Census Population Estimates 2020-29

[Skill and Chance]

US Births fall 4% in 2020 Down 142,00

Fell across every state, demo and age group.  Really can't blame it on the pandemic as only some December births could have been impacted.  When combined with a 530,000 increase in deaths, natural growth fell to 220,000 from 890,000 in 2019 and 1.5 million in 2010

In 2018, four states had more deaths than births WV, VT, NH and ME.  The map for 2020 looks like this

Blue=more deaths than births

Births

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr012-508.pdf

Deaths

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

Wow, from 4 states to that map in 2 years is depressing.

[Skill and Chance]

Why is East TN so different to the rest of Appalachia ?

Retirees mostly, also Knoxville gets some college+ yuppie influx. 

[Skill and Chance]

Based on the April 2020 to July 2021 change, Houston will pass Chicago in about 15 years (2036).

It will be interesting to see how the impacts of climate change, which are already hurting Houston more than Chicago, affect this trend. Chicago is coming in for some deadly heat but not the kind of flooding Houston's going to see more and more of.

Houston growth still meaningfully depends on oil prices.  This was one of the worst time periods on record for oil prices and they are now much higher.  If current prices are sustained for multiple years, expect very rapid late 2000's style growth in Houston again and it could catch Chicago a lot sooner.

[Skill and Chance]

The year 2021 began with birth counts hitting record lows. January 2021 saw the United States' population contract by 96,000 people due to deaths outnumbering births, a record that still stands to this day. This is due to the month not only being the largest peak in COVID-19 deaths the United States saw, but also because it was nine months after March 2020, which was when COVID-19 and the panic surrounding it emerged and lockdowns were beginning to be put into place. To top it off, January is already typically the month with the lowest natural increase of any month due to seasonal birth / death patterns.

However, after the Spring of 2020, excess alarm over COVID-19 had largely subsided. This caused births over 2021 to recover in relation to their positions the previous year, and the latter half of 2021 more than made up for the loss seen in the year's first few months. The current preliminary count of total births in the United States stands at 3,654,930 for the year 2021, an increase of over 40,000 compared to the final 2020 number (3,611,086).

In fact, the Total Fertility Rate of the country in 2021 is likely to be placed at 1.65 to 1.66, much higher than predictions made mid-year. Whether the uptick is the beginning of a sustained trend upward or just a correction for the birth drop remains to be seen, but an uptick did happen.

Natural Increase in the calendar year 2021, though, remained lower than it was in 2020 (+229K in 2020 vs. +196K in 2021), because even though most of the year saw more births, death counts remained at an elevated state throughout 2021, with the beginning of the year peak, and then Delta and Omicron. However, nearly all the of the deficit between the two years comes in the first few months of 2021, and the COVID-19 waves coming later in the year have been less severe than those seen previously. Because of this, we can easily say that the Fiscal Year 2022 (with its population estimates) are almost certainly going to look better than they did in 2021 in regards to natural population growth.

Here are two graphs showing how natural growth and decline happened this last year:

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Of course, though, these changes did not occur evenly state-by-state. Some places fared better than others, as can be seen in these maps:

NATURAL INCREASE YEAR 2021

Each interval is 1 per thousand people, population figures coming from most recent Vintage Population estimates, green is positive and blue is negative.

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PERC. CHANGE IN BIRTHS 2020 - 21

Each interval is 1%, green is positive and blue is negative.

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Of course, I'll also continue the month-on-month maps I was making showing natural population growth and decline, as we've now received our Q4 2021 data. Here the maps are:

Each interval is 1 per thousand people (adjusted to annual numbers), population figures coming from most recent Vintage Population estimates, green is positive and blue is negative.

OCTOBER 2021 PRELIMINARY

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NOVEMBER 2021 PRELIMINARY

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DECEMBER 2021 PRELIMINARY

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Hmmm... is New England starting to have kids again?  Could be a blip, but interesting to follow.  Keep in mind Scandinavia now has some of the highest birthrates in Europe. 

[Skill and Chance]

The 2020 census was obviously out of whack because of COVID and I expect the Sunbelt will most likely get a big boost in 2030.  Could even something like TX+4/FL+3/AZ+2 be possible?   

[Skill and Chance]

https://twitter.com/mcpli/status/1605959620123447307


https://twitter.com/mcpli/status/1605959697911119877

2nd seat Delaware if trends continue

Wow!

Idaho has already gained enough for a 3rd seat?!

Also, that projection would be a net shift of 11 districts (roughly equivalent to the entire population of Virginia!) and 11 EV from clearly D leaning states to clearly R leaning states in 2031.  D’s were extremely lucky the census happened when it did.  At this point, I will be surprised if there isn’t a Dem EC/PV advantage in 2028.

[Skill and Chance]

Wow!

Idaho has already gained enough for a 3rd seat?!

There are few better places to live and raise a family than Ada County. It has very low rates of crime and poverty, friendly locals, a diverse, dynamic and recession-proof economy, a relatively low cost of living and plenty of opportunities for cultural activities and outdoor recreation.

In light of all this, its insane growth rate is not surprising.

And if you've ever been to Coeur d'Alene, it's real a contender for one of the most beautiful places in the US. Shame the far-right nutjobs kind of spoil it.

Hmmm... maybe Idaho is actually the Interior West state that's the best candidate for eventual WFH techie dominance?

[Skill and Chance]

Idaho with three districts will work so much better anyway.

The Coeur D'Alene district will probably still have to take in a bit of the Boise area unfortunately, at least under a distribution like current numbers.

Keep in mind that Idaho has an independent commission in the state constitution.  If the natural population #'s favor an all-Boise district, we can expect to get one.

[Skill and Chance]

In a few decades Idaho will have 4 or 5 seats and North Idaho will have enough population for a seat all to itself, without having to drop down into Boise. That's gonna give us some seriously fun primaries.

A 4-5 seat Idaho is probably at most a Lean R state given who's moving in.  That's interesting to think about. 

[Skill and Chance]

Why has Alabama been holding up decently these past few years, especially compared to MS, LA, and AR?

AL doesn't seem particularly desirable and doesn't have really have spawning industry in many of it's major cities outside of maybe Huntsville, which is a very small portion of the state.

Arkansas (which also has a very high population growth rate relative to the nation) and Alabama both are emerging into the new South the same way Tennessee did

Huntsville and Fayetteville are both engines of growth in the new states but Birmingham and Little Rock are also holding up well.


The only Southern states* left with domestic migration problems are Mississippi and Louisiana.

*Excluding the Mid-Atlantic region of Virginia, Maryland, and DC but they barely count

Glad for Arkansas cause a hypothetical 3 seat AR down the road would suck.

One can expect that if AR keeps 4 seats, the NW AR seat will keep shrinking more and more.

Rs might try to crack it eventually but which would suck. Rn it’s Trump + 23.2 which should be more than fine for this decade, but if the district keeps shredding the outermost rurals, it could narrow pretty rapidly.

Is a commission possible in AR? Ik there’s ballot initiative but it’s weaker than some other states.

A commission should be possible in Arkansas. But are enough people willing to sign a petition to get one to the ballot? The attempt back in 2020-2021 didn't really get enough support at that stage, so it never had a chance.

If Ds are smart, they'd prololy do it now since a redistricting commission wouldn't affect the topline composition of Congress and State Leg very much right now, but down the road it could if the 3rd becomes competative.

I don't disagree.

The legislature just changed the signature gathering requirements to dramatically increase the number of counties signatures must be collected in.  If the new law holds up in court, putting an amendment on the ballot will require a number of signatures equal to at least 5% of 2022 gubernatorial election voters in near unanimous Trump counties.

[Skill and Chance]

Idk if this is just me, but these estimates seem to have a pretty universal theme that D communities are shrinking or at least stalling in population relative to previous census, while R areas are doing better. I wonder if there's some sort of reason for this because these estimates aren't politically biased, but if there was truly this theme of folks fleeing "Democratic cities", surely it would've shown up in the 2020 census.

April 2020 was way too early to pick up most of it.  The expectation is that an April 2021 based census would look dramatically different.

[Skill and Chance]

Anyway, demographic patterns will be back to pre-Covid levels again.

Well, the real date at which growth patterns in the US shifted is 2015-2016.



Also, inasmuch as there's been a rise in fertility levels in the 2020s, it really doesn't seem to have similar patterns to the fall from the 2010s, right? The 2010s decline was concentrated in minority communities which had previously had especially high fertility (like Hispanics) and very religious communities experiencing secularization (like Mormons), whereas the 2020s rise has been described as a "work from home" boost and seems predominantly concentrated among wealthy people first and foremost. (This seems underscored by rises in the fraction of births which are to white mothers -- which hit a trough circa 2015 and have since risen -- and growth in the difference between conservative and liberal fertility.) Even if fertility rates do go back to their mid-2010s levels -- and to be clear there's very little evidence that they'll do so -- the actual people having children are very different ones.

Immigration patterns are really different today too -- a much greater fraction of immigrants are from East Asia or sub-Saharan Africa compared to Latin America.

Idk if this is just me, but these estimates seem to have a pretty universal theme that D communities are shrinking or at least stalling in population relative to previous census, while R areas are doing better. I wonder if there's some sort of reason for this because these estimates aren't politically biased, but if there was truly this theme of folks fleeing "Democratic cities", surely it would've shown up in the 2020 census.

Not if it was outweighed by early 2010s migration patterns (crime didn't hit a trough until 2013-2015, depending on the city -- for most of the Obama years, urban areas in America were still getting safer), and not if cities were generally overestimated on the 2020 Census. It's kind of underrated how much things have shifted over the past decade -- Oregon gaining a seat was fueled by bonkers first-half-of-2010s growth numbers, while their fortunes have shifted so much that it looks plausible they'll lose a seat in 2030. Florida's large COVID-associated gains aren't going to be reflected in the Census until 2030, either.

I'm not sure what to make of this part.  If the post-COVID lockdown fertility boost is driven by WFH (and I think there's strong evidence to believe it is at this point), yes, it's very disproportionately people with 6 figure family incomes who can WFH, but it also cuts out the most reliably conservative slice of them (plumbers, factory managers, pilots, surgeons, non-IT small business owners, etc.- none of these can realistically WFH).  There is also less WFH in the South than in other regions.  The profile of WFH jobs in 2022 after all COVID mandates were lifted was clearly left-leaning despite being wealthier than average (federal employees, software engineers, accountants, some lawyers, etc.), quite possibly as left-leaning as Hispanic people were in 2012.

However, pre-COVID WFH was clearly right-leaning and was often seen as a halfway point to being a stay-at-home parent, so it's always possible things shift back as COVID disappears into the rear-view mirror.  A lot of the core Northeast industries are starting to get antsy about bringing people back, and a lot of the companies that moved south or into the exurbs have gotten more flexible.  For the time being, though, I would clearly expect a WFH driven baby boom to disproportionately impact left-leaning households.

[Skill and Chance]

After the 2020 Census I take these estimates with a giant grain of salt.

The $1M question is was there a bigger problem with the 2020 census itself or the annual estimates?  Did the census undercount the South or do the estimates systematically overcount the South?  In other words, would we expect the deviation to be a one-time thing or is this a persistent result of the difference in methodology where something about the literal census process/funding favors the North in perpetuity?

There's a good argument that the marginal dollar spent on census outreach went further in 2020 due to the pandemic conditions, and Northern/Dem states were more likely to fund outreach.  However, there's also a good argument that Northern/Dem states accustomed to a larger social services budget will always be willing to spend relatively more on this than Southern/GOP states...

[Skill and Chance]

If this actually played out as Trende modeled with CA going full MI in the 2000's (and making the CO adjustment discussed upthread), the new map would dangerously close to "Dems must win TX or FL to win the presidency."  Needless to say, this would be a future where the South dictates terms to the rest of the country by midcentury.  For example, this would be a Republican EC win:



However, I'm dubious this will actually happen.  Between COVID, WFH, and mortgage rates, I suspect most of the people who were going to move between states this decade already moved, making a straight line projection unrealistic.

[Skill and Chance]

After the 2020 Census I take these estimates with a giant grain of salt.

The $1M question is was there a bigger problem with the 2020 census itself or the annual estimates?  Did the census undercount the South or do the estimates systematically overcount the South?  In other words, would we expect the deviation to be a one-time thing or is this a persistent result of the difference in methodology where something about the literal census process/funding favors the North in perpetuity?

There's a good argument that the marginal dollar spent on census outreach went further in 2020 due to the pandemic conditions, and Northern/Dem states were more likely to fund outreach.  However, there's also a good argument that Northern/Dem states accustomed to a larger social services budget will always be willing to spend relatively more on this than Southern/GOP states...

Also its odd that so many Republicans went out of their way to discredit the idea of counting undocumented immigrants, when that would only go to further help in states like Texas and Florida.

While it marginally helps Reps in the EC, it helps Dems tremendously in the US House.   Any additional districts gained from this would legally have to be drawn as Dem districts in most cases, and with a tiny VAP for a US House district.  

[Skill and Chance]

If this actually played out as Trende modeled with CA going full MI in the 2000's (and making the CO adjustment discussed upthread), the new map would dangerously close to "Dems must win TX or FL to win the presidency."  Needless to say, this would be a future where the South dictates terms to the rest of the country by midcentury.  For example, this would be a Republican EC win:



However, I'm dubious this will actually happen.  Between COVID, WFH, and mortgage rates, I suspect most of the people who were going to move between states this decade already moved, making a straight line projection unrealistic.

I have all 4 of CA/NY/TX/FL becoming swing states by 2040. If we look at current polling, CA and NY seem to be trending dramatically right, while TX and FL trend left.

Hmmm... IDK how CA gets to swing state status without Hispanic voters becoming part of the GOP base and voting 2:1 R.  That's actually not a crazy story to tell for the 2030's, but wouldn't it also imply TX and FL would be landslides for the GOP to the same degree CA/NY are Dem landslides today?  NY progressing to swing state status is a lot easier to see because the white Catholic/ex-Catholic post-1900 immigrant block is so large there and could reasonably be expected to follow the Hispanic trend. 

[Skill and Chance]

After the 2020 Census I take these estimates with a giant grain of salt.

The $1M question is was there a bigger problem with the 2020 census itself or the annual estimates?  Did the census undercount the South or do the estimates systematically overcount the South?  In other words, would we expect the deviation to be a one-time thing or is this a persistent result of the difference in methodology where something about the literal census process/funding favors the North in perpetuity?

There's a good argument that the marginal dollar spent on census outreach went further in 2020 due to the pandemic conditions, and Northern/Dem states were more likely to fund outreach.  However, there's also a good argument that Northern/Dem states accustomed to a larger social services budget will always be willing to spend relatively more on this than Southern/GOP states...

The Census's own estimates are that its 2020 numbers were inaccurate, with CO, MN, and RI all having obtained seats they were not entitled to, and FL and TX each being shorted at least one seat. The last seat is very close between FL being shorted two seats and TN needing to gain a seat. (TN gaining in 2020 would've been an out-of-nowhere event, since none of the ACS estimates had it actually gaining).

After the 2020 Census I take these estimates with a giant grain of salt.

The $1M question is was there a bigger problem with the 2020 census itself or the annual estimates?  Did the census undercount the South or do the estimates systematically overcount the South?  In other words, would we expect the deviation to be a one-time thing or is this a persistent result of the difference in methodology where something about the literal census process/funding favors the North in perpetuity?

There's a good argument that the marginal dollar spent on census outreach went further in 2020 due to the pandemic conditions, and Northern/Dem states were more likely to fund outreach.  However, there's also a good argument that Northern/Dem states accustomed to a larger social services budget will always be willing to spend relatively more on this than Southern/GOP states...

Also its odd that so many Republicans went out of their way to discredit the idea of counting undocumented immigrants, when that would only go to further help in states like Texas and Florida.

While it marginally helps Reps in the EC, it helps Dems tremendously in the US House.   Any additional districts gained from this would legally have to be drawn as Dem districts in most cases, and with a tiny VAP for a US House district. 

This seems non-obvious to me, since the areas that are likely undercounted are quite red (fast-bluing, but quite red) suburbs, and Allen set a pretty high standard for when minority districts are required to be drawn. Also, if we're discussing the 2030s, then it should be noted that a Republican victory in 2028 (and possibly one with a strong enough trifecta happening in 2024) would push for a Census citizenship question, which would itself enable red states to pursue CVAP redistricting (as in the Evenwel case). Such would constitute a large internal reapportionment in TX and FL (...also CA and NY, I guess, but I doubt this would ever be implemented federally) from urban areas to rural areas.

Also, on your map the easiest additional large state for Biden to carry is GA, right? If FL and TX remain red then GA starts to have enormous importance for the Democratic party.

Yes, however the assumption of Dems sweeping PA/MI/WI is also generous.