When the Bureau of the Census begins to release information about the 2010 Census, the news will continue to have an impact on American politics. An Associated Press news release begins, “America’s population center is edging away from the Midwest, pulled by Hispanic growth in the Southwest, according to census figures. The historic shift is changing the nation’s politics and even the traditional notion of the country’s heartland – long the symbol of mainstream American beliefs and culture.”

The article continues by saying that the western states of Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho are the “fastest-growing states,” and that Texas and California have contributed to more than 25% of the nation’s population gains since 2000.

Accordingly, the Census Bureau is expected to announce that the historic center of population will move to somewhere southwest of its current location of Phelps County, Missouri. “The last time the U.S. center fell outside the Midwest was 1850, in the eastern territory now known as West Virginia. Its later move to the Midwest bolstered the region as the nation’s cultural heartland in the 20th century, central to U.S. farming and Rust Belt manufacturing sites.”

“‘It’s a pace-setting region that is dominant in population growth but also as a swing point in American politics,’ says Robert Lang, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who regularly crunches data to determine the nation’s center.”