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With the 2020 census on the horizon, there's been a lot of chatter about which states stand to lose seats and which stand to gain. This doesn't just impact representation in Congress, but also the electoral power of each state in presidential electionswhich everyone should know by now is determined by the Electoral College.

CNN's Chris Cillizza looked at the projected changes and determined "the news is very good for the Southwest and South and not at all good for the industrial Midwest and Northeast." Cillizza notes that "Texas is projected to be the biggest gainer post-2020, adding three more congressional districts due to massive population growth over the past decade." Florida is also expected to gain two seats, while Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon "are also projected to each gain another congressional seat."

Who are the losers? Ten states are expected to lose at least one congressional district: Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

To figure out what this all means, Cillizza went back and tracked the biggest changes in congressional representation since the 2000 census, and here's what he calculated:

Texas (+9 seats)

Florida (+6)

Arizona (+4)

Georgia (+3)

Colorado (+2)

North Carolina (+2)

And thebiggest losers:

New York (-5 seats)

Ohio (-4)

Pennsylvania (-4)

Illinois (-3)

Michigan (-3)

"That 30-year trend is unmistakable," says Cillizza. "The South and Southwest are growing increasingly powerful. The Rust Belt is getting rapidly weaker."

While the 2020 census won't change anything for the upcoming election, it's worth noting here that five of the six biggest seat-gainers were Trump states in 2016, and of the losers, Trump won three while Hillary won two. Michigan and Pennsylvania, two of the losing states, may have been won by Trump, but have mostly voted Democrat in recent elections. But, overall, the advantage is clearly for Republicans based on these trends.

There is, however, a huge caveat. And I can't overstate just how huge. The Republican stronghold of Texas has become increasingly competitive, and could become a swing state in future elections. It's expected to vote Trump in 2020, but population changes over the years have increased liberal influence in the state, and down the road, Republicans may find themselves aggressively competing for Texas and it's electoral votes. Should Texas ever go blue, Cillizza notes, "all of the smaller, more incremental gains for Republicans from population movement over the last few decades disappear."

The bottom line here is that Republicans should not dismiss concerns about Texas trending purple, or even put it off. The time to address the problem is now.

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Matt Margolis is the author ofTrumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacyand the bestselling bookThe Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter@MattMargolis

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The Electoral Map Is Shifting in Favor of Republicans, But There's a Catch | News and Politics - PJ Media

National Republicans are breaking with a U.S. House recruit, George Buck, who is running in Florida's competitive 13th Congressional District, after he sought donations from supporters by insinuating that several Democrats, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, should be hanged.

In a fundraising email sent last week, the Republican candidate's campaign for the St. Petersburg-area seat, singled out Omar and falsely accused the Somali-born Democrat, elected in last year's midterms, of working for the country of Qatar and asserted she should be punished, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

The email also mentions Buck's Democratic rival, incumbent Rep. Charlie Crist, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.

"We should hang these traitors where they stand," the email reads, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The campaign literature does not explicitly state who he is referring to as alleged traitors, the paper reported.

ABC News has not independently reviewed the campaign literature.

Buck initially told the Tampa Bay Times he did not write the email, even though it included his signature, adding, "I would never talk like that."

In a statement to ABC News Wednesday, when asked about the fundraising email and the NRCC's decision, Buck asserted that treason is a crime punishable by death.

"I am a decorated veteran of the 101st Airborne Division. As someone who has taken the oath to defend the Constitution, I take that oath very seriously," he said in the statement. "Anyone who commits treason against the United States should be tried to the full extent of the law."

"Treason is one of the few crimes the Constitution has as punishable by death," he added.

In a Facebook post Wednesday, he also said, "Any Republican who calls me out for my rhetoric but doesn't call out the Democrats for theirs are hypocrites."

Buck did not respond when asked by ABC News if he is suggesting Omar or the other Democrats mentioned in his campaign literature committed treason.

Omar's campaign did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., disavowed Buck's email, saying in a statement Wednesday, "theres no place for inciting violence in politics."

"Instead of doubling down on these disgraceful comments, the candidate ought to apologize unequivocally and denounce these unacceptable statements," he continued.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP's campaign arm, dropped Buck from its "Young Guns" program, the party's recruitment and mentoring program for rising House candidates running in competitive races -- a move that distances the GOP from the controversial candidate who is standing by the email.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made the decision to remove Buck from the program, and NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, agreed with the decision, according to a committee spokesperson. Buck was announced as a member of the program on Oct. 30, alongside 23 other Republicans.

Tlaib, one of Omar's key allies, quickly came to her defense, condemning Buck's email in a tweet: "The fact that those who make these violent threats very publicly without hesitation reaffirms just how much white supremacy has spread within the @NRCC. They are raising money on a call to hang a Black Muslim member of Congress and too many are silent. @IlhanMN."

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump has frequently ridiculed Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley--four minority congresswomen who have dubbed themselves the "Squad" on the campaign trail, drawing criticism from both Democrats and some Republicans for his rhetoric.

Ocasio Cortez, Pressley and Tlaib were born in the U.S., and Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a child, has been living in the country since she was 12 years old and is a U.S. citizen. In the 2018 midterm elections, all four women won a popular vote to claim their seats in Congress.

Trump has particularly targeted Omar calling her "an America-hating socialist."

The president threaded a vicious string of verbal attacks against Omar at an October campaign rally in her home district, calling out her positions on Israel, which elicited scattered "send her back" chants from the crowd.

"She is a disgrace to our country, and she is one of the big reasons that I'm going to win and the Republican party is going to win Minnesota in 13 months," he continued.

Buck isn't the only congressional candidate to take aim at Omar.

Twitter suspended the account of Danielle Stella, Omar's Republican opponent in the 5th Congressional District race, after she falsely suggested the congresswoman may have passed intel to Iran and should be "tried for treason and hanged," according to the New York Times referencing a screenshot of a tweet sent from her account.

ABC News did not review the original tweet, which can no longer be accessed.

Omar previously denied the allegations made against her according to The Jerusalem Post. Her office told the New York Times that such stories are outlandishly absurd.

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National GOP breaks with House candidate who says 'traitors' should be 'hanged' - ABC News

We are in that festive period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but do you remember how you spent National Impeach Obama Week? That was the period in 2014 when the Coalition to Impeach Obama Now sought the removal of President Obama by staging national protests. The plan was to unfurl impeachment banners at road intersections and bridges across America. Among the impeachable offenses broadcast included bizarre and erratic behavior which implies psychological pathology and governing by dictatorial fiat with lawless executive order.

But where are they now? Why no protest of lawless executive orders when President TrumpDonald John TrumpTop Democrat: 'Obstruction of justice' is 'too clear not to include' in impeachment probe Former US intel official says Trump would often push back in briefings Schiff says investigators seeking to identify who Giuliani spoke to on unlisted '-1' number MORE has signed more than Obama? What about when Trump declares he has an Article Two with the right to do whatever he wants as president? Where are concerns of bizarre and erratic behavior when the president refers to himself as a very stable genius and the chosen one who has great and unmatched wisdom? Where is the outrage at governing by dictatorial fiat when Trump seeks to bribe a foreign leader to help himself win an election and stay in power?

The political hypocrisy over the years is not limited to a fringe group draping their spray painted Impeach Obama bedsheets from highway overpasses. Many Republican leaders at the state and national levels are demonstrating a kind of ziplock ability to unfasten themselves from past impeachment standards in order to seal their loyalty with Trump.

Take Republican Representative Michael Burgess of Texas. When he spoke at a Tea Party gathering in his district in 2011, he advocated impeaching Obama. But when he voted last month against the impeachment inquiry into Trump, Burgess called the process a sham and a shame and an exercise in futility. Speaking of futility, he has also devoted himself to defunding the Energy Department efficiency standards for incandescent light bulbs. Glaciers may be melting, Venice is flooding, and wildfires are burning, but he will make the world safe for conventional light bulbs.

Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma alleged a coverup in the Obama investigation of the attack in Benghazi in 2013. People may be starting to use the i word before too long, he said during an interview, referring to impeachment. Today, the i word is inconsistent. Inhofe called the current investigation full of smear tactics used by Democratic lawmakers who are desperate and singularly focused on discrediting and delegitimizing President Trump, no matter what, in spite of his successes with the economy, military, and judges. Evidently, there is a constitutional exemption from impeachment based on stock market performance.

When Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa was asked earlier this month whether it is acceptable for a sitting president to ask a foreign power to investigate a political rival, she refused to answer. Instead of addressing claims against Trump, her defense has been to argue that impeachment distracts from more pressing issues. Five years ago, Ernst was not worried that impeachment might divert policy discussion. In 2014, she said that Obama was absolutely overstepping his bounds and should face those repercussions whether it be removal from office or impeachment.

Let us also not forget the South Dakota Republican Party, which voted in 2014 to demand the impeachment of Obama when he exchanged five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo for former Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who had been captured in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, the executive board of the South Dakota Republican Party passed a resolution in full support of Trump and castigated Democrats for trying to do through this impeachment fiasco what they cannot achieve at the ballot box.

Finally, there is the eloquent hypocrisy of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who frothingly defends Trump today. However, when President Clinton was being impeached back in 1999, Graham said, You do not even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing of the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.

Are you listening, Lindsey? If so, which Lindsey are you listening to?

Steve IsraelSteven (Steve) J. IsraelElise Stefanik tests impeachment waters for moderates in Congress The Hill's Campaign Report: Impeachment looms large over Democratic debate Is Mayor Pete the man to beat? MORE represented New York in Congress for 16 years and served as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. He is now the director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. You can find him on Twitter @RepSteveIsrael.

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Republicans need to face reality with hypocrisy on impeachment | TheHill - The Hill

Then-Republican candidate for Governor Ron DeSantis holds a rally in Orlando, Fla., November 5, 2018. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

A new St. Leos poll in Florida shows Governor Ron DeSantis sporting an approval rating of 68 percent (with a disapproval of 20 percent). Whats most impressive about these numbers is that in every demographic that matters, DeSantis is polling above 50 percent with both sexes, Hispanic (67 percent approval) and black voters (63), and among both parties.

When it comes to governorships, Florida isnt an outlier. The last time the Morning Consult poll tabulated a list of the most popular governors, the top 14 and 18 of the top 20 were Republicans. These Republicans govern in states that have highly diverse electorates, from Alabama to Vermont.

Which is weird, because this very week, progressives at the New York Times and the Atlantic were assuring us that the GOP was so reviled nationally and its agenda so toxic to the average American that the party has been compelled to hide from democratic accountability.

Naturally, Charlie Baker cant support the same policies in Massachusetts that Mark Gordon can in Wyoming. And some of these governors have their agendas tempered by Democratic legislatures, while others do not. But, like DeSantis, all of them tend to govern with a conservative disposition, and most of them openly advocate a conservative agenda.

How many progressive governors do you see near the top of the list? Kate Brown of Oregon, perhaps the most progressive governor in the country, is also one of its least popular. Gavin Newsom, whos pushed a slate of left-wing policies, owns an approval rating in heavily liberal California thats on par with Donald Trumps national numbers. Rational, pragmatic, progressive J. B. Pritzkers polls are horrible. Andrew Cuomos numbers are brutal. The only Democrats in the top 20 are Steve Bullock and John Carney, two of the most moderate liberal governors in the country.

Nothing is static in politics, and there are an array of factors that drive a politicians approval. (Heres a deeper dive by John McCormack on why Republicans are succeeding.) But its a bit difficult to ignore the striking skew of this list.

It seems to me that voters have a far more personal, less ideological stake in their governors than they do in the politicians they send to Washington as proxies in broader philosophical battles. Congress, thankfully, does little real policy work. Governors are far more likely to be judged on nuts-and-bolts governance, stability, and competence. In this regard, its pretty clear that Republicans are figuring out ways to stay relevant and popular in lots of areas of the country. Its also pretty clear that voters are able to compartmentalize their local and national votes. Pundits who treat Trumps approval rating as the ultimate indicator of the GOPs political fortunes are doing their readers a disservice.

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If the Republican Party Is Dying, Why Are Their Governors So Popular? - National Review

Having been boxed in by the overwhelming evidence of Donald Trump's guilt on the Ukraine extortion campaign, on collusion with a Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election and on subsequent efforts to cover it up Republicans have given up trying to carve out rational-sounding defenses for his criminal behavior. Instead, they've moved into the territory of simply denying reality, with little seeming interest in trying to make their lies sound plausible at all.

Republican members on the House Intelligence Committee just released what amounts to a "pre-buttal" of the truth, expected in the upcoming Democratic report. There is no attempt to engage with the actual evidence against Trump, just more spewing of conspiracy theories and lies meant to distract Trump's followers. The document shows, according to Stephen Collinson of CNN, that Republicans have fully embraced the Trumpian stratey of calling "on supporters to ignore the evidence of their own eyes."

Similarly, reports suggest that Attorney General Bill Barr is back to his old tricks of running cover for Trump's collusion with Russian intelligence and obstruction of justice.According to the Washington Post,Barr "disagrees with the Justice Departments inspector generalon one of the key findings in an upcoming report," which is that the FBI had ample reason to look into the Trump campaign's extensive Russian connections.

As with the GOP report from House Intelligence, this amounts to nothing more than a laughable assurance that the sky is not blue because it suits Trump to believe the sky is red.

What Republicans hope to accomplish with all this blatant lying in the short term is obvious: just enough excuses for Trump voters to repeat their grotesque transgression against decency in the voting booth in 2020. There appears to be no thought involved, beyond doing whatever it takes to keep power in November.

But that does raise the question of how conservatives imagine this playing out in the long term, particularly with regard to how the history books will think of this moment and the role Republicans are playing in it.

The overwhelming evidence against Trump is such that even some of the more cowardly mainstream media outlets are moving away from the "some say bears are bears while others say bears are sheep, and there's no way to know the difference" coverage and towards more substantive "yep, he did it" coverage.

Historians, we must hope, will have even less incentive to shy away from drawing the straightforward conclusion that Trump is super-duper guilty (of the Ukraine extortion and many other things). The upcoming failure to convict him in the Senate is an inarguable demonstration that the entire Republican Party has abandoned their duties to the rule of law. Trump's guilt and Republican complicity will be regarded as historical facts, at least in the traditional academic sense of the term.

But, as anyone who has dealt with conservatives before is aware, just because something is a historical fact doesn't mean it will be accepted as such by the right. On the contrary, there's a long-standing tendency in American conservatism of trying to erase, distort or otherwise confuse people about history, usually for the purpose of making their historical counterparts look better, or to make their current viewpoints seem less toxic.

One of the oldest and most egregious examples of this is the decades spent by conservatives seeding the myth that the Civil War was about an abstract debate over "states' rights," when, in fact, the Confederacy clearly and undeniably sought to secede in order to protect the institution of slavery. It's a lie that is up there with Holocaust denialism, in terms of its immorality. Sadly, it has had far more mainstream acceptance, and even more of a widespread social and political impact, than Holocaust denialism.

The ongoing fights over the Confederate war memorials largely erected in the 20th century to intimidate black people, but justified with the same "states' rights" nonsense is a testament to the way that a politically convenient lie can persist for decades, even in the face of overwhelming evidence contradicting it. Which raises a real concern that even after Trump is gone, conservatives unwilling to admit that they made a mistake, and perhaps eager to double down on the politics of Trumpism will move to rewrite history in the same way they are trying to rewrite the present, casting Trump as a hero and those who tried to stop his crimes as the villains.

It's an open question. There's plenty of right-wing blights on history right-wingers being a major source of historical blight that modern day Republicans don't try to erase from the record. There's no big push in the modern right to revise the history of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, for instance.And while some conservatives have tried to shift historical understandings by claiming that Joe McCarthy was right about the commies or minimizing the gains of feminism, mostly these efforts mostly haven't caught fire.

But some conservative efforts to revise history away from the facts have been disturbingly successful. The realities of lynching, race riots, and the successful campaign to deprive black Americans of property and wealth have been mostly erased from mainstream history. Only recently, under pressure from historians, activists and black journalists, has this forgotten history been revitalized in public. The civil rights movement and the segregationist policies it opposed have been harder to hide, so conservatives have tried to appropriate that history, claiming falsely to be the true heirs of the civil rights legacy and falsely accusing current anti-racists of opposing the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. and other social justice pioneers.

Notably, the parts of our history where conservatives have focused most of their energy, and have been most successful at distorting reality tend to be about race, although they have also waged counterattacks on labor, women's rights and environmentalism. Even now, conservatives are having a multi-month meltdown over the New York Times publishing a series of pieces about the legacy of slavery and racism, with an intensity they'd never bring to, say, a discussion of violent strike-breaking in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

All that makes the question of whether or not Republicans will eventually drop the "Trump is innocent" act an especially interesting one. On one hand, Trump's crimes are about corruption, the sort of thing Republicans often don't bother denying once it's drifted from the newspaper to the history books. We're seeing this happen presently with George W. Bush, where the same people who used to adamantly deny that he lied about WMDs in Iraq are largely though not completely giving up the ghost. It's easy to imagine a world where, once Trump is gone, Republicans move on and pretend they weren't all crazy about the guy and willing to tell any outrageous and ridiculous lie to protect him.

On the other hand, Trump's popularity on the right is due mostly to his racism. The lies Republicans tell may be about his corruption, but their purpose in telling them is to protect the white grievance politics that Trump peddles. He might end up being a figure somewhat like the Confederate generals, Klansmen and segregationists of old, whom conservatives trying to paint as noble heroes standing up for a valiant "lost cause." Even Ronald Reagan gets some glow from that, as the corruption of Iran-Contra is largely forgotten while conservatives exalt Reagan, who ran an ugly race-baiting campaign, as a legendary American hero.

Nixon was also a racist, but maybe not as overtly and ferociously so as Reagan, so Nixon doesn't get much of a fierce defense from the modern-day right. Also, Nixon resigned in disgrace while Reagan served two full terms, making it a lot easier for conservatives to play dumb about Reagan's likely corruption.

Where will Trump land on this scale of conservative historical revisionism? Will he be lauded as a hero? Will the evidence against him be denied by conservatives for generations to come? Or will they give up trying to defend the indefensible once the immediate political need for it comes to an end? It's genuinely hard to predict, but whatever direction they choose to go will say a lot about what conservatism in a post-Trump world will look like.

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Will Republicans be able to wipe Trump's crimes from the history books? - Salon