Virginia may be set to gain one new congressional seat following the 2020 census according to some estimates, but population projections from the University’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service say otherwise.
In early November, Carolina Demography — a consulting service at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — published a blog post projecting changes to the number of seats each state will have in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2020 census is conducted.
Because the House represents states according to their population sizes, the 435 seats in the House are reappointed among the states every ten years according to population changes. Virginia has had 11 representatives in the House since 1992.
After adjustments have been made, states then redraw the lines of their Congressional districts. Redistricting often benefits whichever party controls the government of a particular state.
Population in southern regions of the country have been growing at more rapid rates than other parts of the country, Director of Carolina Demography Rebecca Tippett said.
Carolina Demography anticipates Virginia, Florida and North Carolina will each gain one congressional seat after the 2020 census. The organization also expects Texas to gain two seats.
Tippett said these changes represent a “shift of political power out of the Midwest and the Northeast and into the southern and western states.”
Although this shift is contingent upon continued population growth, Tippett said it could change the political landscape of the country via the types of legislation Congress considers and the power of southern and western states in the Electoral College.
If Virginia gains another seat in the House, the state’s electoral votes will increase from 13 to 14.
Qian Cai, director of the Demographics Research Group at the Cooper Center, said the center’s population projections do not anticipate Virginia gaining a new congressional seat.
“Our office prepares the annual population estimates for Virginia, its counties, and its cities,” Cai said.
Those population estimates are used annually in fund allocation, revenue sharing, and budgeting.
The state’s population growth has slowed between 2010 and 2014, Cai said.
“It’s a bit early to say what the 2020 population might look like,” Cai said. “What I would like to point out is that we are now in 2015; the numbers used in the projections were up to 2014 and there are still at least six more years to go and the population…has taken a quite different direction compared to 2000 to 2010.”
The public should be cautious before jumping to any conclusions about whether Virginia will gain a new House seat, Cai said.
“Projections are just projections. They are as accurate as they are assumptions,” she said.
Carolina Demography’s prediction is “not a guarantee at all,” Tippett said, and each state has its own method of predicting population growth. Carolina Demography incorporated each state’s prediction about any changes in their number of House seats into its finding.
“It’s really about how Virginia is growing relative to other states in the nation, and because many states are not growing as rapidly as Virginia is, even some slow-downs in Virginia’s growth might still lead to better growth than those northeastern and midwestern states,” she said.
Tippett said Virginia is likely to gain a seat under several of the scenarios Carolina Demography studied, but “if the population slow-down continues and we see some different trends in other states, it’s very much going to be on the cusp” if Virginia gets another House seat.
Current seat allocation among states in the United States House of Representatives
Graphic By: Anne Owen, Nikita Meka and Callie Phillips
If Virginia does gain another House seat, the state will become more important in presidential elections, Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball, said.
“Virginia’s voting history in the last two presidential elections show that it’s something of a bellwether state, it’s an indicator of where the country is at,” Skelley said. “If that remains the case, and it has one more electoral vote, that would make it even more important than it already is.”
Brian Cannon, Executive Director of OneVirginia2021 — an organization which aims to take politics out of the redistricting process in Virginia and supports the creation of an independent redistricting commission — said a new congressional district would have important implications for Virginia state politics.
“[Reapportionment presents] another opportunity for Virginians to ask, ‘so we’re likely to get another congressional seat. Do we want to do this in the most political way possible or perhaps a better, fairer way that represents Virginians better?’” Cannon said.
He also said the current 8-3 Republican majority in the state’s delegation to the House is “pretty gerrymandered” and Virginians want to see competitive and fairly drawn districts.
A new congressional seat would be an opportunity to go down a new path in state politics and avoid the litigation issues, partisanship, and the disenchantment of voters that the state currently faces, Cannon said.
Any new district would most likely be situated in Northern Virginia, Skelley said.
“Northern Virginia has been responsible for most of the state’s growth over the last decade,” Skelley said.
Cai described Northern Virginia as a “huge employment driver” for the state because of its relationship with federal jobs and related service industries, such as information technology and consulting.
Any changes to Virginia’s number of electoral votes would affect congressional elections starting in 2022.
Correction: This article previously misspelled Rebecca Tippett's name in two places and misquoted her as saying "on the cuff."
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