SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WBBM NEWSRADIO/AP) — Bad news for Illinois: Declining population will mean the state will lose one congressional member.
Acting Director of the Census Bureau Dr. Ron Jarmin made the announcements in a virtual press conference.
“Seven states will each lose one seat in the House: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia," he said.
It’s become a decennial tradition in the State of Illinois, which has forfeited 10 U.S. House seats in the last nine censuses, leaving it with 17. That means Illinois will wield less political influence in Washington.
“Illinois was actually one of the three states that actually lost population over the last decade,” Karen Battle of the U.S. Census Bureau said Monday as the office released the latest figures.
Speaking in Aurora, Governor Pritzker said the outmigration from Illinois is something that was set in—if not stone—then clay, long before he became Governor. Illinois Republicans said it’s because taxes are so high, but the Democratic Governor said a look at the numbers suggests otherwise.
Pritzker says the largest number of people who are leaving Illinois are college students, who find lower costs and more assistance at schools in other states.
"Some of our best students are being offered full scholarships to places like University of Alabama, University of Iowa, other places, so I immediately set out to address that with the General Assembly and we did. We increased significantly the amount of MAP grants that are available to people," Pritzker said.
Regardless, the Governor said officials must do something. He said they are addressing higher education costs, and they must deal with the other issues affecting the population as well.
The panel, including Kristin Koslap with the Bureau’s Population Division, was asked if other states are simply gaining more residents than Illinois.
“It’s all about the distribution overall,” Koslap said. “What you’re suggesting could possibly be true, but without digging into it a lot more deeply, we wouldn’t know the exact reason why one state loses and another gains.”
The census reported that Illinois' population in 2020 was 12,822,739, a drop of 0.32 percent from a decade earlier. The number reported was the one the census uses for determining congressional apportionment, which includes 10,231 Illinoisans living overseas.
The decrease will likely spell a loss of federal funding while at the same time strengthening Democrats’ political grip on the state.
“Most people who build a statistical model on how much federal money does a state get will find that more seats means more money,” said Brian Gaines, political scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The U.S. population is just over 331 million, an increase of 7.4 percent from 2010. That represents a lower decade-long growth rate than any but the nation's 7.3 percent increase from 1930 to 1940, acting Census Director Ron Jarmin said in a video news conference.
Illinois joins California, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia in losing one seat in the House. Six states, led by Texas, which claims two, will add members to their congressional delegations.
Census numbers weren't available Monday for counties or cities such as Chicago, the nation's third-largest. Other estimates have put the city's population at 8.87 million, up 2.8 percent from a decade ago.
With Democrats holding 13 of the state's current 18 congressional seats, controlling the governor's office and dominating the state Legislature, little else should change, Gaines said. The 14th Congressional District, running from the top to the bottom of the Chicago metropolitan area on its far western edge, will likely be redrawn to boost Rep. Lauren Underwood, a Democrat who narrowly won a second term last fall by just over 1 percentage point against Republican state Sen. Jim Oberweis.
Democrats are likely to make another run at strengthening the 13th District in central Illinois, where Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis has won five straight elections in a district that already leans Democratic.
“We weren’t really expecting the partisan balance to shift very much,” Gaines said. "It’s already tilted in a way that slightly exaggerates how Democratic the state is.”
Fewer Electoral College votes will mean a little less influence on the national stage. But Illinois, a one-time bellwether whose voters chose the winning candidate in every presidential election from 1920 to 1996, has turned so heavily Democratic in national elections that it's no longer competitive; the last time it was in play for the GOP was 1988.
What Illinois loses nationally in terms of numerical influence, however, it can make up with individual influence in the form of Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, said Glenn Poshard, a Democrat who represented extreme southern Illinois in Congress from 1989 to 1999. Durbin, the Senate Democrats' No. 2 member, was elected to a fifth term last fall.
The cosmetic change — larger districts drawn to cover more ground for each member — aren't as immediately apparent, but will eventually become evident to constituents.
Poshard recalls complaining to colleagues in the House dining room about his district's size. He said he kept quiet after Rep. Pat Willams, then one of two House members from Montana, described a district that would stretch from Chicago to Washington, D.C.
But voters in Montana — which regains a second congressional seat lost after 1990 — or similar expanses such as Wyoming are familiar with House members being stretched thin across an entire state. In Illinois, where districts keep getting larger, constituents grow impatient and officeholders, who rush home after a Monday-to-Thursday congressional week, frustrated, Poshard said.
“You’ve got Friday and and part of Saturday to cover a whole district, and mine had 30 counties in it,” he said. “It’s difficult to get around and meet with the county boards and the regional economic development people and all the folks that want to talk to you.”
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