Arizona on track to gain 10th seat in Congress

PHOENIX — Arizona is well on its way to having a greater voice in Congress after the 2030 census. And the state will be even more of a electoral vote prize to whoever can win in the 2032 presidential race. Arizona is nearly certain to pick up a 10th seat in Congress once the Census Bureau gets done with its decennial count, new figures from Election Data Services show.

And since a state's electoral count also includes the two senators to which each is entitled, that means 12 electoral votes, up from the 11 that were cast this year for Donald Trump. It's not just that Arizona is growing. Most states are.

But it is that Arizona is growing faster than most of the others. The projections are based on the Census Bureau reporting this past week that there were 7,582,384 people in Arizona on July 1. Election Data Services figures that if the state keeps growing at the rate — it has since the official 2020 count — the Census Bureau will find 8,150,554 Arizonans when it releases the 2030 figures.

And with the nation's population projected to top 352.4 million, that should be more than enough to qualify for that 10th seat in the U.S.

House. What makes Arizona's projected faster-than-average growth so important on the national political landscape is that redistricting is a zero-sum game: There are just 435 seats in the U.S.

House. And that means the states that grow slower have to give up a seat — sometimes more than one — to those where people are more likely to move. So if A.