus, eight places short of being awarded.

It is worth men­tion­ing that fol­low­ing the 2014 Cen­sus Pop­u­la­tion Esti­mates, if the Con­gres­sion­al reap­por­tion­ment were to take place at the cur­rent moment, only two seats would be lost — Min­neso­ta’s 8^th and Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s 18^th Con­gres­sion­al seats — and only two seats would be gained — North Car­oli­na and Texas gain­ing a 14^th and 37^th Con­gres­sion­al seats, respectively.

But if we were to wit­ness the same state-by-state growth from 2014 to 2020 that we observed from 2010 to 2014 — admit­ted­ly a mas­sive assump­tion — the below table shows the pro­ject­ed “bub­ble” con­gres­sion­al seats.

As we can see, the trend of west­ern and south­ern con­gres­sion­al seats ris­ing in the rank­ings, while con­gres­sion­al seats in the North­east and Mid­west fall.

The only state that is pro­ject­ed to gain or lose mul­ti­ple seats is Texas, which picks up three. Oth­er states gain­ing seats are Cal­i­for­nia, Col­orado, Flori­da, North Car­oli­na, and Vir­ginia. The states pro­ject­ed to lose one Con­gres­sion­al seat are Alaba­ma, Illi­nois, Michi­gan, Min­neso­ta, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

Nation­al­ly, it’s worth not­ing that states where Pres­i­dent Oba­ma won in 2012 would lose four elec­tors in the Elec­toral College.

While the Pres­i­dent won the Elec­toral Col­lege by an over­whelm­ing 332 to 206 mar­gin in 2012, we need only look back to the con­test­ed Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 2000 to see where a few Con­gres­sion­al seats can make a difference.

If, say, in 2000 Cal­i­for­nia had four more Con­gres­sion­al seats and Texas had four few­er, Al Gore would have won the Pres­i­den­cy, even with the Supreme Court rul­ing that Bush won Flori­da. There­fore, a net gain of eight elec­tors in the Elec­toral Col­lege by red states could be significant.

As I men­tioned ear­li­er, Ore­gon does not appear to be in line for a sixth con­gres­sion­al seat. This is due to a very mod­est growth in the state from 2010 to 2013 of 2.58%, which is only slight­ly greater than the nation­al pop­u­la­tion growth over that peri­od of 2.39%.

On the oth­er hand, Ore­gon had a far bet­ter 2014 with a year-over-year growth rate of 1.07%, while nation­al­ly the pop­u­la­tion grew by 0.746%.

Ore­gon’s hypo­thet­i­cal sixth seat is there­fore pro­ject­ed to move up the pri­or­i­ty val­ue rank­ing six places from three hun­dred and nine­ty-three to three hun­dred and eighty-sev­en — two short of it being award­ed. If state pop­u­la­tion growth stays steady (again, a major assump­tion) Ore­gon would need to grow by 14,612 more than the pro­ject­ed 332,890 pop­u­la­tion gain to be giv­en an addi­tion­al seat.

As for Wash­ing­ton, we’ve wit­nessed sol­id growth of 4.74% over the past four years mak­ing it the eighth fastest grow­ing state over that time-span. That being said, Wash­ing­ton is a long way from gain­ing an eleventh con­gres­sion­al seat with it being pro­ject­ed to be ranked 414 in pri­or­i­ty val­ue in 2020.

Region­al­ly, the only West­ern states pro­ject­ed to gain a Con­gres­sion­al seat are Col­orado and Cal­i­for­nia, while Ore­gon, Ari­zona, and Mon­tana are three of the four states pro­ject­ed to near­est to gain­ing an addi­tion­al seat.

Sub­se­quent cen­sus pop­u­la­tion esti­mates will give greater clar­i­ty as to what the post-2020 Con­gres­sion­al appoint­ment shall be, but cur­rent­ly both the North­west and the West­ern U.S. are not fore­cast as gain­ing much pow­er in Congress.