Quote:
Originally Posted by plinko
This doesn’t seem possible given that apportionment is not based on YOY trends but over the decade. CA still gained 2M people, which is not nothing. And you’ve totally missed Idaho.
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That's the apportionment shift from the cumulative 2010 to 2020 changes. Put another way, running the apportionment formula on the 2020 estimates, and comparing to what the 2010 Census apportioned.
The formula is the
Huntington-Hill method and straightforward: give every state a seat to start, priority number equals state population over square root(number of seats times number plus one), and highest priority number gets the next seat. Feel free to test it yourself with Excel.
Bigger states change seat numbers more rapidly. Idaho is growing fast, but it's population is still small enough that it doesn't get to the 3rd seat priority number quickly enough. Meanwhile, California isn't growing at the rate it needs to keep 53 seats relative to the rest of the country.