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The One Minute Geographer: State Population Gains 2020
The 2020 Census results are in! We’ll be looking at population growth and decline among states and metropolitan areas.
Let’s start with states because growth or decline in population affects the number of US Congressional representatives seats each state has, and, in turn, each state’s number of electoral votes. For example, Texas will gain two seats and California will lose two seats. Look at the chart and you may ask “WHAT! How can California gain 2.7 million people and still lose two seats” ???? (A future post!)
Here are the states that gained the most people ranked by absolute population increase. To simplify things a bit, I rounded to 1,000s.
Everything is big in Texas! And Texas is the biggest winner, adding 4 million people. That’s like Texas adding the entire population of Oklahoma or Oregon, both states with around 4 million people!
Florida is another big winner. It added 2.7 million people — that’s almost five Wyomings!
A few states lost small numbers of people: Illinois, West Virginia and Mississippi. We’ll look at those in an upcoming post too.
Follow me on Medium to see more from the One Minute Geographer. You can see my previous post, “A Declining County in Illinois,” at https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-a-declining-county-in-illinois-a0c6f89669c
