California's Population in Decline

For the first time in its history, California has seen a decline in its population. ABC News (May 7) reports:

California’s population fell by more than 182,000 last year, the first yearly loss ever recorded for the nation’s most populous state that halted a growth streak dating to its founding in 1850 on the heels of a gold rush that prompted a flood of people to seek their fortune in the West.

The figures released Friday followed last week's announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that California would lose a congressional seat for the first time because it grew more slowly than other states over the past decade. Still, California's population of just under 39.5 million and soon-to-be 52-member congressional delegation remain by far the largest.

As for the city of Los Angeles, it has seen a population decline for 3 straight years.

Overall, Los Angeles lost nearly 52,000 people, the third straight year of decline that has put its population at just over 3.9 million.

This impacts California's political influence in Washington DC. Here are the trends for Congressional seat gains and losses since 1990:

1990 Census Impact on Congressional Seats: +7

2000 Census Impact on Congressional Seats: +1

2010 Census Impact on Congressional Seats: 0

2020 Census Impact on Congressional Seats: -1

The reasons provided by the ABC article for the population decline is:

1. Around 116,000 fewer immigrants moved into the state.

2. 53,000 fewer international students.

3. And a 19% increase in deaths due to COVID-19. The article mentions that COVID-19 killed 51,000 people in 2020, but doesn't really give an estimate on that incremental amount. Doing a little Internet Surfing, Mercury News (Jan 27) estimates that there were 40,000+ excess deaths in 2020.

The above sums up to 209,000 as compared to the 182,000 population decline. I'd say those are statistically similar so I'd say California's population probably would have stayed flat. This would indicate that California's population hasn't really budged since 2018.

Will California's population slowly start to decline over the next few years? As I wrote back in March, California has recently seen some large corporate departures in Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Just looking at the changes in Congressional seats since 1990, California is definitely losing popularity as compared to other states. And if you assume 2020 was an outlier and needs to be adjusted, it is still likely that California's population would have stayed flat to 2018. And so I'd argue that 2021 will likely stay flat to 2020.

When it comes to political power, maybe it doesn't matter if California's population declines. Just based on that trend, I suspect that in 10 years, California will once again be losing a Congressional seat(s).