The coastal states of the East and West are expected to lose seats in the next decade’s Congress, while Florida and Texas appear headed for big gains, according to a new study.
The site Redistrict Network is forecasting that New York and California will see a combined decrease of six congressional seats due to those states experiencing either population stagnation or an outright population decline.
This means that New York’s current 26-seat delegation will be reduced to 24, while California’s big 52-seat delegation will drop to 48.
Although the loss for the Golden State is significant, it will continue to maintain the largest congressional delegation in the nation.
The congressional losses won’t be official until 2031 after the new decade’s Census Bureau numbers are made official. But the latest change reflects a population shift that has been ongoing since the 1960s.
According to the site, the two big state gainers are Florida and Texas, both of which will end up with four new congressional seats.
Except for the California decline, the West is expected to do fairly well in the new order of things, with the states of Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming picking up one new seat each. New Mexico and Colorado’s current 3- and 8-seat congressional delegation will remain the same.
All the other states expecting to lose congressional seats are located in the North and include Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
In looking at the statistics, the New York Post notes that both New York and California have “struggled to rebuild populations” since the historic exit of residents in those two states during the Covid 19 pandemic. That struggle, says the paper, sees them “both down about 200,000 residents as of 2025.”
At the same time, Texas and Florida have gained around 400,000 and 200,000 respectively.
The trendline is particularly dramatic when viewed from where things stood in the 1960s: then New York and Pennsylvania had 43 and 30 seats respectively, while today they are down to 26 and 17.
Florida and Texas in the 1960s had 8 and 22 seats respectively, numbers that have ballooned to 28 and 38 today.
January 30, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Graphic courtesy of Pixabay
