Montana and Rhode Island

[⛄]

With 1,015,165 inhabitants, Montana ist the most populous state with 3 EV.
With a population of 1,051,511, Rhode Island is the smallest state with 4 EV.

How will the allocation of the EV change after the 2020 census?

[muon2]

I have a hard time seeing a set of events that could result in anything but 3 EV for RI in 2020. MT is on the bubble for 4 EV, and if I had to pick today I'd say it will stay at 3 EV. However, it's easy to see MT picking up a little extra growth rate as the decade goes on and going to 4 EV.

[DINGO Joe]

I've seen a couple of stories on towns in Eastern Montana that have had spillover from the oil boom in ND.  It wasn't going very well for the towns because their getting the people and problems associated with roughneck culture and they weren't getting any of the revenue from the oil, so utilities, especially water, and law enforcement were having trouble keeping up.  Ultimately, you'd expect the workers to move closer to the work when resources become available.

[Kevinstat]

Rhode Island would have lost it's second seat in 2010 to I think North Carolina had the "major fractions" method used in the 1910 and 1930 apportionments had been used. Under major fractions, if it so happened that rounding each state's decimal quota to the nearest integer resulted in the desired number of seats, then that would always be the result of the apportionment. You could have states being rounded away from the nearest integers or even, in highly irregular situations, rounded past an integer, but not more than one in opposite directions. Under the current method, a state with 1.45/435 of the United States apportionment population would get its second seat in Congress (and thus 4th EV) before a state with 8.6999.../435 of the population would get its 9th seat (and 8.7/435 is precisely 1/50, so we're talking an average size state here), before a state with 19.98/435 of the population would get its 20th seat, and before a state with 54.85/435 of the population would get its 54th seat, let alone its 55th. The two methods occasionally result in the same apportionment (as in 2000) and on average are only one seat different (as in 2010 and I believe 1990), so the fact that Rhode Island would have already lost its second seat under major fractions suggests that it doesn't have very far to fall at all before it loses it's second seat under the method actually being used. Rhode Island wasn't that close to losing it's second seat under the current method though (it varies from major fractions the most with states fighting for their second seats), so perhaps what would have happened under major fractions in 2010 is irrelevant. Still, I vote 3 EVs for Rhode Island and also Montana.  Hard for me to say which will have more people by the 2020 census.

[Cranberry]

I think that Montana will gain the RI seat. It has even now nearly a greater population than RI.