Wall Street Journal Reports Rhode Island Slated to Lose Congressional Seat

Wall Street Journal Reports Rhode Island Slated to Lose Congressional Seat

The Wall Street Journal is predicting Rhode Island is one of the states that will lose a congressional seat in the upcoming redistricting.

This would potentially force Democrats David Cicilline and Jim Langevin to face each other in a primary.

According to the WSJ, states that are likely to lose one seat are Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and California. 

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For California, it would be the first time the state has ever lost congressional seat since statehood in 1850.

Kimball Brace, President of the bipartisan political consulting firm Election Data Services(EDS), said he expects the changes will benefit the Republican Party.

"‘The big states that are very much Democratic are in a loss situation,’ he said, citing California, Illinois and New York, while traditionally Republican states like Texas and Arizona are poised to gain power," writes the WSJ.

"Rhode Island is also a state with an extremely close margin. For most of the decade our studies have projected that Rhode Island would lose their second seat by the end of the decade and the new numbers confirm that projection. But their margin has gotten tighter with the new data. For the past several years we saw that Rhode Island would lose that second seat by more than 25,000 people. But this new data shows the state missing the seat by only 14,539 residents," said EDS in a press release on Monday.

The Census Bureau on Monday released state population estimates for the year which ends July 1, 2020.

Congressional seats and electoral votes are allocated to states based on a census conducted every 10 years.

The 2019 estimates come less than a year before the next decennial census.