Census figures show Wisconsin population growth better, but still slow

I wanted to backtrack to last week’s release from the US Census Bureau on state populations for 2018, and see how Wisconsin shapes up. In that report, Census Bureau says that Wisconsin has now exceeded 5.8 million people. 5,813,568 call Wisconsin home this year, an increase of more than 21,500 compared to 2017, which is a growth rate of 0.37%.

That’s a slower rate than the US’s level of 0.62%, and it’s only 27th in the nation. But the good news from Wisconsin’s standpoint is that we have finally started seeing our population growth pick up in the last 2 years, after stagnant growth for the 6 years before then.

Wisconsin population change
2010-2016 (average per year) +14,329
2017 +19,093
2018 +21,517

However, this still leaves us only in the middle of the pack for the Midwest for growth in both 2018 and the 2010s as a whole, and we are well behind Minnesota, who has added 2 ½ times more people than Wisconsin has in the 2010s. But hey, at least we aren’t losing people like Illinois has for the last 5 years!

Wisconsin has benefitted from that drop in Illinois population. The Census Bureau has tracked state-to-state migration up through 2017, and if it wasn’t for FIBs moving North, Wisconsin would have had little to no population gain at all over the last 5 years.

Wisconsin net migration with Illinois, 2013-2017
2013 +9,520
2014 +15,370
2015 +11,448
2016 +15,728
2017 +14,689

One other sidelight is that the increased population growth in Wisconsin over the last two years has taken us off the bubble for losing a seat in Congress after the 2020 elections, according to Election Data Services. Given how slow things were going here for much of the 2010s compared to the rest of the nation, this was starting to become a question, but EDS now says that Wisconsin is now projected to have a cushion of over 160,000 people by 2020.

Interestingly, Minnesota and Illinois get the last two seats under the projections based on population changes of the last 3 years, and both are noteworthy as Minnesota has been projected to lose a seat for much of the 2010s, and Illinois is now in significant danger of losing 2 seats due to their losses in recent years.

To summarize, Wisconsin's population has finally started to grow a bit in the last 2 years, and that's a trend that's going to have to continue if our aging, cold-weather state is to grow for the rest of the 2010s. We could do a lot better (as shown by Minnesota's big growth), and it's noteworthy that even with more population in the astate, a majority of counties in Wisconsin have lost people in this decade. But a stagnant population is not as blaring a concern as it was 2 years ago in Wisconsin.