This is a neat interactive map showing the winners and losers of the Census. The biggest winner of the Census is America, which has provided a high quality of life to all of its denizens even though our population went up 10% in the last ten years. Countries with large populations have various advantages, including the ability to embark on ambitious projects like moon landings, the ability to win wars, enormous free trade zones, enormous common language zones, enormous free travel zones, access to good tourist locations, opportunities all over the country if local areas aren't suitable, standardized road and rail grades, etc, etc.
The problem with large populations is they become unwieldy and hard to coordinate, people from various regions feel alienated from people of other regions and a country feels more like a battle-zone than a unified state. The general solution to this issue has been sports leagues in America. College sports leagues play each other for a national championship, their athletes criss-crossing the country to compete with each other in a spirit of fellowship and fair play. Fans applaud high performers of all teams no matter where they come from due to love of the game, and whatever fractious spirit people have, "Go East, Beat West!," is safely subsumed into a silly ball game that can leave everyone content so long as they emerged victorious a reasonable amount of the time. The same is true of the NBA, the NFL, the MLB, the MLS, and the NHL. With this many sports leagues of Dallas vs. Washington, Arizona vs. Colorado, Minnesota vs. Wisconsin, everyone gets used to our country being a tightly tied together whole. Then the even larger sports league of the Olympics and the World Cup teaches us to cheer universally for America against the rest of the world. Between our intra-regional leagues that teach us to accept and enjoy our contact with the other states of the Union, and the international leagues that teaches us to form ranks against the outsiders, patriotic love of country generally surpasses regional enmities or dissent.
No one would want to secede from the union if it meant their sports teams could no longer play in their respective leagues. Quite simply, winning the super bowl is more important than winning a war of independence. Laugh if you like, but this is a good thing. Anything that allows a state to be more inclusive and unified is a good thing, because a state is naturally better off the bigger it becomes, so long as the people within it can still get along.
Every state in the Union's population increased over the past ten years, except Michigan. So it isn't exactly true that liberal states are becoming ghostly graveyards due to their bad policy decisions. But what is true is that generally speaking, Democratic states waned in relative power compared to their Republican rivals.
Here is an image of the Obama-Mccain election results. If we overlay the results of the census apportionment changes, we find that Obama would have lost 7 electoral votes and Mccain would have gained 7. This wouldn't have been enough to change the results, Obama won rather crushingly, but in a more competitive race, like perhaps the 2012 race, we're looking at a nearly 15 seat swing in favor of the Republican contender. If we don't win this coming election, what election would we win? These are extremely empowering Census results, giving more seats to the South and the Southwest, both traditional Republican strongholds. The question is whether we're going to do something with it, or fritter our advantage away like we did for 8 years under Bush.
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