West Virginia Decline Thread, 2020s

[Biden his time]

Poll runs for 3,400 days and will be periodically bumped and reset

[Podgy the Bear]

Population is less healthy than the national average and is getting older.  The death rate will accelerate faster than the birth rate.  And more people will be moving out than moving in. 

But they will have two Senate seats and will continue to hold the country hostage--as Manchin is doing now.

[Frodo]

Another question worth adding is: would there be any likelihood that by the time of the 2030 redistricting cycle, West Virginia will join seven other states in having only one (at-large) congressional representative in the House?  

[Zaybay]

Another question worth adding is: would there be any likelihood that by the time of the 2030 redistricting cycle, West Virginia will join seven other states in having only one (at-large) congressional representative in the House? 

WV has a population of 1.8 million currently, and the largest at-large state is DE at around 1M. The amount of population WV would have to lose in order to get down to one seat requires either a war or mass famine to obtain.

[Biden his time]

Throughout the United States, West Virginia has become synonymous with coal, decline, and economic stagnation. It is a relatively poor state with low social indicators, with an older, unhealthier, and less educated population than average. All these factors and more have led to West Virginia being the state which lost the highest proportion of its population during the 2010s, as it witnessed its population shrink from 1.85 Million to 1.79 Million (a decline of 3.2%).

There are certain pockets, though, in the state, which are growing, and it seems inevitable that soon enough, these growing pockets of the state are going to rise up to change the landscape of West Virginia. For example Morgantown, West Virginia's third-largest city, despite having only 30K people, with its relatively fast growth rate, seems poised to one day overtake the shrinking cities of Charleston and Huntington. All the meanwhile, Berkeley County, West Virginia's second-largest county is gaining in population and slowly but surely closing the gap between itself and West Virginia's largest county, Kanawha.

What will the next decade hold for West Virginia? Discuss below.

Shameless thread bump, of course