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Rhode Island news
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N.E.'s loss in House is a gain for South, West
The
region's House delegation will be down to 22 seats, or just 5 percent of the House,
with the loss of a Connecticut seat. By SCOTT MacKAY
and DAVID HERZOG
Journal Staff Writer
New England may be the storehouse of American history and home to some of the nation's top universities, but other parts of the United States are attracting people faster.
Yesterday's census figures are important because they are used to decide how many seats each state has in the U.S. House, which is based on population.
The census showed that the U.S. population soared to more than 281 million people as explosive growth gave Arizona, Texas, Florida and Georgia two more House seats each and chopped further into the political influence of the Northeast and Midwest.
Congressional clout is crucial because the flow of billions in federal spending to individual states is controlled by representatives and senators.
Other states gaining one House seat each are Colorado, California, Nevada and North Carolina.
The biggest losers are New York and Pennsylvania, which will lose two seats each. Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Wisconsin will each lose one seat. House representation in the remaining 32 states remains the same.
While people in the Midwest and Great Lakes states, the so-called "Rust Belt," may lament this shift, we in New England know that it has gone on for many, many years. After the 1910 census, the southern European immigration-fueled growth in Massachusetts and Rhode Island gave the region 32 of the 435 House seats. Since 1910, Massachusetts has lost six House seats, Rhode Island one, Maine two, and Vermont one.
With the loss of the Connecticut seat announced yesterday, the New England House delegation is down to 22, or just 5 percent of the House, the region's lowest share since the founding of the Republic.
"This is a long-term trend that will diminish the region's clout in the House," says Wendy Schiller, political science professor at Brown University. "It is not only that we are losing seats . . . but that many of them are going to states that have been electing Republicans, who control the House, while we have become more Democratic."
Yesterday's results will spill into presidential politics, because a state's Electoral College number is based on its number of representatives, plus the two senators each state gets.
The shift of population west and south means those states will be even bigger electoral prizes in presidential campaigns. For example, carrying Texas, which leans Republican in national politics, will in 2004 give a presidential candidate 34 electoral votes, enough to offset the 34 electoral votes of New England, which tilts Democratic in presidential votes.
"It is no coincidence that John F. Kennedy was the last president elected from the Northeast," says Darrell West, professor of political science at Brown. "Every other president since, except Gerald Ford . . . who wasn't elected, has been from a sunbelt state."
Despite the loss in the House, New England retains its influence in the Senate. Luckily for our chilly corner of the country, the Constitution requires each state to have two senators.
"New England won't thrive, but we will survive," says Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor and expert in New England politics.
One of the reasons, Nelson says, is that the Senate is an institution dominated by seniority and New England voters rarely toss out incumbents. Rhode Island voters have not defeated an incumbent since the 1930s (Republican Felix Hebert in 1934 was the last one), and Vermont voters have never turned an incumbent senator out of office since 1914, the first time voters directly elected U.S. senators.
No sitting New England senator has been defeated since Republican Lowell Weicker of Connecticut lost to Democrat Joseph Lieberman in 1988. And the New England senators are evenly distributed between the two parties -- six Republicans and six Democrats -- meaning that the region has connections to each party's leadership.
"New England is a region that was largely settled by 1800 and where the leaders realized there wasn't much room to grow," says Nelson. "It is a region where people value stability and voters have tended to stick with the familiar in Senate elections."
Some of this Senate stability comes from electing politicians from well-established political families. Four New England senators have family ties to political figures in their states. Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut is the son of the late Sen. Thomas Dodd; Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire is the son of Hugh Gregg, a former governor; Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts is brother of President Kennedy, and Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is son of the late Sen. John Chafee.
While yesterday's results showed a continuation of the post World War II shift of political power and population to the south and west, the movement was less pronounced between 1990 and 2000 than between 1980 and 1990, says Kimball Brace, a Washington, D.C., redistricting expert hired by Rhode Island and many other states to help draw new congressional and legislative district lines.
"There was much more drastic change in the decade of the 1980s," says Brace.
For example, California gained seven seats and Texas picked up three after the 1990 census, while no state increased its congressional representation by more than two based on yesterday's figures.
Yesterday's reapportionment statistics are just the first numbers from Census 2000 that will have wide political implications. In March, the Census Bureau is scheduled to begin releasing more data detailing local-level populations that will be used to redraw congressional and state legislative districts.
Those numbers will probably kick off a long and difficult redistricting battle in the Rhode Island General Assembly, which must cut its membership by 25 percent under a downsizing provision and reconfigure its districts to match population trends within the state. It must be completed in time for the 2002 elections.
"The interesting battle in Rhode Island is for the legislative seats," Brace says. "My hair will turn grayer by the time I get done."
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