How the Electoral College Could Tilt Further From Democrats Amid Redistricting and Population Shifts

The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.

That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.

In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats.

Across all of the possible scenarios in the nine states that would be considered battlegrounds in the 2032 election, Democrats would see about a third of their current winning Electoral College combinations disappear if population projections hold. However, when looking only at the most feasible winning combinations based on voting behaviors in the 2024 election, the outlook is far worse. Of Democrats’ 25 most plausible paths to victory in 2024, only five would remain.

Some groups have arrived at an even more challenging outlook for Democrats in 2032. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan organization, projected Republicans to have three more safe seats from Texas and Florida, and New York to lose one more seat than The Times’s projection.

The Democratic Party already faces acute challenges after its disastrous losses in 2024, including fundraising woes, an electorate that slid decidedly to the right, a vacuum of leadership and a sharp decline in voter registrations.

The party is also battling President Trump’s push for red states to redraw their congressional maps in the middle of the decade in order to secure Republicans an advantage in next year’s midterm elections. While this does not directly affect a future Electoral College, it adds urgency for Democrats to expand into new areas.

The dire post-census projections put the party in a bind between two necessary tasks: investing to win in the short term, including in the midterms, and building a future in states that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades.

Still, the looming Electoral College shift presents such an existential threat to the party that many Democrats, including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, are adamant that planning for the next decade must begin now.

“There’s no doubt about it, and it’s a lot of what I talked about when I ran for chair,” Ken Martin, the D.N.C. leader, said in an interview. He added, “We have to acknowledge that there’s some of these states that are red that are going to need more resources to essentially help us win down the road.”

Red states are growing fast, and blue states aren’t keeping up

Rapid growth in Southern and Western red states is driving the changes to the political map, according to The Times’s analysis. Texas and Florida are each expected to gain millions of residents in the coming years, expanding each state’s population by nearly 13 percent, according to Esri.

The fastest growing Democratic state, Colorado, will expand its population by less than 10 percent. New York and Illinois are both expected to shrink by 2030, and California’s population will essentially stay the same.

These projections are not a guarantee of things to come, and could still change significantly. Natural disasters, economic upheaval and other factors could alter the country’s population patterns. Political realignment among demographic groups, such as Republicans’ gaining with Latino voters, could further scramble the landscape.

But some of the population shifts that will influence the reallocation of congressional seats have already taken place. State populations have changed enough since 2020 that if the redistribution of congressional seats occurred this year, red states would gain five seats. Blue states would lose five.

Should the projections hold, one hope for Democrats is to do what seems, at least after the 2024 election, impossible: pivot to the South. That would mean turning states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana — all places Mr. Trump won by more than 20 percentage points — into competitive battlegrounds, and quickly.

Democrats point to underlying trends as signs of hope in some of those states, or at least as a foundation to build upon. Mississippi, they note, has the highest percentage of Black voting-age adults in the country. Alabama and Louisiana both just added a second majority Black congressional district, though the Louisiana district is currently being challenged before the Supreme Court. And Arkansas was the only red state to add Democrats to its Legislature during the last election.

Additionally, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group founded by the former Democratic attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., noted in a memo last month that the population growth in the two largest counties in Texas, Harris and Dallas, was driven completely by communities of color. Those counties and their suburbs are expected to see the fastest growth by 2030.

In Georgia, a newer battleground state that swung back toward Republicans and Mr. Trump in 2024, communities of color are the only ones that have grown since 2020, adding about 487,000 people to the state’s population. At the same time, the state’s non-Hispanic white population has dropped by about 20,000.

But 2024 showed Democrats that demographics no longer spell the party’s destiny, as Latino voters drifted significantly toward Republicans and Black male voters moved slightly rightward.

Hedging for the future

To blunt its concerns about an increasingly tough Electoral College map, and potentially turn Southern states competitive, the Democratic Party needs money.

Yet months into Mr. Martin’s tenure as chair, cash remains scarce after spending billions on the 2024 defeat, a record sum roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of a small country. Top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills. The same donors who readily contributed to the 2024 effort are reluctant to sign more checks, especially as Democrats flail politically in response to the aggressive first months of the Trump administration.

The Democratic state parties in the South, meanwhile, have seen little to no investment for decades, leaving no local donor base to draw from. Most do not have more than a single office with a skeletal staff. The Alabama Democratic Party, for example, has just five people on its payroll, according to its most recent campaign finance disclosure.

A recent governor’s race in Mississippi offers a particularly striking example. In 2023, Democrats had their first real opportunity in 20 years to win a statewide race in Mississippi, when Brandon Presley, a popular local mayor and a cousin of Elvis Presley, challenged an unpopular incumbent, Gov. Tate Reeves.

Mr. Presley’s viability excited Democrats across the country, even as his stance against abortion kept most major national Democratic donors from significantly contributing. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democratic representative from Mississippi who has held elected office in the state for half a century, said he had expected a flood of questions from national Democrats eager for a major upset.

“I was never asked, not one call,” Mr. Thompson said. He criticized the D.N.C. for “parachuting” in operatives and not hiring local experts to help build a coalition for Mr. Presley. He added that money was wasted on expensive television ads that came with fees lining the pockets of national consultants.

With a month and a half left in the race, Mr. Martin, then the vice-chair of the D.N.C., attended a private event with Mr. Presley at a casino in Biloxi, Miss. The two spoke about the looming final sprint and how the D.N.C. could help.

In Mr. Martin’s recollection, Mr. Presley had been blunt. “I’m on the cusp of being one of the first Democrats elected governor in the Deep South in a generation, yet there’s no infrastructure on the ground to help me,” Mr. Presley had said, according to Mr. Martin. “I have to build it all myself.”

Six weeks later, Mr. Presley lost by three percentage points.

As party chair, Mr. Martin has initiated a program to cut checks to state parties, prioritizing conservative states over safer Democratic territory. Each state party in a blue state gets $17,500 monthly, and those in red states get $22,500.

From Mr. Martin’s perch, investing in the future is not a matter of resources but a shift in behavior. Democrats raised nearly $3 billion in the last presidential cycle, with much of that money coming in the final stretch. Mr. Martin pointed to those totals as evidence that money was available to Democrats, both now and in the future.

“I’m not going to take a scarcity mind-set to this,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “We can do both, right? We just have to. You have to be diligent about it, you have to be disciplined, and you have to make the case that it’s not an either/or proposition.’”

There is debate, however, about whether spending money in some of these deep red states is the best way to counter the looming Electoral College threat.

And even money cannot speed up time. Georgia took a decade of work before becoming competitive.

“In an ideal world, what it would look like is eight- to nine-figure investment over the course of a decade,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi conference of the N.A.A.C.P., about what it would take to make Mississippi competitive. “And it also is spent on the ground.”