With the midterms only about two weeks away, all focus is on the Election Day 2026 races. The Democrats appear as if they will flip the House of Representatives and are increasingly looking as if they are poised to flip the Senate as well. The Senate races in particular are getting an enormous amount of attention.
However, the gubernatorial races in key states are getting much less focus, and in these last two weeks there needs to be an extra push in those races to help prepare for 2032. What do the current elections for governor have to do with presidential politics in 2032? Potentially a lot, and here is why.
There will be a new United States population census in 2030. This obviously will not affect the next presidential cycle two years from now, but it will very much affect the makeup of the Electoral College vote six years from now. That is because current red states are expected to pick up several House seats and current blue states are projected to lose seats in the 2030 population count.
That will correspond directly to a gain and loss in Electoral College votes among the states. To put that in total perspective, the South is expected to have double the number of House seats as the Northeast with 164 versus 81. Texas is projected to gain as many as four Electoral College votes, and Florida two or three, while California is expected to lose four such votes.
In addition, solid red states Utah and Idaho would pick up one more vote, while solid blue states New York, Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island would each lose one. Moreover, northern swing states Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would lose one vote and southern swing states Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona would each gain one. This is not a simple story of red states gaining and blue states losing population, because one needs to look at the underlying reasons for those gains and losses to really assess what kind of electoral headwinds the Democrats are facing.
And there are some reasons for Democrats to be more positive than the headline numbers on population shifts alone might suggest. There are four key reasons populations shift among the states: birth and death rates, migration between states, immigration from abroad and census counting efforts. Examining each provides meaningful insight into whether gains for traditionally red states will necessarily translate into a political advantage for Republicans.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
