Headlines Scream That Democrats Are Doomed Come 2030—But The Reality Is Murkier

From 30,000 feet, the trendlines for Democrats are cataclysmic: Blue states, particularly the powerhouses of New York and California, are leaching population that’s being hoovered up by southern states, particularly Florida and Texas. 

Come the 2030 census, those blue states will lose House seats and electoral votes and the southern bloc will gain them, making Democrats’ path to the White House and to a House majority impossibly difficult. Stack that new reality on top of Republicans’ longtime, baked-in Senate advantage, and the future for the political left is grim.

“Texas and Florida will gain and New York and California will likely lose something — the general trends seem clear even if we don’t quite have a magnifying glass or a microscope to see exactly what the future will be yet,” Michael Li, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told TPM.

“It’s not if it’s gonna happen, it’s the degree to which it’ll happen,” added Ken Martis, a political geographer and professor emeritus at West Virginia University. Various models predict the red states scooping up differing numbers of votes and seats.

The looming problem twists the knife for an already beleaguered Democratic Party, smarting from a defeat in 2024 and confronted with the future of an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump in the White House, a Congress under unified Republican control and a Supreme Court well stocked with conservatives.

Many news outlets have picked up on the trend, prophesying the Democrats’ doom: PBS declared the population shifts to be “Democrats’ future crisis”; the Associated Press underscored that “Democrats are threatened” by the trend; Newsweek called it a “problem much bigger than Donald Trump”; the Washington Examiner, perhaps with some glee, urged Democrats to “come to grips” with the political tsunami rolling their way.

Still, who is leading this domestic migration, the odd conditions of the 2020 census and the “wildcard” of incoming immigration all significantly muddy the political picture, and invite humility about predictions of how America — and its political makeup — may look by 2030.    

“The idea that this is an automatic good for Republicans I don’t think is true,” Li said.

A Weird Decade 

Some of the current trendlines stretch back to the mid-20th century, when industrialized states, particularly the rustbelt, started to lose population. In this “post-industrial era,” molded in large part by globalization, job hubs across the north started to wither. 

Within that “megatrend,” as Martis calls it, are more recent, smaller ones. And a smaller trend that was in full swing at the time of the 2020 census was southern migration, as many jobs went remote during the COVID-19 pandemic and people sought cheaper housing, lower taxes and better climates — to New York and California’s detriment and Texas and Florida’s gain. Meanwhile, immigration into the United States all but stopped, removing a key means of growth for all of those states, but particularly the ones that weren’t benefitting from domestic migration.

In the years since, that rush to the south has slowed. As immigration began to flow into the U.S. again, California and New York recouped some of their losses. 

Still, some of the conditions forcing people out of those blue hubs remain; every expert TPM asked cited housing costs and cost of living as a large part of the southward push.

Citing April data, Greg Morrow, a housing and land use policy expert at UCLA, told TPM that California issued 23 permits for new housing per 100,000 people compared to Texas’ 71 permits — three times fewer.  

A gnarled knot of byzantine zoning codes, NIMBY (not in my backyard) protests, outdated, sometimes counterproductive environmental regulations and astronomical construction costs (at least $1 million per affordable housing unit in Los Angeles, according to Morrow) make it difficult for states like California to nimbly adjust. 

But politicians are reacting. Morrow pointed to a more aggressive stance in the last five years by California’s state government to take over in the face of local inertia, proposing and passing laws that unwind some of the strict zoning requirements and allow for more building. 

“Things are changing — but it’s like turning the Titanic,” he said.

But the other side of the ledger isn’t stable either. Housing costs in the southern states have started floating up, in part due to the increased demand. Other factors, like skyrocketing home insurance costs in Florida caused by climate change-fueled extreme weather, may dissuade relocation too. 

And then there’s the immigration “wildcard,” said Bill Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. 

“If the Trump administration cools down and slows immigration, it’ll impact negatively not only Florida and Texas, but also New York and California,” he said. “Especially the latter two because they depend a lot on immigration.”

Who’s Moving? 

When you look under the hood at who is moving to the southern states, it further complicates the political ramifications. 

“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.”