Utah’s increasing population has led to some growing pains, including a housing shortage, but may lead to more power in Washington, D.C.

Three groups that follow reapportionment predict Utah will get a fifth seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2030 Census.

Reapportionment — the process of dividing the 435 House seats among the 50 states following the decennial census — results in some states losing seats and others gaining seats.

As Utah continues to grow — reaching 4 million people by 2033, according to projections from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute — it will be one of nine states the Brennan Center for Justice predicts will gain at least one seat.

Two other groups — the American Redistricting Project and Election Data Services — project that eight states will gain at least one seat.

Miles Coleman, the associate editor of a nonpartisan newsletter at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said another seat would give Utah more political clout.

But while population growth is centered in the Wasatch Front, that wouldn’t necessarily mean the new seat would go blue, Coleman added. He’s also a political cartographer and drew at least one map with Salt Lake County — the most liberal and populous county in the state — split five different ways and all the seats likely going to Republicans.

Everyone would be excited about a new seat, said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah.

“But of course that might happen in other states as well,” Biele said. “So it’s not like Utah’s going to suddenly become an important state.”

Biele said the league does hope any new seat and redistricting efforts would lead to better boundaries, which the group already is seeking through legal action.

Growth expected to remain steady

Though Utah’s population is no longer booming as much as it did at the beginning of the decade, it’s still growing — and demographers with the Gardner Institute predict the increase will remain steady.

Their report projects that Utah’s population will increase by 510,867 in the next 10 years to reach 4,025,388 by 2033 — an overall growth rate of 14.5%, an average of 1.5% a year.

Most of the growth will come from people moving to Utah, the report predicts, leading to an older population as the median age increases from 32.7 this year to 35.2 in 2033.

Some demographers also expect Utah to reach 3.86 million people by 2030.

That’s about 440,000 more people than the estimate by one of the groups projecting Utah will gain a seat. Election Data Services project Utah will be home to 3.42 million in 2030. The other two groups did not list their projected population for states.

All three did predict Utah would gain a seat, though.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah will gain anywhere from one seat (like Utah) to four (like Florida and Texas).

It also predicts California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania will lose between one and four seats, with California among the states to lose the most seats.

The largest portion of Utah’s domestic in-migration for the past decade has been from California, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Arizona, Florida and Texas are also major destinations for people moving out of California.

The American and Redistricting Project and Election Data Service have similar predictions with one difference. They don’t think Michigan will lose a seat or that South Carolina will gain one.

It isn’t clear where in Utah the new district could be, but the Gardner Institute predicts most of the state growth for the next decade will be along the Wasatch Front.

According to the report from earlier this month, more than half of the state’s growth will be in Salt Lake and Utah counties.

Demographers expect those counties to add a combined 289,000 or so people.

The remaining counties with growth will add a total of 223,915 people, with most of that population gain coming in Cache, Davis, Iron, Tooele, Washington and Weber counties.

Three counties — Daggett, Duchesne and Millard — are projected to lose residents during the next decade.

More clout in Congress — but no guarantee how it leans

Though growth can have its downsides, there are advantages too, said Coleman of UVA’s Center for Politics.

“It definitely is nice to have more representation, more clout in the Electoral College,” he said.

The Electoral College is the group of presidential electors formed every four years during the presidential election. States get two electoral votes for their U.S. Senators and one for each Congressional district.

Another representative also means the chance to have another voice for the state on Congressional committees, Coleman said.

Yet there’s no guarantee how that voice will sway, he said, because new congressional boundaries would depend on who controls the redistricting process. If the Legislature drives the process, Coleman said, lawmakers could draw five Republican seats.

Using the website Dave’s Redistricting, Coleman drew five districts that all included part of Salt Lake County. Three stretched from the Greater Salt Lake area to Utah’s borders.

But if reformers in Utah get their way, he said, an independent commission could create a “pretty safely Democratic seat” based in Salt Lake City.

Utah had maps drawn by an independent commission during the last redistricting process after voters approved Proposition 4, which established an independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission in 2018.

The Republican supermajority in the Legislature rewrote the law and ignored those maps, instead splitting Salt Lake County into four different congressional districts.

The Utah Supreme Court ruled in July that lawmakers overstepped their authority in doing so.

Republican leaders have argued that preserving the Legislature’s authority to draw congressional maps protects the integrity of elections and prevents “big money and outside interest groups” from pushing their own agendas.

The League of Women Voters, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is still trying to get the current maps thrown out. Biele, the league’s president, said the group championed maps that gave rural Utah its own district.

Lawmakers “totally dismissed that idea,” and chose to, she said, “dilute the voices of both urban and rural voters” instead of grouping similar communities.

“We hope the Legislature realizes they need to settle down, they need to realize they represent the people of Utah, not just the Legislature,” Biele said.

Coleman advised some caution around the projections, saying they’ve differed in the past from actual Census counts and can be “a little noisy from year to year.”

Utah almost got another seat after the 2020 Census, he said, but it went to North Carolina despite some dispute over the U.S. Census Bureau not counting missionaries abroad as current residents.

Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.