A gain in electoral votes comes from an increase in population, the question is were most of those new voters conservatives? If not then the advantage is lost to the other side as when NC and VA went for Obama in 2008.
RipSawyer is right.
Yes, conservative states are gaining in population while rustbelt states are losing. There are many reasons for that, and one of them is that conservative fiscal policies at the state level encourage job creation.
The problem is that not everybody moving to a conservative state is conservative. Short term, people fleeing the rustbelt to get a job results in more electoral votes for a conservative-dominated state, and since with a few exceptions nearly all of the electoral college votes are from winner-take-all states, that means places like Texas gain influence as conservative powerhouses.
Long-term, we have a major demographic problem if we can't convince Hispanics other than Cubans to become Republicans. Texas is not a swing state today, but Florida is, and California — the home of Ronald Reagan — is now in the Democratic Party's camp.
Once key Southern states cross the tipping point to have large liberal minorities, RINOs will become the norm, and not long afterward, those states will become Democratic rather than RINO.
MSF BU said that “the GOP must get immigration under control and make better efforts to motivate white voters in the midwest.”
I don't see any realistic way to control immigration as long as we have lots of low-wage backbreaking jobs that most Americans simply won't do. Economics are dominating our illegal immigration problem, and it is businessmen — farmers or meatpackers in many cases — who are behind the illegal immigration problem.
If someone can show me how to convince Americans to do farm labor that most Americans haven't done for a century, or stockyard and meatpacking work that even a century ago was typically done by low-wage Irish, Italian, or Eastern European immigrants, I'm open to saying we should close our borders. I simply don't see a way to do that.
If we can't close our borders — and I don't think we can — we have to find a way to convert our current illegal immigration into legal immigration that actually meets the needs of American business and excludes people with backgrounds we don't want, much as was done in the 1800s at Ellis Island. In the meantime, we need to do what the DAR was very good at doing in the 1800s and early 1900s, namely, teaching American values to the new immigrants.
If we don't do that, we're lost as a nation.