Wis losing a seat in Congress? That's what we're on track for as of now

Following up on the recently-released Census estimates of state and US population for 2025, that also means we are halfway between the 2020 Census and 2030’s Census. So why not project forward to what this may mean for the membership of Congress and the Electoral College after that 2030 Census, and the maps get redrawn. The American Redistricting Project went with the 2022-2025 post-COVID population trends to see what states were on track to add or lose members of the House of Representatives as well as Electoral College votes.

As you can see, Wisconsin is among the states that would lose members of the House.

Yes, I find it ironic that the GOP-led states of Florida and Texas would grab more seats in Congress in no small part because of high levels of immigration in their states, no matter how much their GOP overlords pose against it (but funny, ICE isn't overrunning their states, are they?). I also note that this projection shows that Dems can’t win the White House in 2032 merely by getting back the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and having everything else be the same.

I want to center on the Wisconsin situation in particular, as we are pretty close to the threshold where we could hold onto our 8th seat in the House.

So if we gain people at a faster rate than Michigan or don’t lose as much ground to Texas or Georgia in the next 2 years, maybe we stay at 8 seats. But if we don’t, then it would add even more importance to redistricting here for 2031, because some member of Congress is losing his/her seat regardless of the result of elections.

I took a crack at what that might look like, if we were trying to make a relatively even 7-member map in Wisconsin. Here’s what it looks like.

And I’m going to use two races to see what the partisanship of these districts might be. I’ll use the 2022 Governor’s race (Dems win by 3.5%) and 2024 Presidential race (GOP wins by 0.9%) as baselines to see who would be favored in these districts, and by how much.

2022 Governor race

2024 Presidential race

I can probably do some more manipulations to make it even closer to level (either moving District 1 more into Milwaukee or moving District 3 into Dane County), but this is a good start. 2 Dem districts, 2 GOP districts, and 3 districts that lean GOP in various amounts, but are definitely flippable for Dems.

January's release from the Census Bureau only had state population. We will find out later this year how population has changed inside of Wisconsin, and which counties and communities of our state are growing faster than others, along with the ones that are losing people. That's also a key factor in what happens for districts at both the Congressional and statehouse level, and we can see if the COVID-era trends that encouraged more people to move up North in this state are still happening, or if people are heading back to metro areas, and where in metro areas are they going to.

Also remember that Wisconsin Republicans have 6 seats in the House today as a result of their 2012 and 2022 gerrymanders. So in any 7-district scenario, they are likely to have 1 fewer GOP seat than today, and possibly 2 or 3. So maybe our GOP members of Congress should be going out of their way to encourage more migration to our state (both from inside and outside the country), and making sure that every Wisconsin resident gets counted in 2030. Because the job they save could well be their own.