Did the US 2020 census undercount the Hispanic population?

The sharply divergent ways that states either embraced census efforts or treated them as a low priority are now having repercussions for states power in Congress

Minnesota started its 2020 census outreach in 2015, bringing together local governments, foundations and businesses to spur participation. California allocated $187 million beginning in 2019 to get its people counted. And New York City alone spent $40 million on census advertising, texts and events.

By contrast, Texas didn’t invest in a census program until last September, dedicating $15 million months after the count had begun. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said in 2019 that the state would not “have a role” in aiding the count, before ultimately agreeing to an unfunded committee last January. And Arizona spent less than $1.5 million on census efforts in what remains one of the fastest-growing states.

The sharply divergent ways that states either embraced census efforts or treated them as a low priority are now having significant repercussions for each state’s power in Congress and its Electoral College votes throughout the 2020s. While the Census Bureau results released on Monday showed the West and the Sun Belt continuing to grow in population, the political gains were softer than expected.

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Arizona, Florida and Texas — Republican-run states that committed relatively few resources to the census — each ended up with one House seat fewer than the Census Bureau had forecast, while Minnesota and New York, controlled by Democrats, did better than expected.

The more detached approach taken by the three Sun Belt states raised questions about whether Republican leaders had limited their states’ political clout by not doing enough to encourage participation. And because those states have some of the largest Hispanic populations in the country, the census is already fuelling a debate over whether that group may have been significantly undercounted.

“It’s too much of a coincidence that these are three states with large Latino populations and these are three states where Republican governors did not invest in their own outreach efforts,” said Arturo Vargas, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, referring to Texas, Florida and Arizona. “There’s a lot going on here: What impact did the state investments have? What impact did the pandemic have? Too many questions to just accept the number at face value.”

Eric Holder, the former US attorney general who leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee — which aids the party’s efforts in state legislatures, which control redistricting in most states — cited the potential chilling effect of former President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies. He said the administration’s attempts “to weaponize” the census, including the push by Trump — which was ultimately unsuccessful — to include a citizenship question, might have discouraged Hispanic people in the Sun Belt states from completing surveys.

The 2020 census figures, he said, will always be suspect.

“I just wonder if it had the impact of suppressing the count, especially in the Hispanic community,” he said Tuesday. “I’m not sure there’s any way to ever prove that or to determine whether or not that’s true, but I think that’s always something that we’re going to be wondering about.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust and Holder’s counterpart, said the gaps between the census projections and the final numbers raised suspicion about the figures and could diminish trust in the census, and in government in general. Arizona, Florida and Texas each received one House seat fewer than had been anticipated, and Minnesota, New York and Rhode Island each received one more seat than had been expected.

The Census Bureau, Kincaid said, has not been transparent about why its projections were off by so much in those states.

“It’s injecting more uncertainty into an already uncertain process,” Kincaid said in an interview Wednesday. “At a time when overall American faith and confidence in the government is low, this census is only going to exacerbate that.”

The bureau said last October that it had accounted for 99.7 per cent of the nation’s housing units.

Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said that if the lower-than-expected gains in border states were the result of large undercounts, especially among Latinos, the Hispanic populations would be harmed. “What you’re going to see is a decrease in representation for those communities and a decrease in funding for those communities,” he said. “That makes it easier for Republicans to draw favourable maps for themselves in those states.”

Because the counting process was delayed by snags in the data processing effort, the Census Bureau will not release race and ethnicity data until September. Once those figures have been reported, legislatures and commissions will be able to begin drawing boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts, a crucial political process that is the centre of persistent partisan acrimony because it can determine the balance of power in Congress.

The results may be a high-stakes example of states’ getting what they paid for.

Arizona, Florida and Texas all had census self-response rates below the national average, which was 67 per cent, according to the Census Bureau. California, which spent $187 million on a campaign to encourage its residents to complete the census forms and has the largest Hispanic population in the country, had a self-response rate of 70 per cent. Still, the state lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Minnesota, which led the nation in self-response rate at 75 per cent, started its campaign five years early, building a coalition of more than 300 organisations and local governments that contacted more than 1.3 million people — about 23 per cent of the state’s population.

“There was a lot of energy and excitement behind it,” said Susan Brower, the Minnesota state demographer, who oversaw the state’s census campaign. “It was an army of census nerds.”

Minnesota’s self-response rate was higher than its 2010 number, even as the national average dropped 7 percentage points amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Brower said that in recent weeks she had been giving census presentations to the state’s congressional delegation in which she predicted that Minnesota could keep all eight of its House seats. “I was met with scepticism,” she said. “I’ve been saying all along that it’s possible. I was pleasantly surprised, but it wasn’t a total shock to me.”

At the same time in Florida, where DeSantis initially dismissed the state’s census obligations, the self-response rate was 64 per cent, below the national average. Patricia Brigham, the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said she wasn’t surprised.

“In January, Gov. DeSantis announced that Florida would form a statewide committee to raise awareness for the census, and we really heard nothing about it after that,” Brigham said. “If this led or had anything to do with an undercount, the government hurt the state of Florida.”

A spokeswoman for DeSantis said that the state did significant work to “equip, encourage, and empower participation” in the census, and noted that while New York and California spent significantly, they both lost seats.

Jose Garza, the voting rights lawyer for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus in Texas, said the state’s political leaders had for decades failed to do sufficient outreach to fully count Latino residents.

“This is something that we were all concerned about, that the state of Texas didn’t put very many resources into outreach,” Garza said. “I think it’s pretty obvious that most of the growth, or all of the growth, is coming from the minority population. It’s pretty clear that there has been a severe undercount.”

Arizona, which had widely been expected to pick up another congressional seat, is one of the fastest-growing states in the country. But for a second time, the state came in under its estimated count, said Mike Noble, the chief pollster at OH Predictive Insights, a nonpartisan research group based in Phoenix. The outcry was muted in 2010 as the state received an additional congressional seat that year.

“There’s not enough supply of Arizona housing right now,” Noble said. “But we were short again, and we didn’t get a seat, so of course you’re seeing a big outcry. The question is why, and we won’t really know that for months.”

Officials and advocates agreed that the Census Bureau figures released Monday might not be fully understood until block-by-block racial and ethnic breakdowns were released in the fall.

“That will give us a much clearer picture,” said Vargas, of the Latino Elected Officials group. “But just by the initial numbers, I smell smoke.”