The Democrats’ Electoral College Squeeze
6 min read
As California goes, so goes the nation, but what happens when a lot of Californians move to Texas? After the 2030 Census, the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley will likely be forced to reckon with its stagnating population and receding influence. When congressional seats are reallocated to adjust for population changes, California is almost certain to be the biggest loser—and to be seen as the embodiment of the Democratic Party’s failures in state and local governance.
The liberal Brennan Center is projecting a loss of four seats, and the conservative American Redistricting Project, a loss of five. Either scenario could affect future presidential races, because a state’s Electoral College votes are determined by how many senators and representatives it has. In 2016, after her loss to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton argued that she’d “won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward”—an outlook that she contrasted with Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan. But now Democrats’ self-conception as a party that represents the future is running headlong into the reality that the fastest-growing states are Republican-led.
According to the American Redistricting Project, New York will lose three seats and Illinois will lose two, while Republican-dominated Texas and Florida will gain four additional representatives each if current trends continue. Other growing states that Trump carried in this month’s election could potentially receive an additional representative. By either projection, if the 2032 Democratic nominee carries the same states that Kamala Harris won this year, the party would receive 12 fewer electoral votes. Among the seven swing states that the party lost this year, Harris came closest to winning in the former “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—at least two of which are likely to lose an electoral vote after 2030. Even adding those states to the ones Harris won would not be enough to secure victory in 2032. The Democrat would need to find an additional 14 votes somewhere else on the map.
Population growth and decline do not simply happen to states; they are the result of policy choices and economic conditions relative to other states. Some states lose residents because their economy hasn’t kept up with the rest of the country’s. But in much of blue America, including California and New York, economic dynamism and high wages aren’t enough to sustain population growth, because the skyrocketing cost of shelter eclipses everything else. The amenities that these states offer—the California coastline, the New York City cultural scene—start to look like the historic molding on a house with its roof caved in. Policy failures are dragging down the Democrats’ prospects in two ways: by showing the results of Democratic governance in sharp, unflattering relief, and by directly reducing the party’s prospects in presidential elections and the House of Representatives.
California, New York, and other slow-growing coastal Democratic strongholds have taken an explicitly anti-population-growth tack for decades. They took for granted their natural advantages and assumed that prosperity was a given. People willingly giving up their residencies in these coastal areas is a sign of how dismal the cost of living is.
While the media are likely to pick up on anecdotes about wealthy people complaining about tax levels and political norms in liberal states, data show that population loss is heavily concentrated among lower-income people and people without a college degree. In an analysis of census data, the Public Policy Institute of California found that more than 600,000 people who have left the Golden State in the past decade have cited the housing crisis as the primary reason.
When people vote with their feet, they’re sending a clear signal about which places make them optimistic about the future. What does it say about liberal governance that Democratic states cannot compete with Florida and Texas?
Remarkably, none of this happened by accident. A hostility toward population growth and people in general has suffused the politics of Democratic local governance. The researcher Greg Morrow meticulously documented the political effort in Los Angeles to stop people from moving to the city over the back half of the 20th century. In the early 1970s, the UCLA professor Fred Abraham pushed for growth limits, arguing, “We need fewer people here—a quality of life, not a quantity of life. We must request a moratorium on growth and recognize that growth should be stopped.” Morrow also points to comments from the Sierra Club, which recommended “limiting residential housing … to lower birth rates.” Such arguments preceded a now infamous downzoning in the ’70s and ’80s, which substantially reduced the number of homes that could be legally built, slashed the potential population capacity of Los Angeles from an estimated 10 million people to 4 million, and spurred one of the nation’s most acute housing and homelessness crises. Self-styled progressives and liberals in blue communities across the country have taken similar approaches, all but directing would-be newcomers to places like Texas and Florida.
Contrast this attitude with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s boast, in a press release during his unsuccessful presidential-primary campaign, that “people are flocking to Florida and fleeing California.” DeSantis has pursued pro-growth housing policies that allow working-class people to afford housing in his state.
For a long time, failures of local governance have remained divorced from the national political conversation. What can President Joe Biden have to do with the decision of Marin or Westchester County to refuse new housing supply? But national Democrats cannot overlook the issue any longer. As researchers from the Economic Innovation Group recently noted, the biggest declines in Democrats’ vote share from 2020 to 2024 occurred in the most expensive and most populous counties.
In the days since Harris’s defeat, Democrats have defended Biden’s tenure by arguing that inflation was beyond the president’s control, or pointing to other economic accomplishments. But no Republican stopped San Francisco from building housing, and Trump is not responsible for New York City’s byzantine housing-permitting regime. (In fact, as I write this, New York is on the verge of watering down a proposal that would ease the construction of apartment buildings and smaller homes. In the course of my work, I hear many policy makers and residents in blue communities lament their intractable housing crises, seemingly unaware that many places have solved a supposedly insurmountable problem. The only difference is those places are in states run by Republicans.
It is not too late to reverse California’s stagnation—or that of New York and other expensive states. The cost of housing is quite literally a signal for how many millions of people would love to live in those places. Yet, in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, as several Democratic governors have telegraphed their intent to act as bastions of resistance in the coming years, none has focused on the issue that has most hollowed out the promise of liberal America. Nowhere in these headline-seeking pronouncements is a plan to address the housing and cost-of-living crisis or even a reckoning with the failures that produced the status quo. In part this is due to Democrats’ failure to understand the link between their anti-growth policies at the state and local level and the national viability of their party. For years, Democrats have gotten to represent the growing, vibrant parts of this country and have become complacent, presuming economic dominance even in the absence of good policy. But last week’s results should not have shocked state and local Democratic policy makers—people have been voting with their feet for years.
