The losses set up a potential fight over the makeup of congressional districts, and point to diminished power among Midwest states over a host of federal policies.
“It’s really significant as we think about the promotion of manufacturing policies, from the manufacturers that are key in all of our states in this area,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan.
The Great Lakes states which also include Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin now have 118 of 435 seats in the U.S. House, but the number will decline to 113 in 2022.
Ron Jarmin, the acting director of the U.S. Census Bureau, said a net of 84 seats in Congress have shifted from the Midwest, North and Northeast to the South and the West since 1940.
LANSING State Rep. Gary Howell and his colleagues had been up all night when then-Gov. Rick Snyder called a morning meeting with House Republicans to brief them on a last-minute deal he’d brokered to finalize a massive rewrite of Michigan energy laws.
It was the final day of Michigan’s 2016 lame-duck session, a biennial tradition of frantic and often partisan post-election legislating. Snyder was asking lawmakers to cap a marathon meeting by voting for a plan that spanned more than 200 pages and had been negotiated in the dark of night by his administration, electric utilities, environmental and business groups.