What Will Happen after the 2030 Census?
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I’ve discussed this before, but the shift in the 2030 census will mean that Democrats can win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania and still lose the Electoral College. We will now have to win all of these states, plus some combo of Nevada/Arizona/North Carolina/Georgia in order to have even a narrow presidential win. It’s not great. Kate Riga had a piece on this the other day at TPM that is worth reading: The main idea is that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t as awesome for Republicans as is commonly reported.
“The people who are adding to Texas’ population growth and to Florida’s and to North Carolina’s are very diverse, a lot of people of color,” Brennan’s Li said. “That could change the politics of the states. We’ve seen that a little bit already in Georgia and North Carolina — they’re on the board now for Democrats.”
Li pointed to the Dallas suburbs as some of the fastest growing Black communities in the country.
Still, while the politics of the region are already changing, Republicans have the far superior track record in winning those states. To avoid the catastrophe trumpeted by many other news outlets, Democrats will have to craft an electoral strategy — perhaps aided by the states’ evolving political composition — that involves picking off some southern states to remain competitive.
The next five years are as unpredictable a stretch of American history as we’ve ever seen: “There were weird things at the beginning of the decade, and there could be weird things at the end,” Li said.
But one thing is certain, he added: “The party that wins the south wins the future.”
If that’s the case that things might not be so bad….I think they are likely to be pretty bad. Yes, the growth of Black communities in Atlanta and Dallas and Charlotte may eventually make a difference. But then we’ve been saying this for a long time now and outside of Georgia in 2020, we haven’t seen any payoff here, especially as lots of other people move to places such as Texas precisely because it is so far to the right. Then you have the cheating that Republicans will engage in.
The only answer is going to be figuring out how to expand the base, but there seems to be some resistance to these ideas, with a pretty strong lack of self-reflection among Democrats; despite endless articles about this issue, it’s all “whatever I thought in 2024 is absolutely correct” no matter whether it comes from the center or from the cultural liberals or whatever passes for the left in this nation. So we will see. If Trump throws the economy far enough into the gutter, that could happen, though I do have to say that I figured by now the economy would be a lot worse than it is. I do still expect it to get worse, but every economic report seems less bad than I figured it would be. So who knows.
In any case, we gotta figure out how to attract a lot of voters who do not vote for Democrats now and in states in the South. What are your suggestions?