The Trump census sabotage campaign might have backfired
In 2020, President Donald Trump tried to sabotage the census, the once-a-decade constitutionally mandated tallying of the U.S. population that determines how much political representation, federal money and other benefits communities receive. He failed to realize his most extreme plans to manipulate the count, through which he hoped to increase Republican representation and minimize Democrats’. But new numbers the Census Bureau released last month suggest that he still managed to do substantial damage both to the integrity of the process and to the confidence the public places in it.
The bureau reported that it significantly undercounted the population in six states - Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas - and overcounted the population in eight - Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah. Arkansas’s undercount rate topped 5%, while Hawaii’s overcount rate was nearly 7%. Nevertheless, the law requires that these numbers determine the distribution of congressional seats among states.
The bureau’s data did not reveal which communities in each state were miscounted. But numbers released in March showed that Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans living on reservations were undercounted nationally, while Whites and Asian Americans were overcounted. The breakdown of affected states appears to reflect these broad trends.
The undercounts might have deprived Florida and Texas both red states with large minority populations - of congressional seats. On the flip side, Minnesota and Rhode Island, which are Whiter and run by Democrats, possibly retained congressional seats their population sizes did not warrant.
For its part, the Census Bureau argues that the 2020 count was not so different from past censuses. Yet in 2010, the bureau managed to do substantially better, reporting no such miscounting. Do not blame the Census Bureau’s professional staff. They had to conduct a massive, in-person count of millions of people during a global pandemic and amid concerted Trump administration efforts to undermine their work.
That the plan to corrupt the census appears to have backfired does not absolve the former president and those in his administration for attempting to politicize the decennial exercise.
From here, the bureau, the Biden administration more broadly and Congress should ensure that the most accurate population estimates are used to distribute federal money. And Congress must examine ways to insulate the Census Bureau from future presidents seeking to corrupt basic government functions for their own political benefit.
How the federal government’s decennial tally shakes out can make a huge difference in who holds power in Washington, and on behalf of whom. It can never again be vulnerable to the kind of nakedly political assault that Trump conducted in 2020.