The greater Pacific Northwest could gain two congressional seats from 2021 redistricting

The greater Pacif­ic North­west (Wash­ing­ton, Ore­gon, Ida­ho, Mon­tana, Alas­ka) appears poised to gain two seats in the Unit­ed States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives fol­low­ing redis­trict­ing in 2021, accord­ing to a new analy­sis pub­lished yes­ter­day by Elec­tion Data Ser­vices, which fol­lowed this report from the Unit­ed States Cen­sus.

EDS assess­es that Ore­gon and Mon­tana will each gain one seat in the House, while Wash­ing­ton, Ida­ho, and Alas­ka will con­tin­ue to have the same num­ber of seats they have today (ten, two, and the bare min­i­mum of one, respectively.)

If the fore­cast is cor­rect, Ore­gon would gain a sixth seat, while Mon­tana would regain the sec­ond seat that it lost fol­low­ing the 1990 cen­sus and redistricting.

“Using any method­ol­o­gy, the pop­u­la­tion pro­jec­tions points toward a ten (10) seat change over sev­en­teen states across the nation by year 2020,” the firm wrote.

“States that will gain sin­gle seats include Ari­zona, Col­orado, Mon­tana, North Car­oli­na, and Ore­gon, while Flori­da is set to gain two con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts and Texas would gain three seats,” the report projects.

“Sin­gle seat loss­es will again occur in the Mid­west and North­east sec­tions of the nation, where Alaba­ma, Cal­i­for­nia, Illi­nois, Michi­gan, Min­neso­ta, New York, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Rhode Island, and West Vir­ginia would each lose a seat. All oth­er states would keep the same num­ber of rep­re­sen­ta­tives they were award­ed in Decem­ber 2010 when the offi­cial 2010 Cen­sus num­bers were released.”

Here’s the same infor­ma­tion in table form:

The south­west and west­ern regions of the coun­try look like the prospec­tive big win­ners from 2021 redis­trict­ing, at the expense of the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states. Although Cal­i­for­nia is fore­cast to lose a seat, Elec­tion Data Ser­vices says it will stay in the west and go to Montana.

The firm notes that Cal­i­for­nia has nev­er lost a seat from redis­trict­ing since state­hood, so this would be a his­toric change.

Cur­rent­ly, the Pacif­ic North­west has nine­teen seats in Con­gress and twen­ty-nine elec­toral votes. Our region would have a total of twen­ty-one seats in Con­gress begin­ning in Jan­u­ary 2023 and thir­ty-one votes in the Elec­toral Col­lege begin­ning in 2024 if this analy­sis by Elec­tion Data Ser­vices is correct.

The addi­tion of a new dis­trict would sig­nif­i­cant­ly change both Ore­gon and Mon­tana’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress. Ore­gon cur­rent­ly has four dis­tricts locat­ed on the west­ern side of the Cas­cades and one on the east­ern side.

In Ore­gon, redis­trict­ing is han­dled by the Leg­is­la­ture, which retains map-draw­ing pow­ers, while in Mon­tana, it is han­dled by a bipar­ti­san commission.

If Ore­gon gets a sixth dis­trict, there will like­ly be more than one dis­trict span­ning sig­nif­i­cant por­tions of the state’s east­ern regions.

The pos­si­ble result in Ore­gon is two safe Demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­tricts, three dis­tricts that lean Demo­c­ra­t­ic to vary­ing degrees, and one safe Repub­li­can district.

Mean­while, Mon­tana would be split into two for the pur­pos­es of its rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the House, just like Ida­ho is now. Both dis­tricts would like­ly be friend­ly ter­ri­to­ry for Repub­li­cans, but not impos­si­ble for a Demo­c­rat to win.

The results of last year’s midterms demon­strate that a Demo­c­rat can still win a fed­er­al race in the Big Sky State. Mon­tanans opt­ed last year to return Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bent Jon Tester to the Unit­ed States Sen­ate against the wish­es of Don­ald Trump, deal­ing him and Mitch McConnell a major loss.

EDS’ full report is avail­able below if you’d like to read more.