Declining net migration and a continuing shift to the red states are redrawing America’s political map.
Declining net migration and a continuing shift to the red states are redrawing America’s political map.
T he annual Census Bureau estimates of national and statewide population growth from July 2024 to July 2025 arrived later than usual this year, but, like U-Haul’s data on internal migration, the new census figures paint a picture that ought to be a serious wake-up call to blue America.
Borders, Controlled
First, the big picture: the population growth rate for the country as a whole dropped in half, from 1 percent in 2023–24 to 0.5 percent in 2024–25. That’s almost entirely the result of tighter borders rather than domestic trends. Net international migration peaked in 2024, with 2.7 million more people entering the United States than leaving it. That dropped to 1.3 million in 2025 and is projected to keep plunging.
The foreign-born population dropped from 53.3 million to 51.9 million just between January and June of 2025, and the biggest driver of that was a collapse from the historic 2022–24 peak in “humanitarian migrants”:
Only two states, West Virginia and Montana, bucked the trend of either slower population growth or faster population decline this year compared with last year — reflecting that those are two states with the smallest immigrant populations.
A drop in population growth is bad news for America, and if we continue down the current path of vigorous immigration law enforcement without widening the door for legal immigration, we will be storing up trouble for the nation’s economic growth. That said, the Biden-era migrant surge was unsustainable and demanded a correction, and there are obvious benefits to reasserting control over immigration and reorienting it away from the absorption of penniless migrants who demand taxpayer benefits. But whether you love or hate the Trump immigration crackdown, there’s no debating its visible impact on the country’s population. The prospect of its continuing for three more years has significant ramifications for the makeup of America.
Red States, and Blue
The Census Bureau’s map of where state populations are growing should be a familiar one by now:
As usual, Texas is growing, and California is shrinking. Let’s look at the numbers. Texas added 391,243 people, twice as many as Florida, the next-largest state in terms of raw population growth:
Five states plus Puerto Rico declined in population, those being Vermont, Hawaii, West Virginia, New Mexico, and California. California’s net loss of 9,465 people, while a drop in the bucket, was exceeded only by the loss of 17,686 by Puerto Rico, which continues to struggle. Let’s break that out in percentage terms:
South Carolina led the way in population growth, followed closely by perennially growing Idaho. Once again, while the patterns are not entirely uniform, the list of growing populations is dominated by red-governed states. Only five of the 22 states with growth rates higher than the national average have Democratic governors, and two of those (North Carolina and Arizona) have Republican-controlled state legislatures and state supreme courts. Minnesota actually had a good year compared with its decade-long pattern — after Republicans regained partial control of the state house and hit the brakes on some of Tim Walz’s left-wing initiatives.
Twenty-eight states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia grew at below-average rates in the past year. These are 15 deep-blue states, deeper-blue D.C., liberally governed Puerto Rico, four other with Democratically governed states (one of them, Pennsylvania, with a divided state house and an activist blue state supreme court), and only eight fully Republican-governed states, one of them moderate New Hampshire. Perennial losers California, New York, and Illinois are yet again near the bottom of the barrel.
Over the five years between April 2020 and July 2025, Idaho has been the biggest winner, followed by Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah. Once again, red states are all over this chart, while blue states are generally the population losers:
I’d say that Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and California can’t blame the weather for their persistent population losses, but then, all three have faced natural disasters — wildfires and hurricanes — that have exacerbated their misgovernance. West Virginia’s slowing decline this year doesn’t change the fact that it has been doing poorly throughout the decade.
Now that we’re halfway through the 2020s, projections of how these trends could reshape our political map are becoming more reliable, and they may be more dramatic than usual because errors in the pandemic-era 2020 census had hurt red states. The American Redistricting Project updated its forecasts, with Texas and California dominating the shifts, but it estimates a less dramatic gain for Florida and a less dramatic loss for New York than it did in last year’s projection:
How bad is this news for Democrats? Let’s break this out by reference to the last few presidential cycles:
- Red states that Donald Trump won by six or more points in 2024, which voted for Trump in 2020 and 2016 and have all-Republican senators and governors: +8 seats.
- Purple-red states that Trump won by two to six points in 2024, all of which have Republican state legislatures: +3 seats. (Of these: Arizona and Georgia voted for Biden in 2020, North Carolina and Arizona have Democratic governors, and Arizona and Georgia each have two Democratic senators.)
- Purple-blue states that Trump won by less than two points in 2024, Biden won in 2020, and that have Democratic governors and one senator from each party: –2 seats.
- A blue state (Minnesota) that Kamala Harris won by less than six points in 2024: –1 seat.
- Deep-blue states that Harris won by six or more points in 2024: –8 seats, with half of the loss in California.
In a future presidential election where the Sun Belt battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona go red while the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (plus Minnesota) go blue, there would be a net shift of eleven electoral votes in favor of the Republican ticket compared with the current Electoral College. That would turn a 270–268 Democratic map into a 279–259 Republican map. The House of Representatives would see a similar shift toward red states and toward Sun Belt battlegrounds over Rust Belt battlegrounds.
As I’ve been writing since these trends emerged several years ago, this is likely to have an impact on the intra-GOP battles to succeed Trump. The rustpolitik approach of JD Vance and others of like mind in the Republican Party is premised on the centrality of the Rust Belt to the party’s fortunes. But that era may end after the next census. In the short run, that may be good news for Vance in the 2028 presidential primaries. He’s already well positioned for the nomination based on a simple binary calculation: If Trump’s political fortunes look good in 2028, Vance will be very hard to defeat in a primary, and if Trump is widely unpopular, Vance’s intraparty competitors may prefer to let him run the hard race in 2028 and wait for a more favorable map in 2032, after the Midwestern “blue wall” becomes a blue hedge. If you are Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp or Glenn Youngkin or some other Republican with a more Sun Belt and less Rust Belt brand than Vance, you may well look at 2028 and tell Vance, “Take your turn now, I’ll wait.”
Demographics isn’t destiny — at least, not on its own. If Republicans do enough to splinter their current political coalition and alienate enough voters, they will find different ways to lose. But for now, the map promises the hope, or the fear (as the case may be), of a redder future.