Minnesota Report
The early report of the state population totals by the US Census Bureau carried pleasant news for our state yesterday. The decennial counting of heads is always a time of winners and losers and once again we snuck past New York by 89 people to retain our eight Congressional seats. Our hard count established by April 1, 2020 as 5,709,752. We are up from 5,303,925 in 2010 or an increase of 6.3%. The total population of the nation is 331,108,434. Granted, the 572,000 deaths from COVID-19 are not reflected in this figure
Seven states lost representation California (-1), Illinois (-1), Michigan (-1), New York (-1), Ohio (-1), Pennsylvania (-1) and West Virginia (-1) and six states gained, Colorado (+1), Florida (+1), Montana (+1), North Carolina (+1), Oregon (+1) and Texas (+2).
The size of our Congressional district grew to 713,719 up 50,728 from 662,991. What we also learn from our state population is the size of out state legislative districts. A Senate seat will now be 85,220 up from 79,163 and a House seat will be 42,610 up from 39,582. The ability for Republican Senators to gain 6,057 will be a sizable challenge because the bulk of their seats are in Greater Minnesota which we believe has not grown proportionally to the seven-county metropolitan area. This data will be released in September.
This means Minneapolis will have to hold municipal elections this year and again in 2022.