WASHINGTON — Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country, demographers have found, signaling what could be a faster-than-expected transition to a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the American population.
The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner.
“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.
The pattern first started nearly two decades ago in a handful of states with aging white populations like Pennsylvania and West Virginia. But fertility rates dropped drastically after the Great Recession and mortality rates for whites who are not of Hispanic origin have been rising, driven partly by drug overdoses. That has put demographic change on a faster track. The list of states where white deaths outnumber births now includes North Carolina and Ohio.
The change has broad implications for identity and for the country’s political and economic life, transforming a mostly white baby boomer society into a multiethnic and racial patchwork. A majority of the youngest Americans are already nonwhite and look less like older generations than at any point in modern American history. In California, 52 percent of all children are living in homes with at least one immigrant parent, Professor Sáenz said.
What does it mean for the political map? Some experts say that rapid demographic change became a potent issue in the 2016 presidential race — and helped drive white voters to support Donald J. Trump.
Of the 26 states where deaths now exceed births for whites, 13 voted for Mr. Trump and 13 voted for Hillary Clinton. Four are states that flipped from President Barack Obama in 2012 to Mr. Trump in 2016 — Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. But it is not clear how demographic change will affect politics in the future.
“People say demographics is destiny and there’ll be more people of color — all that is true,” said Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University. “But they also say the U.S. is going to become more progressive, and we don’t know that. We should not assume that white moderates and liberals will maintain current political allegiances, nor should we expect that the so-called nonwhite group is going to work in any kind of coalition.”
At its most basic level, the change is about population, but each state is experiencing it differently.
Florida was the first state where white deaths outstripped births around 1993, largely because it was drawing a lot of retirees. But its population has been one of the fastest growing in the nation. Retirees have kept coming, replenishing the white population, and its large Hispanic population has helped lift the state over all. The median age for Hispanics in the United States is 29, prime for child bearing, compared with 43 for whites.
Deaths began to exceed births for whites countrywide in 2016, according to the report. But in many states, as in Florida, white people moving in made up the losses. However, in 17 states, including California, Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio, those migrants weren’t enough and the white populations declined between 2015 and 2016, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire and the report’s other author. Five of those states registered drops in their total populations that year: Vermont, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Connecticut.
