Reports of the death of the Republican Party continue to be premature. …

That’s the news from the American Redistricting Project’s forecast, based on extrapolations from 2022 Census Bureau estimates. ARP shows California, which gained seats in every census from 1850 to 2000 and lost just one seat in 2020, losing five seats in 2030. It shows New York losing three seats and Illinois two seats.

This reflects large-scale flight from our four most popular metropolitan areas, and from what are three of the most heavily taxed states, starting in the pandemic year (the 2020 census was taken as of April 1, when that flight was about to begin) and continuing as lockdowns were eased in the first half of 2022.

It also shows large-scale flight to low-tax states, with Texas and Florida each projected to gain four House seats in 2030 and Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Delaware one each.

[This likely means that the Electoral College divisions will become more entrenched, at least in the short run. The longer-range question is whether the voters who relocate to these red states are true red-state voters, or whether they bring their blue-state politics along with them. Hopefully it’s a lot more of the former than the latter. — Ed]