By 2030, nearly two-thirds of all Americans will live in the South and West

Jonathan Tilove:

In fact, the bureau forecasts that 30 percent of all Americans will be living in just three states -- California, Texas and Florida -- each of which it calculates will grow by 12 million, the total population in 2000 of Pennsylvania or Illinois.

The shift will profoundly affect American life, most obviously in culture and politics. The Sun Belt's changing racial and ethnic landscape may be the shiny silver lining for Democrats otherwise fated to watch the air leak out of much of blue America.

The overall trend continues a decades-long migration of people and power south and west that author Kevin Phillips in 1969 accurately predicted would carry Republicans to political ascendancy -- but with a twist. In ways Phillips could not have foreseen when he wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority," immigration is Latinizing significant stretches of a region whose conservative identity was forged by the white middle class. As a result, its political character is fracturing in uneven and unpredictable ways.

"I don't think the Sun Belt has the political cohesion it had 40 years ago," Phillips said from his home in Connecticut. "The Sun Belt is so dominant that it now has divisions and compartments that are really different from one another."

The continuing change will recalibrate the electoral map, with the rough Sun Belt/Snow Belt parity that existed in Richard Nixon's day yielding an increasingly lopsided Sun Belt advantage. By 2030, Florida will have more electoral votes than New York and Massachusetts combined, Arizona will match Michigan in electoral might, and North Carolina will be the equal of Pennsylvania.

Last year, 220 of President Bush's 286 electoral votes came from Sun Belt states. According to an analysis by William Frey of the Brookings Institution and University of Michigan, 2004's red states should yield 303 electoral votes in 2032 -- 245 of them in the Sun Belt.

"At first blush this looks like a windfall for the Republicans," Frey said.

But, he cautioned, 2032 is seven presidential elections away, and while the makeup of many Snow Belt states may not change that much, except to get older, politics in the Sun Belt, with its younger, growing population of new arrivals from the rest of America and around the globe, will be harder to predict. "You know who's going to be in the Snow Belt," Frey said. "In the Sun Belt, you just don't know."

The opportunity for the Democrats is in the emerging presence of Hispanics, who, with the exception of Cubans in Florida, usually vote 2-to-1 Democratic, though President Bush has done somewhat better.

John Pitney Jr., a Claremont McKenna College government professor who worked four years as a Republican National Committee researcher in the late 1980s and early '90s, put it this way: "The growth of the Latino vote presumably is the only thing keeping the Democratic leadership off Prozac."

Here are some disturbing demographic projections:

By 2030, Florida's non-Hispanic white population will have slipped to 56 percent from 66 percent and the state will be a quarter Hispanic.

Texas will be majority Hispanic. It will gain fewer than a million non-Hispanic whites between 2000 and 2030, while the Hispanic population will triple, growing by 13 million.

California, which Phillips envisioned as the cornerstone of a conservative majority but which now anchors the Democratic map, will see its Hispanic population double by 2030, growing by 11 million, while its non-Hispanic white population declines by 2 million. It will be 29 percent white and 47 percent Hispanic.

Democrats Covet the West, but Can't Keep Losing the South