How Trump’s plan to make Canada the 51st state could change the US… and backfire on Republicans

President-elect Donald Trump has redoubled his pressure on the United States to annex Canada this week and make it the 51st state.

“I called him Governor Trudeau because they should be the 51st state. It would be a great state,” Trump said Thursday before a room full of Republican governors of the outgoing Canadian prime minister.

The 78-year-old Trump has been harassing Trudeau and Canadians for weeks with rumors about American expansion north.

Trudeau has said bluntly that this will “never happen” and warned that it is a distraction from the newly elected president’s tariff threat, which would cause prices to rise.

Democrats have also dismissed Trump’s expansionist talk as an attempt to divert attention from his controversial Cabinet nominations and agenda.

But when it comes to representation, expanding the US to 51 states including Canada in the future is also not politically advantageous for Trump or the Republicans.

And it comes at a time when the Republican Party has been pushing for years to block other potential entry into the union because of what it would mean for their numbers in Congress.

Canada is a country with approximately forty million inhabitants, divided into ten provinces and three territories.

If it were to become one huge state as Trump has called for, it would become the most populous state next to California.

It would also be the largest state in terms of land mass, as Canada is larger than the entire US, including all 50 states combined.

What would Canada becoming a state mean for Congress?

If Canada were to hypothetically become one large U.S. state, it would represent a dramatic shift in the composition of Congress, not one that benefits Republicans.

Canada would be the 51st state entitled to two senators. While the country has people with political leanings across the spectrum, overall it is a socialized, more liberal-oriented country.

Even if the senators were not actual members of the Democratic party, they would most likely engage with the Democrats.

With such a tightly divided Senate (Republicans regained a 53-47 seat majority in January after Democrats had held the majority since 2019), adding two Canadian senators would make it harder for Republicans to maintain control with 53 seats compared to the Democrats’ 49 seats.

In the House of Representatives it is even more complicated.

Currently, there are 435 voting members of the House spread across the fifty states, each representing approximately 750,000 voters.

The total population each member represents would shift dramatically with the inclusion of Canada, as would the number of representatives from each state if the U.S. were to maintain the total of 435 voting members of the House of Representatives.

That maximum number was established in 1929 with the Permanent Distribution Act.

If the number of seats were to remain at 435, Canada would have a number of seats somewhere between California, which currently has 52 seats, and Texas, which has 38 seats thanks to 2020 census data. With the shift, dDozens of states would also lose seats.

Exactly how many seats would be blue versus red with the change is challenging to determine because of the redistribution. But as with the Senate, Canada would likely send more left-wing members to Congress, endangering Republicans’ already fragile majority in the House of Representatives.

In another scenario, Congress could also hypothetically pass a new law that would completely change the distribution of Congress and increase the number of representatives, but that would not change Canada’s overall makeup as a blue state.

Trump’s speech to add Canada as the 51st state comes as Republicans have long strongly opposed adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states, even though people in both are already U.S. citizens.

Proponents of statehood through the U.S. territory and the Capitol have argued that both countries pay taxes and have a population larger than that of several states. But Republicans have backed off because they would benefit Democrats in Congress.

“I think this is one of those things that has just been pushed aside,” Casey Burgat, of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, said of Canada’s Statehood Talk.

He said Trump’s comments have forced some in the Republican Party to try to defend it, despite it being “probably not even wanted by either party.”

What would it mean for the Electoral College?

The battle for the White House has all come down to just seven swing states in recent elections, as the US chooses presidents using the Electoral College, with electoral votes based on the results in each state.

Add Canada to the mix and Democrats enter every election with an even bigger advantage on their way to the White House.

A poll of Canadians in October before the US presidential election showed that the vast majority of them would have voted for Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in November.

According to the Leger poll, 64 percent of Canadians said they would vote for the vice president if they could vote in the election. Only 21 percent said they would vote for Trump, making it a safe assumption that Canada would be in the blue column.

Add to that a huge blue state with a large congressional delegation to the US and it would dramatically complicate the Republican Party’s path to victory.

That’s because the distribution of electoral votes per state is distributed based on the census. The number of votes is equal to the number of a state’s congressional delegations.

For example, Pennsylvania had 19 electoral votes in the 2024 election with its 17 congressional districts and two senators.

Currently, California has the most electoral votes with 54, while the second most populous state Texas has the second most electoral votes with 40.

There are currently 538 electoral votes, so a presidential candidate must get a majority of 270 to win.

Trump won the 2024 election with 312 electoral votes, against Harris’ 226, with an overview of all battleground states.

If Canada were to gain 45 seats in the House of Representatives and two senators, that would mean that 47 electoral votes would remain blocked for the Democrats, while other states would lose their representation and therefore electoral votes.

Would Canada ever choose to become a state?

While how Canada becoming a state would affect representation is a reality the U.S. would have to grapple with, the question of whether Canadians would even consider joining the U.S. is a different reality.

Trump has suggested that Canadians want to join the US, but Canadians have rejected the idea.

A Army Survey A Dec. 6-9 survey found that 82 percent of Canadians said they would not want their country to become a U.S. state, while only 13 percent said they would.

This includes the majority of all major political parties in Canada.

Trudeau on Thursday rejected Trump’s claim that Canadians want to join the US.

“Canadians define themselves in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways we all use as a shorthand is ‘we are Canadian because we are not Americans,'” Trudeau said in remarks during a visit to Washington, DC.

‘TThe hat will not change,” he added.

His comments come as Trudeau prepares to leave office and his Liberal Party searches for a new prime minister.

His party, which is more aligned with the Democrats, has been in power for almost a decade but is facing a leadership crisis, while the Conservative Party appears more likely to win a majority in this year’s elections.

However, the current unpopularity of the Liberal Party does not necessarily mean that Canadians have become more ideologically conservative, right-wing or pro-Republican, explains Professor Wendell Adjetey of McGill University.

He said she just a new leader and party to tackle Canada’s economic challenges.