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America’s Heartland Is In The South And West Now

| January 7, 2018 @ 5:00 am

By Justin FoxBloomberg

Sometime this year, the population of the Southern U.S. will surpass that of the Midwest and Northeast combined.

How did I arrive at this assertion? Last July 1, according to the state population estimates released last month by the Census Bureau, there were an estimated 124.6 million people living in the Midwest and Northeast and 123.7 million in the South. Next July 1, if the regions continue growing at the rates that they have since 2010, the numbers will be almost even at 125 million, with the South presumably pulling away after that. Meanwhile, the West – which surpassed the Northeast in population in the 1980s and the Midwest in the 2000s – had 77.4 million inhabitants as of last July and has been growing almost as fast as the South.

The South, as defined by the Census Bureau, is a vast, 16-state region stretching from West Texas to the Delaware shore. The West is similarly sprawling. The fact that each has a lot more inhabitants than the Northeast, which is just Pennsylvania and the eight states to its east, is not in itself noteworthy.It is noteworthy, though, how much the regions’ relative populations have changed over the years. And while it’s not exactly news that the nation’s population has been shifting southward and westward, it does seem like a phenomenon worth dwelling on from time to time – especially when a major milestone looms, as with the South overtaking the combined population of the Midwest and Northeast this year. Here are the changes through the decades, expressed in population totals:

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