Trump is ending the census count early. It's a feat of profound political cynicism
ASupreme Court ruling this week allowed the Trump administration to end the 2020 census two weeks early, risking an undercount of members of the population who are difficult to reach – particularly immigrants, transients, and the poor. From the beginning, the administration has attempted to meddle with what is usually a scrupulously non-partisan process in order to advance its goal of disenfranchising and immiserating parts of the country which do not vote Republican. And following this court ruling, it is on track to get away with it.
Even by Trump’s own standards of naked partisanship and self-dealing, the weaponization of the census has been cynical and alarming. By deliberately attempting to produce an undercount in certain parts of the country, and by trying to seize control of the process whereby the census is used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives and Electoral College, the administration is leaving behind a tainted legacy.
Why does the census even matter? As well as being the basis for distributing political power between and within the states, the data from the census guides the allocation of about $1.5t in federal funding each year. The constitution states that the census has to take place every ten years and be based on an “actual enumeration” of residents, meaning that the Census Bureau is not permitted to use statistical models to make up for an inaccurate count. If the census isn’t accurate, then the country has to live with the consequences until the next one takes place a decade later.
The Trump administration’s interference began with its attempt to insert a citizenship question into the census, which was designed to suppress responses from immigrants. After the Supreme Court found that excuses for inserting the question were “contrived”, Trump claimed the right to unilaterally alter the Census Bureau’s count to exclude undocumented immigrants. The administration is now rushing to end the census early in order to ensure that Trump, and not a successor with more respect for the constitution, is still in the White House to transmit the altered figures.
The immediate result of this move would be diminished political representation and federal resources for communities with large numbers of such immigrants. But the more long-term result would be the delegitimization of yet another vital institution. In recent years, Republicans have cynically stacked the Supreme Court and undermined confidence in the electoral process through baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots. Now they refuse to carry out the simple act of counting how many people are resident in the country in order to fairly distribute power and resources. With every institution they bring low, they undermine the trust that makes governing a large and diverse democracy possible.
The politicization of the census is just as disturbing as these other developments. It is a basic principle of democracy that power and resources be distributed based on population – one person, one vote, one equal share. As Republicans face the reality of a demographic shift away from their ageing white base, they would rather deny the very existence of groups to which they are unfavorable – particularly immigrants – than share power and resources. It wouldn’t be the first time the party has pulled this trick. After the 1920 census showed that city dwellers – many of whom were immigrants – outnumbered rural residents for the first time in American history, the Republican-led House of Representatives refused to reapportion Congressional seats accordingly. It took decades and the intervention of the Supreme Court to restore a semblance of fairness.
As they attempt to cope with yet another Republican attack on democracy, Democrats have no clear guidelines on how to respond. This time it is they who control the House of Representatives, but it is unclear what will happen if Democrats simply refuse to accept the incorrect figures transmitted by the Trump White House. The most likely outcome is that no reapportionment will happen at all, freezing the country in an unfair and regressive status quo. And for so long as the filibuster stifles the Senate, legal changes which might ameliorate the negative impacts of a sabotaged count will be hard if not impossible to achieve.
But the broader issue raised by the census is how Republican nativism and partisanship exert a death grip on American politics. When one of the two main parties no longer believes in democracy, it forces people to expend time and energy battling for the most basic of principles – even the right to have their existence acknowledged – rather than working to address the country’s very real problems. Removing Republicans from power in November won’t free the nation from this problem. The battle to rejuvenate American democracy will still be long and hard. But it will at least be a victory for the principle that every vote has a right to be counted and every voice has a right to be heard. And from there, a true reckoning with what ails the nation can begin.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University, and host of the podcast America Explained