Three Midwest states lose Congressional seats
Illinois, Ohio and Michigan each lost at least one U.S. House of Representatives seat, the Census Bureau announced today. Ohio tied New York with two congressional seats lost.
This is the fourth consecutive Census Illinois has lost a congressional seat.
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s election victory secured the right for Democrats to redraw congressional and state legislative political boundaries the Chicago Tribune reported. That gives Democrats the edge to tilt and shift the lines in a way aimed largely to benefit party incumbents and to make future gains.
The Census found Ohio has 11,536,504 residents as of April 1, a 1.6 percent increase over 2000, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
The county’s divided political landscape will continue to make Ohio critical in assembling the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the White House, Green said.
“Ohio becomes ever more crucial to the Democratic Party,” said Tom Rieder, an archivist with the Ohio Historical Society who specializes in the state’s political history. “What becomes 18 electoral votes becomes vital to President Obama in seeking re-election.
Michigan was the only state in the country to lose population, dropping to 9,883,640 from 9,938,444, according to The Detroit Free Press. It remains the eighth largest state in the nation.
Additional states losing seats include Iowa (-1), Louisiana (-1), Massachusetts (-1), Missouri (-1), New Jersey (-1), New York (-2) and Pennsylvania (-1).
The most populous state was California (37,253,956); the least populous, Wyoming (563,626). The state that gained the most numerically since the 2000 Census was Texas (up 4,293,741 to 25,145,561) and the state that gained the most as a percentage of its 2000 Census count was Nevada (up 35.1% to 2,700,551).
The states receiving additional seats in Congress included Arizona (+1), Florida (+2), Georgia (+1), Nevada (+1), South Carolina (+1), Texas (+4), Utah (+1) and Washington (+1).
The new apportionment changes will go into effect for the 2012 elections. For more information, visit the U.S. Census Bureau’s interactive census data map.
