How did state gain only one Congress seat?
Analysts expected Florida to earn at least two seats, Electoral College votes
The hundreds of people who streamed into Florida every day for a decade brought with them, along with traffic and everything else, an increase in the state’s political clout — greater representation in Congress and in electoral votes that decide the presidency.
But not as big an increase as expected. When official numbers came out from the Census Bureau on Monday, Florida was awarded one more congressional district, for a total of 28, and one more electoral vote, for a total of 30.
For years, Democrats, Republicans and independent analysts were practically certain that Florida is in line for two more of each.
What happened?
There’s no disputing Florida is on a roll, with the official population count up 14.6% since 2010 to 21.5 million as of April 1, 2020. Nationally, population increased 7.4% to 332.4 million.
The numbers confirmed, once again, the South and West are growing much faster than the Midwest and Northeast.
The big surprise leapt out in when congressional seats were allocated. The Constitution requires a Census every 10 years to apportion seats in the U.S. House. Each state gets one representative; the rest are divided based on population. Each state’s electoral votes are based on its number of House seats, plus two.
Actions and rhetoric by former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis could have played a role.
Immigrant population
Florida, widely expected to get two more seats, got one. Texas, expected to get three seats, got two. And Arizona, expected to get one got zero. A big commonality among those three states is a large Hispanic population, including many immigrants, both legally in the U.S. and here without documentation.
And that raises questions about the Trump effect.
For much of the former president’s time in office, he demonized immigrants who aren’t in the country legally. And for much of the planning for the 2020 Census, the Trump administration wanted to add a question about citizenship to the Census. Ultimately the Supreme Court stopped the citizenship question.
Advocates for the immigrant community said that almost certainly reduced Census participation by people who are in the U.S. without permission. (Regardless of what anyone thinks of people in the U.S. without documents, the Constitution requires counting of everyone in the country.)
If, as some suspect, that led immigrants to complete the Census at a lower rate, “it probably hurt Florida, Texas and Arizona,” said Michael Garcia, president of the civic group The Hispanic Vote, in Broward County.
Like others, Garcia said he couldn’t be certain. Kevin Wagner, a Florida Atlantic University political scientist, and Matthew Isbell, a Florida-based Democratic data consultant who runs the MCI Maps firm, said it’s impossible to know until more data comes out, and even then there may not be a definitive answer.
Broward County Commissioner Nan Rich, a former Democratic leader in the Florida Senate, said she has no doubt about what happened.
“There’s no question in my mind,” said Rich, who was chairwoman of Broward’s Complete Count Committee, which brought civic, government and business leaders together to encourage people to complete the Census. “I believe it was a whole, orchestrated attempt to undercount certain groups of people in the United States. … I think there’s a definite corollary to the whole intent of the Trump administration not to count the immigrant population or certainly to undercount it.”
Census information is legally protected and can’t be turned over to law enforcement or immigration authorities. Jorge Garrido, who leads Hispanic Vote in Palm Beach County, said many immigrants, including newly legal immigrants, don’t trust the federal government — something he said predates Trump.
And assuring people the information couldn’t be used for anything other than Census purposes ran into what was coming out of the Trump Administration, Rich said. “Everything they did was to undermine that and to raise the level of fear and uncertainty among people who are undocumented — and not just undocumented, but immigrants in general — that somehow this would be turned over to ICE and other authorities.”
One bit of evidence: the state’s population was 0.9% less than population estimates, one of the larger shortfalls in the country and about double the national shortfall.
It’s a small percentage, but in a state with 21 million-plus residents, potentially significant. Florida was about 171,000 people short of a second additional seat.
“I don’t think it’s something that’s Florida-specific,” Isbell said. “A lot of the Sunbelt areas with Hispanic populations seemed to fall a little bit below where the statistical estimates for their populations were,” he said, while some northeastern states had populations higher than the estimates. “You see a pretty clear pattern.”
Census promotion
Many states and communities had robust efforts to encourage people to participate in the Census and backed up their efforts with promotional money.
Under DeSantis, critics say, Florida did relatively little, and it was late. Arizona and Texas didn’t have the kind of ambitious promotional efforts as some other states.
Arturo Vargas, CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, who termed the counts in some states “surprising” in a statement, said the robust promotional efforts in states like California and New York and anemic efforts in Arizona and Florida may have had an impact.
“There appears to be a correlation between the investment of statewide governmental resources in census outreach and apportionment tallies,” he said.
DeSantis appointed a Florida Complete Count Committee, chaired Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, on Jan. 6, 2020.
Rich said the effort was minimal, at best. “The state was missing in action.”
Moné Holder, senior director of advocacy and programs at the left-leaning advocacy group Florida Rising, said the state could have done much more. One of the predecessor organizations that merged to create Florida Rising did extensive outreach efforts to encourage people to participate in the Census.
“We didn’t see a state Complete Count Committee formed until the final hours of the Census. And that committee didn’t do what it needed to do to make sure that education was widespread, especially in Black and brown communities,” Holder said.
Taryn Fenske, the governor’s communications director, said by email that the Nuñez-led group accomplished a lot, “funded from existing state resources at no additional expense to Florida taxpayers.”
She pointed to a list of efforts including partnerships through which Florida pro sports teams, coaches and players touted the Census; video messages tailored to each county; “faith-based content” sent to 30,000 faith and community leaders; thousands of fliers at food distribution and COVID-19 testing sites, and a Nuñez media blitz in English and Spanish.
Fenske noted that two states that spent heavily, California at $187 million and New York at $60 million, still lost one seat each.