| Good. Now to keep Texas from being turned blue. |
[NBCNEWS] The Census Bureau on Monday released state population totals that determine each state's number of House seats, with just seven seats moving among 13 states — the smallest shift since the current congressional apportionment model was adopted in the 1940s.
Texas was the biggest winner, gaining two House seats. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida and North Carolina each gained one seat.
The losses were concentrated in the industrial Midwest, with Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio each losing a seat. Democratic strongholds California and New York each lost a seat. Census officials said New York would not have lost its seat if 89 more people lived in the state.
That 89-person difference was what separated New York from maintaining its 27th seat versus Minnesota keeping its eighth, which it managed to hang on to.
Kristin Koslap, a senior technical expert for the 2020 Census Apportionment Division, said Monday at a news conference that "it's not unusual for there to be a small margin" in population that determines whether a state gets an additional seat, loses one or maintains the status quo.
In terms of total population, the census counted 331,449,281 Americans, a 7.4 percent increase from the 2010 census. California remains the largest state and Wyoming the smallest.
The average population per-House seat is now 761,169 people, an increase of more than 50,000 per-district from the average of 710,767 in 2010.
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