The COVID-19 pandemic was nearly single-handedly responsible for delivering former President Joe Biden a victory in the 2020 election. But, at the same time, the yearlong lockdowns, school closures, and heavy rotation of vaccine mandates by Democrat-controlled state governments drove millions of people to greener pastures in red states.
The response to the same pandemic that helped deliver the White House to Democrats just five years ago could be handing Republicans the keys to the Oval Office, with red states looking to clean up when congressional reapportionment takes place in 2030. The only thing that can bail out blue states and a future Democratic administration from being decimated by their own inability to govern is mass immigration.
By 2022, early estimates from the American Redistricting Project predicted that the 2030 congressional reapportionment would be a bloodbath for Democrats. Reliably Democratic states, including California, New York, Rhode Island, Illinois, Minnesota, and Oregon, were set to lose 13 congressional seats, while only Delaware among the states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 was set to gain a single congressional district.
Reliably Republican or Republican-leaning states throughout the Sun Belt, including Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Georgia, and Arizona, were set to gain 13 electoral votes, erasing any need for a Republican candidate to focus on the Rust Belt.
Beginning in 2032, a Republican candidate would only need to carry Ohio, Indiana, and the Sun Belt states to win the presidency with 276 electoral votes. Gone would be the days of campaigning in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and there would be no need to reach into Democratic-leaning states of Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia. The path to the presidency would favor Republicans for the foreseeable future.
Just two years later, the American Redistricting Project examined the 2030 congressional reapportionment based on the new population trends and found that Democrats’ projections had brightened.
Democrats were now projected to lose just six congressional seats in California, Illinois, and New York rather than 10. Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina would no longer receive new seats.
While this still bodes well for Republicans and the Sun Belt because of the massive population growth in Texas and Florida, it’s not nearly as comfortable as would have been expected two years prior. Did people gravitate back to the high-tax, high-regulation blue states? No, of course, they didn’t.
So, what happened during those two years to give Democrats this massive population boom? Biden’s immigration policy.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the foreign-born population in the United States grew by more than 5 million people, hitting a record-breaking 15.6%. These immigrants, both legal and illegal, overwhelmingly moved to blue states with generous welfare policies and sanctuary cities that protected them from deportation.
Census data from March 2025 found that cities such as New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with some of the most draconian COVID-19 policies, saw an influx of foreign-born residents from 2022 to 2024. Prior Census estimates showed that many cities lost population in June 2023. However, through Biden’s mass immigration policies, they added people, with the growth accelerating throughout that year and into 2024.
While the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country lost 668,000 people because they championed failed COVID-19 policies, they gained 1.1 million foreign-born residents, with another million moving to nearby suburban areas. From 2020 to 2024, California, Illinois, and New York lost 2,618,295 people who migrated to mostly red states while gaining 1,732,282 immigrants — enough to protect some of their electoral losses and depriving red states that have practiced good governance of receiving more representation in Congress.
People were voting with their feet, having had enough of Democrats’ inability to provide a decent quality of life, taking untold billions of dollars and voters with them. Democrats were padding what would have been devastating losses with immigrants, legal and illegal alike.
From July 2023 to July 2024, blue states that had failed so spectacularly at governing were some of the fastest-growing places in the country because of mass immigration. California was the third fastest-growing state, only behind Florida and Texas. New York was fifth, New Jersey sixth, and Washington ninth.
This will not only aid Democratic candidates running for president but also protect members of Congress who championed policies that destroyed millions of people’s lives, created generational learning loss, and prolonged the lockdowns. Had Illinois lost two seats and New York lost three, as initially projected, many Democratic politicians would find themselves without a district to run in.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and secure the border will help reconfigure some of the damage done under Biden. Even before Biden kicked open the door of America’s borders to the world, more than 3.4 million illegal immigrants lived in California, Illinois, and New York, giving the three states five more congressional seats than they would have had if only citizens were counted in the allocation of congressional districts. That doesn’t take into account the 2.2 million who moved to the U.S. in the latter half of Biden’s term, further packing blue states with noncitizens.
If the Trump administration can achieve some level of mass deportation, it will help give proper representation and create an Electoral College and Congress based on where citizens actually live. But stopping illegal immigration isn’t enough. Republicans must also advocate limiting legal immigration.
Despite the long-standing idea that America is a propositional nation made up of immigrants, and any efforts made to reduce the sheer number of legal immigrants are extreme, a majority of people want fewer foreigners coming into our country.
A Gallup poll conducted in July 2024 found that 55% of people wanted immigration decreased, the highest number in decades. The Republican-aligned pollster Cygnal asked poll respondents how many immigrants they think should be admitted to the U.S. annually, and 42% said they wanted legal immigration at least cut in half, if not greater. A Cato Institute survey from 2021 found an even larger number, 61%, of people said they wanted legal immigration reduced.
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Without mass immigration, both legal and illegal, red states will continue to thrive as they have higher birth rates and attract greater domestic migration, and blue states would have to pay the consequences of promoting policies that chase away citizens and their businesses. Mass immigration is their great bailout at the expense of voters in places such as Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina, which would receive their proper representation, and Republicans would have an easier path to the presidency in the 2030s.
People are showing that they prefer to be governed by Republicans rather than Democrats. It’s time that we stopped immigration from being a buffer for a Democratic Party that has yet to fully face the repercussions of its bad politics.