How the South’s youth boom could change America

The South was the only region in the nation which recorded an increase in the number of residents under 18 over the past five years, according to the latest Census data, while the Northeast, Midwest, and West saw their share of young people plunge.

This rise in children and young adults in the South—which includes tens of thousands of future voters—holds the potential to change the cultural and political identity and economic status of the region in the coming decades, something which the Republican Party is already warning against.

Numbers of Young People Fall Everywhere But the South

At the national level, the number of Americans under 18 fell by 2.4 percent between 2020 and 2025, reflecting the country’s declining birth rates, while rising by a modest 2.1 for those aged between 18 and 24, according to Census data.

In the West, the decline in the number of young people was even more significant, with the share of residents under 18 plunging by 5.7 percent—the biggest drop in the nation; the number of those aged between 18 and 24 rose by a modest 0.8 percent.

In the Northeast, the number of residents under 18 fell by 4.1 percent, while that of those aged 18-24 fell by 2.1 percent. In the Midwest, the number of residents under 18 fell by 3.9 percent, while that of those aged 18-24 rose by 1.9 percent.

Only in the South both categories reported an increase, with the number of residents under 18 rising by 1.1 percent and that of those aged 18-24 by 5 percent. It is not only young people: all age groups in the South grew faster than in any other region from 2020 to 2025, data shows.

Between April 1, 2020, and July 1, 2025, the data analyzed by the Census, the South grew by 6 percent, nearly double the nation’s 3.1 percent population growth.

“If you look at the nation as a whole, there’s actually been a decline in the under age 18 population now since 2010,” demographer William H. Frey, a senior fellow with Brookings Metro, told Newsweek.

“Between the 2010 and 2020 census, there was a decline of the under-age 18 population—an absolute loss of under 18 people in the United States. And that’s continued over this five-year,” he added.

“The continued transition of baby boomers into retirement age, compounded by local migration and fertility patterns, is shifting the demographic makeup of the country,” Lauren Bowers, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates branch, said in a statement.

“The South stands out because it is seeing population gains in age groups that in other regions saw little change or are declining, reflecting its strong positive migration patterns this decade.”

Why Is the South Alone Growing?

The South has been winning the country’s population game for years now, with a particular boost reported during the pandemic years thanks to a surge in domestic migration from the Northeast and the West to Sunbelt states such as Florida and Texas.

A mix of housing affordability, lower cost of living, friendly tax environments, job opportunities, and good weather is what has proven the biggest pull of these states for many Americans.

Domestic migration to Southern states has slowed down since the end of the health emergency, as employers issued return-to-office orders to those who had left big cities in the Northeast and West for the Sunbelt.

“People started moving to the Southern states during the pandemic because they were shutting down workplaces in the Northeast and the coastal areas,” Frey said.

“The Southern gains were pretty high during the pandemic and a couple of years after it. Growth is still high, of course, but it’s gone down a little bit because that domestic migration is not quite as strong as it was before, it petered off,” he added.

“Immigration is going down, and that’s what makes this five-year period sort of wobbly,” Frey explained. “The South, which was gaining residents during the pandemic, doesn’t have that immigration it used to have and it doesn’t have the strong domestic migration that it had three or four years ago.”

Even with this slowdown, the South is still faring better than all other U.S. regions—driven by a few big states.

“I think it’s an overstatement to say that it’s the whole South who’s gaining young residents, because there are fast, big-gaining states like Texas and Florida and North Carolina and then you’ve got Mississippi and Alabama, for example, and these other states aren’t, doing nearly as well,” Frey said.

“But as a whole, the South and those big gainers are still doing okay.”

A state like Florida has traditionally attracted large numbers of South American migrants, thanks to existing large communities from countries such as Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela in cities like Miami.

And immigration plays a key factor in keeping states young, Frey said, as “migrants in general are younger than the rest of the population. People in their 20s and early 30s have the highest migration rate. These are people in their childbearing age, who might have children after a while of being in the U.S. and makes the age structure of the state a little bit younger.”

How A Younger Population Could Change the South

In a rapidly graying America where deaths are expected to surpass births by 2030, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, having a still-growing young population could prove massively consequential for the South and the entire country.

First of all, it might be a stronger position in the national economy.

“It’s going to be the productive people who move into the younger parts of the labor force, and they’re also going to be part of the big consumer population,” Frey said. “Companies are going to survive because they sell products and goods. You want to have people there that are going to be able to do that,” he added.

“The labor force is going to have to learn new computer technologies and social networking and all of these things which are likely to continue to change, and it’s always the younger population that becomes much more adept at doing that,” Frey said. “And so they become more productive parts of the labor force as they grow older.”

Then there is the potential political impact of a younger population, considering that a recent Harvard poll found that more young registered U.S. voters vote Democrat than Republican (45 percent to 26 percent). While it is hard to predict which side young voters will lean toward in the coming years and decades, a shift from red to blue for many Southern states is not entirely out of the picture.

“It’s not just a youthful population, but the youthful population is also more racially diverse. More Latinos, more Black people, more Asian people, and other groups as well,” Frey said.

“I think that the parties and the politicians that reach out to those groups, in addition to the fact that they’re young, have to consider that they are people from lots of different backgrounds,” he added.

“The South has continued to vote Republican in lots of ways and a lot of presidential elections, except for very recently. Some of that has to do, you could say, with the civil rights movement and the changes that occurred in the South, and they still have a large white Republican vote in a lot of Southern states,” Frey said.

“But now as that younger population, the growing population, becomes more racially diverse, even in the South that could change things for them.”

A Politically Fraught Answer to America’s Aging

For Fray, international immigration is the nation’s “only solution to this extreme aging that we are facing,” he told Newsweek.

“Immigrants and their children are younger than the rest of the population. Eventually they’re going to get old too, but if they keep coming in at younger ages, that slows down the national aging,” he said.

While politically fraught, the idea of welcoming more migrants into the country is the only way for the country to become “less old,” Frey said, “because they’re going to help that younger part of the labor force and the child population from declining.”

For 25 years now, Frey said, the number of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

“The number of white people under the age 18 has been declining. And the only reason we don’t have an even bigger decline in the younger population is because we have immigrants,” the demographer explained.

“In the last two years a lot of people in the country have felt that we have too many immigrants, so these immigrants shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I think that’s a bad strategy, demographically, for the future. I think more people need to understand the importance of the immigrant population just to keep our population growing and keep it younger.”