The Coming Census Time Bomb
In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.