California Will Lose a House Seat for the First Time

California, for decades a symbol of boundless growth and opportunity that attracted people from across the country and abroad, has seen its population growth stall and is losing a U.S. House of Representatives seat for the first time in its 170-year history.

Census Bureau population data released Monday is used to determine how the nation’s 435 House seats are allocated. California remains the most populous state by far with nearly 39.58 million people, but it is growing more slowly than other states and will see its House delegation drop from 53 to 52.

California's population grew by about 2.3 million people since the 2010 Census, but has been nearly flat since 2017.

“It’s certainly a remarkable result given the broader history of the state, which has been just almost relentless population growth,” said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who studies political redistricting. “The state has just been booming almost since day one, so to have it be slowing down this much is really historically unprecedented.”

This means influence will shift to faster-growing states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, where business-friendly policies and lower costs of living have fueled high-octane growth over the past decade.

Texas gained two seats while Florida added one.

Texas politicians have long sought to woo California residents and businesses. During the pandemic, companies like Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced plans to relocate headquarters to from California to Texas.

“There will be gloating — political gloating — I can guarantee it,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor of public policy communication at the University of Southern California.

California's loss of a House seat also means a possible dip in federal funding for Medi-Cal, the health insurance program for low-income people, as well as less money for highways, schools and a wide array of social services that are based on population.

The number of seats in Congress is fixed at 435 and the Census Bureau uses a population-based formula to decide how many seats each state gets. That means if one state loses, another one gains.

More U.S. residents moving out of California than into the state is just one factor driving California’s slower growth, though demographers say more data is needed to understand who has left and why in recent years. In fact, California has lost more residents to other states than it gained for all but three of the past roughly 30 years, McGhee said.

Those losses typically are offset by international immigration into the state, something that’s slowed in recent years, he said. Births also are declining while deaths are increasing, a phenomenon across the U.S. that’s more pronounced in California.

In a memo released by the state's finance department shortly after the Census figures were announced, officials pointed to both natural and political developments as reasons why California's overall population growth rate didn't keep pace with the national rate over the last 10 years.

Both California and the nation's fertility rates fell over the last decade, but California's fell at about twice the national rate, officials said.

"This faster-than-national decline in fertility yielded 350,000 fewer children in California over this 10-year period," the memo stated.

The memo also pointed to the impact of Trump administration immigration policies on California's net migration numbers.

"Domestic flows out to other states were more than offset by international migrants," the memo stated. "However, federal immigration policy decisions in the last half of the decade, accompanied and perhaps exacerbated by an officially pronounced federal view of immigration overall, slowed California’s migration-related growth."

Specifically, state finance officials called out Trump administration reductions in H-1B visas and asylum applications, noting that asylum applications fell "from approximately 100,000 in 2016 to approximately 30,000 in 2019," and saying California is historically home to 30% of the total national asylum population.

'It Will Be a Blip'

Just because California’s growth has slowed doesn’t mean the state is in decline.

“California tends to go through boom and bust cycles,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior research associate at the Population Reference Bureau.

The growth in recent years has been historically low. Since the last census, California’s population grew 6.1%, which ranked 24th nationally.

Bob Shrum, director of University of Southern California's Dornsife Center for the Political Future, said he expects the overall impact of the loss of a congressional seat to be marginal, even on federal funding. That’s because California will still have far more seats than any other state.

“It will be a blip,” Shrum said. “It will be talked about by Republicans and (Gov.) Greg Abbott in Texas, but it won’t make any fundamental difference to the fortunes and future of the state.”

Now that the number of congressional seats is known, states can embark on the decennial process of redrawing congressional maps, known as redistricting. That process won’t start until late summer or fall because of a delay in releasing neighborhood-level population data.

California is among several states that use a commission to draw state legislative and congressional districts. Voters in 2008 created an independent Citizens Redistricting Commission that took the power to draw the lines away from the state Legislature. The group has already begun a months-long process of seeking community feedback and taking other input.

It has not yet decided if it will try to tweak the maps or start from scratch, said Sara Sadhwani, a member of the commission and assistant professor of politics at Pomona College.

That means, for now, it’s too soon to know how the lines will change and which incumbent politicians could lose their seats or find themselves fighting with colleagues to stay in Congress.

Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant who owns Sacramento-based Redistricting Partners, said while losing a House seat isn't great, California actually worked hard to limit its losses.

"The state spent $200 million on working with community-based organizations, and doing phone banking and texting, and, when it was appropriate, doing actual in-person outreach in communities to try to bolster the completion of census forms," Mitchell said.

"We grew more than other states that actually gained congressional districts. Our 2 million population growth is just not the same 7.5% national rate of growth. And that's why we're losing a congressional district. But we're still growing."

This story includes reporting from The Associated Press's Kathleen Ronayne and KQED's Katie Orr and David Marks.