The New(er) South?

Some interesting news from the Census Bureau:

ATLANTA (AP) -- Georgia will add another 3.8 million people in the next 25 years, putting the state's population over 12 million and launching Georgia past Ohio and New Jersey in population, according to the latest estimate from the Census Bureau.

Georgia will be the nation's eighth most populous state by 2030, according to the estimate released Thursday. Georgia ranked 10th in 2000. The growth will be enough to give Georgia one more seat in Congress, to 14.

In other words, Atlanta's traffic problems will get even worse... lovely (and as you may notice in the picture, the highways downtown can get as large as 12 lanes wide, so if something of that magnitude can get congestion, you should be able to understand how bad Atlanta's traffic can be).

There are a bit of cool tidbits from this the new data. North Carolina will surpass Georgia as the most populous Southern state that doesn't begin with an F. I was also surprised by the projections that Arizona would be the 10th most populous state in the nation by 2030. Part of me wonders why the hell anybody under the age of 50 would want to move out to Arizona, but that could be my assumptions that Arizona consists of only deserts, cacti, the Grand Canyon, and John McCain.

The most interesting bit, considering the growth of Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina is this:

Growing like kudzu, the South is expected to have a population of about 143.3 million in 2030. In percentage terms, that means 39.4 percent of the U.S. population will live in the South. With another quarter in the West, that leaves just over a third in the once dominant Midwest and Northeast.

Now the question is, politically, what kind of people will be coming down here? They are obviously moving from Nothern states that are considered Democratic strongholds to states that hold that distinction for the Republican Party (54% growth in Utah? wtf mate)? Time will tell.

Also, to answer a question that was presented to me earlier today, the Census considers the South region to include the following states: Delaware, Washington D.C., Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Some of you may be extremely confused by the inclusion of Delaware (and possibily Maryland and Oklahoma as well). The Census' definition, in essence, includes every state (or in the case of Oklahoma, territory) that held slaves c. 1865, with the exception of Missouri.