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Projected population shifts over this decade could give Republicans a greater edge in presidential elections while reducing representation of rural areas and Midwest agriculture in Congress.
Analyses of population trends since the 2020 census indicate that four southern states, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, are in line to gain a net nine electoral votes in U.S. House seats after the 2030 census, if those population trends continue. All those states voted for President Donald Trump in 2024.
Southern states would control 40% of the House for the first time in history, according to an analysis by Brennan Center for Justice.
Texas would gain four seats and Florida three, according to analyses by the Brennan Center and The American Redistricting Project. Georgia and North Carolina as well as Arizona, Utah and Idaho would each gain one seat.
At the same time, California could lose as many as four seats, and three Midwest states are projected to lose one each: Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Rhode Island are also projected to lose a seat. Of those states, Trump only won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2024.
While the potential shift in electoral votes bodes well for Republicans, assuming current partisan alignments remain unchanged, the change is likely to reduce the number of rural districts, where populations are shrinking, stagnant, or growing more slowly than the cities or suburbs.
David Schultz (Hamline photo)“This is a 150-year story of the exodus from rural America to urban and suburban America and it’s just going to accelerate more at this point,” said David Schultz, a professor in the political science department at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Minnesota is projected to go from eight House districts to seven, which likely would mean consolidating the state’s three heavily rural districts into two, regardless of which party is in control of the state legislature, said Schultz. All three districts, the 1st, 7th, and 8th, are represented by Republicans: Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber, respectively.
“In Minnesota, what’s going to likely happen, it’s’ going to be a rural seat that’s lost even if Republicans are in control of the whole game, just because of where the population is at this point,” said Schultz.
Texas, Florida gains won't make up for rural losses
Redistricting will hit Minnesota and Pennsylvania in rural areas “and to a lesser extent Wisconsin and Illinois, since there's also been significant population loss in Chicago and Milwaukee,” Erin Covey, a congressional analyst for the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, told Agri-Pulse.
The new districts in states like Florida and Texas, which is projected to have 42 House seats after the 2030 census, aren’t likely to be rural or agricultural in nature either. The growth in those states is centered in metropolitan areas, such as Fort Worth, San Antonio and Miami, said Covey.
Some 88 of Texas’ 181 rural counties lost population from 2020 to 2023, for example, according to the Texas Demographic Center. The population losses are concentrated in western Texas, including a large swath of the agriculturally rich panhandle.
Nationally, the number of people living in nonmetro counties increased by 0.29%, or 134,540, from 2020 to 2024, but the population of U.S. metro counties grew by 1.08%, or 3.2 million people, according to an analysis by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS). And the slight overall increase in nonmetro populations masks broad declines in the Plains states and elsewhere.
Some 51% of nonmetro counties lost populations from 2020 to 2024, according to ERS.
“A nonmetro population decline was common across much of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and California. Decline was also common in western Oklahoma and western Texas, the Mississippi Delta region of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana; southern Alabama, and Appalachian Kentucky,” ERS found.
In California, where many rural counties also have been losing population, the same is not necessarily true of the Central Valley, where the 20th District, which includes Bakersfield and is represented by Vince Fong, is growing quickly, according to The American Redistricting Project report. “California has perhaps the most interesting growth patterns in the West. The population has been stagnant in San Diego, San Francisco Bay, and most of Northern California,” the report said.
Population shifts could add to rural policy challenges
Rural representation in the House is already shrinking. A 2024 analysis by The Daily Yonder found that about 28% of rural voters live in districts where at least half the population is rural, and only 10% of House districts are majority rural.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult already to pass farm bills. … I think it becomes even more complicated to do that,” said Schultz.
Heidi Heitkamp (UChicago photo)Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., agrees that the political clout of rural voters is going to continue to shrink after 2030, and she thinks it was a mistake to cut nutrition spending in 2024 through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act at the same time farm program spending was increased.
She said that unnecessarily fractured the rural-urban coalition that had once supported farm bills. Republicans downplay that concern, arguing that the coalition had not had an impact on farm bills for some time.
“I think the Big Beautiful Bill basically funding farmers and cutting SNAP was a big, big mistake,” she said. Tying nutrition and farm spending together ensured that “everybody has a stake in in agriculture. You separate that out, and then you see these [rural] districts with smaller and smaller representation, that is not a formula for success.”
Heitkamp is co-chairing the bipartisan Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity with former New Hampshire GOP Gov. Chris Sununu.
The Brennan Center report cautions that the 2020-2025 population trends may not continue through 2030. Slowing immigration rates, for example, could alter the growth of key states.
Immigration accounted for 44% of Texas’ growth between 2024 and 2025 and 90% of Florida’s, the report said. Moreover, California, Illinois, and New York would have all lost population if not for immigration.
If immigration levels are flat or negative for the rest of the decade, “Florida would gain only two seats rather than three because it would go from being one of the nation’s fastest growing states to a relatively slow-growing one. Meanwhile, Wisconsin would keep a seat that it is currently projected to lose,” the report said.
