Census

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How the Census Bureau Stood Up to Donald Trump’s Meddling

      by

      WASHINGTON — There were 10 days left in the Trump presidency. And John Abowd and Tori Velkoff had a decision to make.Six months earlier, in July 2020, President Donald Trump had ordered the Census Bureau, where they were senior officials, to produce a count of every unauthorized immigrant in the nation, separate from the 2020 census count that was well underway. The Trump administration’s goal was to strip those immigrants from the population count used to divvy up House seats among the states.The move promised to benefit Republicans by sapping electoral strength from Democratic-leaning areas and handing more voting power to older, white and most likely more conservative populations.Mr. Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist, and Ms. Velkoff, its chief demographer, were obligated by law to carry out the president’s orders. They’d assigned some of their top experts to produce an immigrant count from billions of government records. Mr. Trump had also inserted four political appointees into the bureau’s top ranks since June, in no small part to ensure that the numbers were delivered.But despite months of work, the results, in Mr. Abowd’s and Ms. Velkoff’s view, fell far short of the bureau’s standards for accuracy. Now the agency’s director, Steven Dillingham, was demanding the tallies — accurate or not — before the president left office.Mr. Abowd and Ms. Velkoff went to Ron Jarmin, the deputy director. The trio, who had more than 75 years of experience in the bureau among them, agreed on a response: They would reject the demand unless they could explain in a technical report why the numbers were useless. (In an interview this month, Mr. Dillingham said that he was merely asking for an assessment of the immigrant tabulations, with whatever caveats were necessary. “I said, look over that data and see if any of it is ready,” he said.)Mr. Jarmin then sent a message to three other Census Bureau experts whom he had assigned to assist the political appointees. Stop whatever you’re doing, it said. Any future orders will come from me.That internal struggle, which has not been previously reported, was the breaking point in a battle with the Trump administration over political interference in the census. By now, tales of Trump appointees disrupting, or outright corrupting, the work of federal agencies are familiar. But in this case, the meddling threatened not just to change the allocation of federal power, but also to skew the distribution of trillions of federal tax dollars.It was not a revolt or some sort of deep-state resistance that thwarted that effort. Instead, a slice of the career bureaucracy that keeps the federal government running, day in and day out, stood up for what it saw as the core function of the Census Bureau — to produce the gold standard for data about the nation’s population.“We tried to do what we thought was statistically sound and valid,” Ms. Velkoff said in an interview in June. “If we didn’t have a statistically sound and valid methodology, then we pushed back.”The episode pitting career officials against political appointees raises an important question: Should the Census Bureau be better protected from such political interference in the future?The White House had initially sought to identify unauthorized immigrants by adding a question about citizenship to the census form itself. Mr. Abowd had warned that doing so would harm the quality of the count. In focus groups the bureau conducted, people in various ethic groups expressed an “unprecedented” level of concern about giving the government identifying information, according to a 2017 report on the research. Nonetheless, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of the Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau, ordered the agency to go ahead with the citizenship question.But in June 2019, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Ross’s proffered rationale — that adding the citizenship question was necessary to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — calling it “contrived.”With that avenue closed, the administration immediatelyordered the Census Bureau to gather data on unauthorized immigrants by combing through records of some 20 federal agencies.Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues spent the next year collecting immigrant data from the administrative records. Then in July 2020, Mr. Trump ordered the data to be used to remove unauthorized immigrants from the coming census totals that would reapportion the House for the next decade. But to segregate unauthorized immigrants from the census totals for each state, there first had to be a census.And that was a problem. In the summer of 2020, the bureau faced the huge challenge of counting every household in the midst of a pandemic. Despite that, Mr. Ross ordered the agency to finish the count by Sept. 30 and to produce the politically crucial population figures for apportioning House seats among the states by Dec. 31. The deadlines ensured the census totals would be delivered to Mr. Trump whether or not he won the November election.Internally, census officials were aghast. Anyone who thought the agency could meet the December deadline, the day-to-day leader of the census, Timothy Olson, wrote to Mr. Jarmin and other senior census officials, “has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.”But the anti-immigrant forces within Mr. Trump’s administration kept the pressure on, creating four new political jobs in the bureau’s top ranks — an unprecedented step — beginning in June 2020.Senior bureau officials gave them offices. They also quietly ordered that the appointees be given only rounded numbers — estimates, which could not be labeled official for political or other reasons.The first of the new political appointees was Nathaniel Cogley, a political-science professor at a state university in rural Texas who has specialized in African studies. He was soon joined by the other three, and they reported weekly to an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.Mr. Cogley began attacking the bureau’s effort to count a small share of known households that evade the best efforts of census takers. In these cases — 1.2 million people in 2010, but probably many more in pandemic-scarred 2020 — the bureau has long used a statistical method called imputation, looking at nearby households to make educated guesses about who lives in the places the census field operation missed.Some of those households are occupied by right-leaning libertarians who are deeply suspicious of the government. But many are low-income families, members of minorities and unauthorized immigrants, who expand the count for urban areas and thus increase representation for traditional Democratic strongholds.“If you leave out imputations, you leave out African Americans, Hispanics and other hard-to-count people,” Kimball Brace, a demographer and president of a consulting firm that does work on redistricting, said in an interview. Mr. Cogley called him to ask for evidence that imputation was statistically unsound. “I saw Cogley’s view as totally a way of justifying how the Republicans come out on this,” Mr. Brace said. (Mr. Cogley did not respond to calls, texts and emails asking for comment.)Mr. Ross had the power to order the bureau to do as Mr. Cogley wished. But after listening to dueling presentations, he allowed the imputation work to continue — handing the career officials a victory on one of their most important concerns. (Mr. Ross declined to comment on the record.)In early November, when Joe Biden won the presidential election, the 10-week clock for Mr. Trump’s time in office began to tick with new urgency. There would be no second term. Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues raced to meet the Dec. 31 deadline. But the bureau hit a major technical snag: The pandemic had scrambled the locations of tens of millions of people, like college students and agricultural workers, who should have been counted where they studied or worked but instead lived elsewhere temporarily because of the coronavirus.Putting them in their proper place would take time. In late November, census officials told Mr. Dillingham, the bureau’s director, that they could not meet the Dec. 31 deadline and maintain the agency’s standards for accuracy.Mr. Cogley and other political appointees pressed for shortcuts to speed ahead, going so far as to suggest commandeering computers from other agencies to accelerate data processing, an idea the bureau dismissed as impractical. But the political appointees and the White House never answered a basic question about the numbers they most wanted: What definition of “unauthorized immigrant” should the bureau use? Did it include people contesting their deportation in court? Or children whose birthplace was unclear? Or immigrants whose green cards were being processed?In December, the White House tried one last tack: If census experts could not reliably say who should be removed from the state-by-state apportionment totals because they were in the country illegally, then administration officials would decide for them, using whatever tabulations of immigrants the bureau provided.This would take a hammer to the bureau’s standards for accuracy. It would also reverse past practice, in which the Census Bureau calculated the House apportionment and the White House delivered the results to Congress as a formality. In January, Mr. Dillingham told Mr. Jarmin it was the bureau’s No. 1 priority — above the census itself — to turn over figures on undocumented immigrants to the White House by Jan. 15. He acknowledged proposing cash bonuses to those who could make it happen, but said he made sure anyone working on the project “would not be pulled off the 2020 census data.”This last-minute order, which Mr. Dillingham delivered orally rather than in writing, was the breaking point for the career officials who had carried out every other directive. “The integrity of the statistical process that the Census Bureau is ethically committed to was abrogated in serious ways,” Mr. Abowd said.Separately and anonymously, three career officials filed whistle-blower complaints with the Commerce Department’s inspector general. The complaints accused Mr. Dillingham of violating a cardinal rule for the federal government called Statistical Policy Directive 1. “A federal statistical agency,” it states, “must be independent from political and other undue external influence in developing, producing and disseminating statistics.” Mr. Dillingham said this month that when he heard about the complaints to the inspector general, he stopped asking for the immigrant tabulations.On Jan. 18, Mr. Dillingham resigned. Mr. Trump left office two days later without the counts that would have downgraded the status of immigrants and most likely helped more Republicans win election.The census has been wielded as a political weapon before. When the very first count in 1790 fell short (at 3.9 million) of George Washington’s expectations, he didn’t change the number, but he instructed Thomas Jefferson to check it. When Jefferson’s work produced an estimate above four million, he included the higher number in descriptions of the census abroad to make the new country appear stronger.When the 1920 census counted rising population totals in American cities — thanks to an influx of Italians, Poles, Jews and others from outside Northern Europe — Congress refused to reapportion the House until 1929 so that rural areas wouldn’t lose seats.And most notoriously, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Army used census information to round up Japanese Americans for internment. (In 2000, the bureau apologized.)Now a group of officials at the agency are considering how the census could be better protected from political meddling and misuse. In July, a committee of career professionals put in place a new policy on data stewardship, which firms up the rules governing internal as well as external access to confidential data. A bigger idea is to move the bureau out of the Commerce Department to make it more independent, like the National Science Foundation. Congress could also mandate by statute that immigrants who reside in the country must continue to be counted, as they always have been. Lawmakers (or the president, by executive order) also could further strengthen the existing safeguards in Statistical Policy Directive 1.In the end, the delays that frustrated the anti-immigrant ambitions of Mr. Trump’s administration may end up helping his party. The bureau’s release of redistricting numbers on Thursday was several months behind schedule. Republicans, who control more state legislatures and have shown a greater appetite for extreme gerrymandering than Democrats have, could benefit because little time remains to contest maps before the 2022 elections.The newly released numbers will now set the stage for what are likely to be colossal battles over control of the House and State Legislatures.For career professionals, “the highest priority now,” Mr. Abowd said, “is restoring the credibility of the 2020 census and the Census Bureau.”Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The Times magazine. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Census Bureau data out today will shape the redistricting fight of this decade

      by

      The fight to voteCensusCensus Bureau data out today will shape the redistricting fight of this decadeOf concern is a 2019 decision that gives lawmakers clearance to manipulate districts for political purposes The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 12 Aug 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 12 Aug 2021 13.59 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,It has arrived without much fanfare, but today is one of the most important days for the next decade of American politics.Later this afternoon, the Census Bureau will release the data that all 50 states will use to redraw their political maps. That includes congressional districts as well as state legislative and other local districts. It’s a process that the constitution mandates just once every 10 years, and is therefore hugely consequential.Almost every redistricting cycle is a nasty political battle over whose districts are preserved, cut and made more or less competitive. But observers are particularly concerned this time around.The next major US voting rights fight is here – and Republicans are aheadRead moreOne of the main reasons is a 2019 supreme court decision in a case called Common Cause v Rucho. In that case, the supreme court said for the first time that federal courts could not do anything to stop lawmakers from severely manipulating districts for political purposes. It’s a decision that could embolden lawmakers, who control the redistricting process, to tweak districts in a way that bakes in political wins for their respective parties. It will also be a boon to Republicans, who are poised to dominate the redistricting process this year.Another concern is the absence of federal oversight. In every redistricting cycle since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has required places with a history of voting discrimination to get their districts pre-approved by the justice department or a three-judge court in Washington DC before they go into effect. But because of a 2013 supreme court ruling, states are no longer required to obtain that pre-clearance. States may now seek to draw districts that weaken the influence of voters of color. Civil rights and other groups can still challenge the districts, but probably only after they go into effect. This means that elections could occur in these discriminatory districts as litigation moves slowly through the courts.One of the biggest issues is the data itself.There are lingering worries that the Census Bureau’s 2020 count was inaccurate and undercounted minority communities. While the bureau has repeatedly assured the public of its confidence in the data, experts will be combing through it to spot any anomalies.In a normal redistricting cycle, the data being released today would have been published much earlier in the year, giving states ample time to draw new maps before the midterm elections. But because of Covid-related delays with the 2020 census, the data is late. That’s another problem, because states face rapidly approaching deadlines to produce their maps for elections next year. Redistricting is a notoriously opaque process and the condensed timeline could allow lawmakers to rush plans through with little public input.Beyond redistricting, the census data is also expected to show just how fast America’s non-white population is growing. The new numbers are likely to confirm estimates that non-white people account for almost all of the population growth in the US, while the white population is shrinking, according to the Washington Post.Also worth watching …
      The US Senate adjourned for its summer recess without passing a sweeping voting rights bill. While Democrats have pledged to bring a compromise bill for a vote in the fall, that may be too late to stop severe partisan gerrymandering, since mapmaking will already be under way in many places. There also still isn’t a clear plan for how Democrats will get around the filibuster, a Senate rule Republicans have used to block a vote on the legislation.
      Texas Democrats remain outside the state, denying Republicans a legislative quorum to pass new voting restrictions. Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, ordered a second special session that began last weekend and the house has signed arrest warrants to bring lawmakers who return to Texas to the capitol. Those outside the state are beyond the jurisdiction of Texas law enforcement.
      There’s growing concern that the independent panel in charge of drawing Michigan’s electoral maps may hire a law firm connected to Republicans to help it draw new districts.
      TopicsCensusThe fight to voteUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Census Data Will Arrive Next Week, Setting Up Redistricting Fight

      by

      After a lengthy delay, the Census Bureau will release the data used to redraw congressional and state legislative boundaries next Thursday, Aug. 12, the agency said in a statement, setting up what is certain to be a highly contentious nationwide fight over redistricting before the midterm elections next year.The census data had been delayed largely because of difficulties in collecting and processing the enormous amount of information amid the coronavirus pandemic, but also because of efforts by President Donald J. Trump to meddle with the census by adjusting its timing.The pandemic and Mr. Trump’s actions — he also sought to add a citizenship question — have left some people questioning the count’s accuracy. The debate over the citizenship question, in particular, has raised worries about possible suppression of the participation of Latino communities.The delay forced many states to delay their redistricting plans, which will most likely lead to a compressed, scrambled process with elevated stakes. There is growing belief in Washington that the balance of power in the House of Representatives after the 2022 midterm elections will depend largely on the results of the redistricting process.Multiple battleground states, including Florida, Texas and North Carolina, are set to gain at least one new congressional seat, as are Colorado, Montana and Oregon. Seven states will lose a seat: New York, California, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Illinois.Potential House and Senate candidates have also been forced to keep their political ambitions frozen in amber as they wait to see whether redistricting will affect their ability to hold on to a current seat, open up an opportunity to run for a newly drawn seat, or otherwise change their calculus for seeking a particular office. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Why Democratic Departures From the House Have Republicans Salivating

      by

      A growing number of Democrats in battleground districts are either retiring or leaving to seek higher office, imperiling the party’s control of the House and President Biden’s expansive agenda. WASHINGTON — With 18 months left before the midterms, a spate of Democratic departures from the House is threatening to erode the party’s slim majority in the House and imperil President Biden’s far-reaching policy agenda.In the past two months, five House Democrats from competitive districts have announced they won’t seek re-election next year. They include Representative Charlie Crist of Florida, who on Tuesday launched a campaign for governor, and Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who will run for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman. Three other Democrats will leave vacant seats in districts likely to see significant change once they are redrawn using the data from the 2020 Census, and several more are weighing bids for higher office.An early trickle of retirements from House members in competitive districts is often the first sign of a coming political wave. In the 2018 cycle, 48 House Republicans didn’t seek re-election — and 14 of those vacancies were won by Democrats. Now Republicans are salivating over the prospect of reversing that dynamic and erasing the Democrats six-seat advantage.“The two biggest headaches of any cycle are redistricting and retirements and when you have both in one cycle it’s a migraine,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2012 and 2014.Democrats face other vexing challenges as well: Republican legislators control redistricting in key states where they can draw boundaries in their favor. Reapportionment alone — with red states picking up additional seats — could provide Republicans the seats they need to control the House. And historic political trends almost always work against the president’s party in midterm elections.The prospect of losing the House majority adds a greater level of urgency for the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats eager to push through expansive policy proposals. It also raises questions about the staying power of Democrats, after an election in which they barely ousted an unpopular president while suffering a surprising number of downballot losses in races they expected to win. The results appeared to blunt the momentum the party generated in 2018 when it picked up 41 seats in the House. Democrats’ failure to qualify for the runoff in a Dallas-area special House election Saturday only added to the party’s anxiety. While Republicans were always heavy favorites to retain the seat, which became vacant when Representative Ron Wright died from the coronavirus, not placing a candidate among the top two finishers is likely to hurt recruiting efforts, Democratic officials said.This could be just the beginning of the Democratic departures: The high season for congressional retirements typically comes in early fall after members spend the August recess taking the political temperature of their districts. Further complicating the picture for Democrats is the Census Bureau’s months-long delay in completing the reapportionment process and delivering to states the final demographic and block-level population data. That has left the House committees in a state of suspended animation, unable in many instances to recruit candidates and devise electoral strategy. While each day brings announcements of new 2022 candidates, many are not being specific about which district they’re running in and dozens more are waiting until the fall, when they see the new boundaries, to decide whether they will formalize their campaigns.“It’s like going to war on a battlefield but you don’t know where you’re fighting, when you’re fighting or who you’re fighting,” Mr. Israel said.Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, announced on Tuesday that he would run for governor.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThe largest concentration of competitive and vacant House seats may be in Central Florida. In addition to Mr. Crist, who represents St. Petersburg, two other Democratic representatives, Stephanie Murphy of Winter Park and Val Demings of Orlando, are weighing runs for statewide office. All three now hold seats in districts President Biden carried handily last November, but with Republicans in control of Florida’s redistricting process, the state’s congressional map is likely to soon be much better for Republicans than it is now.Each of them would be exceedingly expensive for a new candidate to run in because of the high cost of media in Florida, further stretching the party’s resources in what is expected to be a difficult election cycle.“You have to assume that because Republicans get to control reapportionment, that it’s not going to get any easier,” said Adam Goodman, a Florida-based Republican media strategist, who predicted the G.O.P. would take two of the three seats now held by Mr. Crist, Ms. Demings and Ms. Murphy. “The Crist seat — it took a Charlie Crist type of person to hold that seat in ’20. The Democrats won’t have that person this time.” Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner who is weighing her own run for governor, echoed that assessment as she tweaked Mr. Crist at her own news conference that competed for attention with his campaign launch. “It’s a time when we need his voice and his vote up in Washington, D.C.,” Ms. Fried said. “His seat is one that only probably Charlie Crist can hold on to, so really would like to have encouraged him to stay in Congress.”Democratic strategists said it is hardly unusual for members of Congress to seek a promotion to statewide office. “A lot of us lived through 2009 and 2010 and we’re not seeing that level of rush to the exits that we did then,” said Ian Russell, a former D.C.C.C. official. “It’s not surprising that members of Congress look to run statewide, that has been happening since the founding of the republic and doesn’t indicate a bigger thing.” Representative Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, will run for an open Senate seat next year.Sarah Silbiger/ReutersRepublicans, optimistic about being on offense for the first time since 2014, cited potential pickup opportunities in western Pennsylvania, where Representative Conor Lamb is weighing a run for the state’s open Senate contest; New Hampshire, where Representative Chris Pappas may run for governor rather than seek re-election to a district likely to become more Republican; and Iowa, where Representative Cindy Axne told the Storm Lake Times last month that her first two options for 2022 are running for Senate or governor. “House Democrats are sprinting to the exits because they know their chances of retaining the majority grow dimmer by the day,” said Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Representative Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, who last year entered an alcohol rehabilitation program after falling on the Washington Metro, also chose not to seek re-election. Representative Cheri Bustos, whose district covering a swath of Central and Northwest Illinois swung to Donald J. Trump, announced her retirement last week. Last year Ms. Bustos led the House Democrats’ campaign arm through a disappointing cycle, when the party lost 13 seats after they expected to flip Republican-held districts. Along with Florida, Republicans are expected to draw themselves more favorable congressional districts in Georgia, where Democrats hold two competitive districts in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, and Texas, which will add two new seats for the 2022 elections. Mr. Ryan’s Democratic district in northeast Ohio is likely to disappear when Ohio Republicans draw a map with one fewer House seat, and Representative Filemon Vela of Texas, whose Rio Grande Valley district became eight percentage points more Republican from 2016 to 2020, chose retirement rather than compete in what was likely to be his first competitive re-election bid. “This is where Democratic underperformance in 2020 really begins to hinder Democrats downballot,” said Ken Spain, a veteran of the House Republicans’ campaign arm. “Republicans fared well at the state level last cycle and now they’re going to reap the benefits of many of those red states drawing a disproportionate number of the seats.” Because Republicans hold majorities in more state legislatures, and Democrats and voters in key states such as California, Colorado and Virginia have delegated mapmaking authority to nonpartisan commissions, the redistricting process alone could shift up to five or six seats to Republicans, potentially enough to seize the majority if they don’t flip any other Democratic-held seats. Democrats are expected to press their advantages where they can, particularly in Illinois and New York, states that lost one House district each in last week’s reapportionment. New York’s new map is certain to take a seat from Republicans in Upstate New York, and one Republican-held seat in Central Illinois may be redrawn to be Democratic while another is eliminated. For the moment there are more House Republicans, six, not seeking re-election, than the five House Democrats retiring or running for aiming for a promotion to statewide office. But of the Republicans, only Representatives Lee Zeldin and Tom Reed of New York represent districts that are plausibly competitive in 2022. With Democrats holding supermajority control of the New York State Legislature, Mr. Zeldin, who is running for governor, and Mr. Reed, who retired while apologizing for a past allegation of groping, could both see their districts drawn to become far more competitive for Democrats. Reid J. Epstein reported from Washington and Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope

      by

      Voters of color make up an increasing percentage of the United States electorate, but that trend isn’t hurting Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans.The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isn’t doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The expanding Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College underscores how the growing diversity of the nation may not aid Democrats enough to win in places they most need help. Just as often, population growth is concentrated in red states — like Texas and Florida — where the Democrats don’t win nonwhite voters by the overwhelming margins necessary to overcome the state’s Republican advantage.As for the Republicans, the widely held assumption that the party will struggle as white voters decline as a percentage of the electorate may be more myth than reality. Contrary to what Tucker Carlson says repeatedly on Fox News about the rise of “white replacement theory” as a Democratic electoral strategy, the country’s growing racial diversity has not drastically upended the party’s chances. Instead, Republicans face a challenge they often take for granted: white voters.One way to think about this is to compare today’s electorate with that of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were winning in landslides. Democrats, no doubt, have benefited from the increased racial diversity of the country since then: Mr. Biden would not have even come close to winning Georgia in November if its voters were as white they were back in the 1980s. Former President Donald J. Trump would have probably won re-election if he could have turned the demographic clock back to the ’80s and reduced the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. Today’s wave of Republican-backed laws restricting voting rights may be intended to do exactly that.In states like Georgia, where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even a return to the racial demographics of the 1980s wouldn’t do nearly as much to hurt Democrats as one might expect. Yes, the November result would have gone from an extremely close win for Mr. Biden to an extremely close win for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden would have won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though nonwhite voters had doubled their share of the electorate from 1984 to when Mrs. Clinton sought the presidency. Remarkably, Mr. Biden’s fairly modest gains among white voters helped him as much as the last 30 to 40 years of demographic shifts did.Similarly, Mr. Bush or Mr. Reagan would have still prevailed if they had had to win an electorate that was 29 percent nonwhite, as opposed to the merely 13 to 15 percent nonwhite electorates they sought to persuade at the time.This is not the conventional story of recent electoral history. In the usual tale, the growing racial diversity of the electorate broke the Reagan and Bush majorities and allowed the Democrats to win the national popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.And yet it is hard to find a single state where the increasing racial diversity of the electorate, even over an exceptionally long 30- or 40-year period, has been both necessary and sufficient for Democrats to flip a state from red to blue. Even in states where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, like Georgia and Arizona, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.One reason demographic change has failed to transform electoral politics is that the increased diversity of the electorate has come not mainly from Black voters but from Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters. Those groups back Democrats, but not always by overwhelmingly large margins.In 2020, Democrats probably won around 60 to 65 percent of voters across these demographic groups. These are substantial margins, but they are small enough that even decades of demographic shifts wind up costing the Republicans only a couple of percentage points.The new census data’s finding that the percentage of non-Hispanic white voters in the country’s electorate dropped by about two percentage points from 2016 to 2020 might seem like a lot. But with Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters representing the entirety of the increase, while the Black share of the electorate was flat, the growing nonwhite share of the electorate cost Mr. Trump only about half a percentage point over a four-year period.Another factor is the electoral map. The American electoral system rewards flipping states from red to blue, but many Democratic gains among nonwhite voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and often noncompetitive states. By contrast, many traditional swing states across the northern tier, like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, have had relatively little demographic change.The ability of Democrats to flip red states has been hampered by another pattern: the tendency for Republicans to fare relatively well among nonwhite voters in red states.It’s often said that Latino voters aren’t a monolith, and that’s certainly true. While Hispanic voters back Democrats by overwhelming margins in blue states like New York and Illinois, Republicans are often far more competitive among Latinos and members of other non-Black minority groups in red states — including those Democrats now hope to flip like Texas or Florida.Texas and Florida really would be blue if Latinos voted like their counterparts in New York or Illinois. But instead, Latino population growth has not quite had a strong pro-Democratic punch in the states where the party hoped to land a knockout blow.At the same time, white voters are easy to overlook as a source of Democratic gains, give that these voters still support Republicans by a comfortable margin. But Democrats probably improved from 39 to 43 percent among white voters from 1988 to 2020. It’s a significant shift, and perhaps even enough to cover the entirety of Mr. Bush’s margin of victory in the 1988 election, without any demographic change whatsoever.President Biden won seven states, including Wisconsin, while losing among their white voters.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIt’s a little easier to see the significance of Democratic gains among white voters at the state level. According to AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won white voters in states worth 211 electoral votes. Democrats like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004 probably didn’t win white voters in states worth much more than 60 electoral votes, based on exit poll and other survey data.Mr. Biden even won white voters in many of the states where the growing diversity of the electorate is thought to be the main source of new Democratic strength, including California and Colorado. And he also won white voters in many big, diverse states across the North where Republicans used to win and where nonwhite demographic change might otherwise be considered the decisive source of Democratic strength, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, which voted almost entirely Republican at the presidential level throughout the 1980s.According to the AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won seven states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — while losing among white voters. In these crucial states, Democratic strength among nonwhite voters was essential to Mr. Biden’s victory.But of these states, there are really only three where Mr. Biden clearly prevailed by the margin of the increased racial diversity of the electorate over the last few decades: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. He did not need to win any of these states to capture the presidency, but he would not have done so without long-term increases in both nonwhite voting power and Democratic strength among white voters.The story is quite different in the Northern battleground states. White voters still represent more than 80 percent of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the new census data. The nonwhite population in these states is predominantly Black; their share of the population has been fairly steady over the last few decades. But Mr. Biden won these states so narrowly that the relatively modest demographic shifts of the last few decades were necessary for him to prevail in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.It’s just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The next major US voting rights fight is here – and Republicans are ahead

      by

      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe next major fight over voting rights in the US kicked off Monday: a hugely consequential battle over the boundaries of electoral districts for the next 10 years that will have profound implications for American politics. And Republicans seem to be pulling ahead.Census officials released a decennial tally of people living in the US, a number that’s used to apportion the House’s 435 seats among the 50 states. The Census Bureau announced that Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina and Florida will all gain an additional seat in the House, while Texas will get two more. Seven states – California, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – will lose a seat.The numbers accentuated what many have predicted for months: Republicans are extremely well positioned to draw districts that will give them an advantage both in their effort to reclaim control of the US House in the 2022 midterms, and cement control over congressional seats for the next decade.The constitution gives state lawmakers the power to draw districts and, because of their continued strength in state legislative races, Republicans will dominate the process later this year and can manipulate the lines to their advantage, a process often called gerrymandering.Even though Democrats earned about 4.7m more votes in 2020 House races around the country, Republicans will have control over the drawing of 187 congressional districts later this year (down from 219 in 2011) while Democrats will have complete control over the drawing of 75 districts (up from 44 a decade ago), according to the Cook Political Report.Republicans need to win just five seats to retake control of the US House of Representatives, a gap observers believe they can wipe out with gerrymandering alone. Eric Holder, the former US attorney general, told reporters Wednesday he was concerned Republicans could use their complete control of the redistricting process in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina alone to overcome that gap.“What we’re seeing is a Republican party that has shown they’re willing to bend or break the rules of democracy simply to hold on to power,” said Holder, who is leading the Democratic effort to push back on excessive GOP gerrymandering. “If Republicans gerrymander those states, as they have indicated they will, they will have the ability there, almost to take control of the House of Representatives just based on what they do in those four states.”In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts could not do anything to stop severe manipulation of district lines for partisan gain. One lingering uncertainty is whether Democrats in Congress will be able to pass pending federal legislation to place new limits on the practice. Passing that legislation, however, requires getting rid of the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring 60 votes to advance legislation. Democrats do not yet have the votes to get rid of the procedure.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering … require greater transparency in the process,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a lot that could be done.”Because of a 2013 supreme court ruling, states with a history of voting discrimination, like Texas and North Carolina, will not have to get their maps approved by the federal government before they go into effect. That leaves an opportunity for lawmakers to draw maps that discriminate based on race. Kathay Feng, the national redistricting and representation director at Common Cause, a government watchdog group, warned that voting advocates would be closely monitoring for that kind of discrimination. Much of the America’s population growth over the last decade has come from non-white people.“Our top priority is ensuring that states that are adding congressional seats recognize the population growth fueled by communities of color in the upcoming redistricting process,” Feng said in a statement.As federal legislation stalls, Democrats are already signaling they will move aggressively in court to challenge gerrymandering. Shortly after the apportionment numbers were released, Holder’s group filed three separate lawsuits in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Louisiana – states where Democrats and Republicans share control of the redistricting process – asking courts to be prepared to step in if lawmakers reach an impasse. Such quick machinations are crucial because the redistricting process is moving on a condensed timeline this year because of delays releasing data due to the Covid-19 pandemic.Marc Elias, a top Democratic election lawyer, said this week more lawsuits are likely to follow.While the Republicans made possible gains, the biggest surprise of the Census Bureau’s Monday’s announcement was that it didn’t result in more of a shift for the party. Projections based on population estimates had predicted Texas would gain three seats and Florida would gain two. Arizona, where districts are drawn by an independent commission, was expected to gain a seat, but ended up not doing so. Minnesota and Rhode Island were both projected to lose seats, and New York could have lost an additional seat.“Overall, the population shifts to the the south will definitely benefit Republicans, but definitely not as much as people were expecting, just because they got fewer seats,” Li said.It’s not unusual for the final tallies to be slightly off from apportionment, but Li said he was surprised to see the kind of variation there was this year. There is some concern that the variation in the data may signal an undercount of Hispanic population, especially after the Trump administration repeatedly tried to tamper with the process. Bureau officials said Monday they are confident in the data.Holder told reporters on Tuesday that it was impossible to separate the upcoming battle over redistricting from an aggressive GOP effort underway in state legislatures to restrict access to the voting booth.“I have no doubt that the same Republican legislators that have pushed these bills will now try and use the redistricting process to illegitimately lock in power for that party, for them, for the next decade,” he said. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Census (Barely) Leads to a Congressional Loss for New York

      by

      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: An early sprinkle, followed by mixed sun and clouds. High in the mid-60s. Alternate-side parking: In effect until Thursday (Holy Thursday, Orthodox). Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Census Bureau announced yesterday that New York’s congressional delegation will shrink by one seat starting with the 2022 election, continuing a decline that dates to the 1940s.New York lost the seat by the narrowest of margins: just 89 residents, the fewest to cost a state a representative in the modern era.But even at a reduced size, New York’s delegation will remain one of the most powerful in the country, and its representatives could be crucial to Democratic efforts to retain control of the House.[New York loses a House seat after coming up 89 people short on the census.]Here’s what you need to know:Where New York standsLosing the seat will cut New York’s congressional delegation to 26, putting the state behind California, Texas and Florida, in that order. (California will also lose a seat, Texas will gain two and Florida will gain one.)The small number of people that led to the loss for New York caused some officials to criticize the state’s approach to the census, which was taken during some of the darkest days of the pandemic.“The state was simply M.I.A.,” Julie Menin, who served as the city’s census director, told my colleague Shane Goldmacher.The national pictureDemocratic lawmakers across the country are looking to New York as a bulwark against expected Republican gains in Congress from partisan remapping efforts.In the state, an independent commission made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans will formally begin the redistricting process. But if the commission deadlocks, as many think it will, the Democratic-controlled State Legislature will draw the congressional districts.New York is represented by 19 Democrats and eight Republicans in the House. Some hypothetical maps reduce the number of Republicans to three, which would help the Democrats hold their historically narrow House majority.The vanishing districtJack McEnany, a former state assemblyman who oversaw redistricting efforts a decade ago, said that lawmakers would likely look upstate to find the district they want to dissolve.Democrats could push two Republican incumbents into one district or draw lines that make existing Republican seats more Democratic by adding more progressive areas to their districts.From The TimesCuomo, in Rare Public Appearance, Says: ‘I Didn’t Do Anything Wrong’Guard Watched as Man Hanged Himself in Jail, Prosecutors SayAsian Man Who Was Stomped and Kicked in Harlem Is in Critical ConditionSupreme Court to Hear Case on Carrying Guns in PublicHelen Weaver, Chronicler of an Affair With Kerouac, Dies at 89Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingFifty people were shot in 46 incidents last week in New York City, police figures showed. [NY Post]The city is investigating the organizers of a concert that drew throngs of fans to Tompkins Square Park, saying they misrepresented the event as a smaller political rally. [PIX11]Some ideas for how to gradually return to a “normal” city social life. [Time Out]And finally: Spreading the word about anti-Asian hate crimesFred KwonNew York Police Department data show that hate crimes against people of Asian descent are on the rise in New York, with 66 reported this year as of last Sunday. That’s more than double the 28 recorded in all of 2020.But activist groups and the authorities say many people of Asian descent, particularly older, first-generation immigrants who are not fluent in English, do not report bias incidents to the authorities.Esther Lim took it upon herself to address that reticence by printing booklets in several languages to teach people about hate crime laws and reporting practices. She said the booklets “provide a sense of empowerment” and encourage victims to file reports.“There were no resources provided in their native tongue,” Ms. Lim said in an interview. “All the information I found was in English.”Ms. Lim said that so far she has handed out more than 34,500 booklets in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, where she spent much of last weekend distributing more than 2,000 of them in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Flushing, Queens. She said she had printed booklets in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Spanish, and planned to add Khmer, Arabic, Indonesian and Farsi.The booklets include local hate crime definitions and laws, advice on how to report incidents and useful English phrases.“English isn’t my first language,” one of the phrases says. “Someone is following me. Can you stay next to me until it is safe?”The need for outreach was highlighted again on Friday night, when a 61-year-old Asian man was brutally assaulted in East Harlem.Ms. Lim said that many of the booklet’s recipients, especially if they were older, expressed their gratitude and their anxiety.“They fear going out to even walk around their neighborhood,” Ms. Lim said. “I’m glad that they’re grateful, but sad that this is needed.”It’s Tuesday — speak out.Metropolitan Diary: Flawless Dear Diary:I went to a tailor in the West Village to have a few pairs of pants let out. He told me it would not be possible to make the alteration I was hoping for on these particular trousers.He then proceeded to get down on the floor and demonstrate the proper way to do situps. After doing 10 flawless ones, he snapped back up and advised me to do the same situps 15 minutes each night before going to bed because it “makes you very sleepy.”I thanked him very much, returned to my apartment and went online to order pants in the next waist size up.— Bill OberlanderNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com.What would you like to see more (or less) of? Email us: nytoday@nytimes.com. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Texas, Colorado and Florida among states to gain House seats after Census

      by

      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterSix states will gain additional seats in the US House of Representatives because of population shifts over the last decade, the US Census Bureau announced on Monday. Seven states will lose one congressional seat.The US saw a total population growth of 7.4% over the last decade, the second slowest change in US history (the previous slowest was 7.3% from 1930 to 1940). Overall, the total US population was 331,449,281 people on 1 April 2020, the day the Census Bureau uses as a marker to count.Texas will gain two additional seats in the House, the bureau said on Monday. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina and Florida will also gain a congressional seat.The seven states that will lose a seat are: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.Overall, the fastest growing parts of the US were the southern and western portions of the country.The US constitution requires the federal government to take a census of the population every 10 years. That tally is used to allocate seats in the House and determine how almost $1.5tn in federal dollars are allocated.The changes in seat counts will also reflect changes to each state’s electoral college votes for the next decade. A state’s electoral college votes are equal to the total number of representatives in Congress.The shift of seven seats among 13 states was the smallest since 1941, said Ron Jarmin, the acting director of the Census Bureau.The numbers came as somewhat of a surprise; projections based on population estimates had Texas gaining up to three seats, Florida gaining two and Arizona gaining a seat. Experts projected Alabama Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island could all lose additional seats. Bureau officials acknowledged that difference on Monday, but said repeatedly they were confident in the results and that they were within 1% of the estimated projections in many states.The officials also revealed how much every census response matters. Had New York state counted just 89 additional people, it would not have lost a congressional seat, bureau officials said on Monday.Monday’s announcement was an important milestone in the once-a-decade process of redrawing electoral boundaries, which is also required by the constitution. Census officials are expected to deliver redistricting data to states later this year. The entire process has been delayed several months because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the bureau to push back its work.Monday’s announcement also came after the Census Bureau, states and civic groups spent years convincing people it was safe to respond to the census during Donald Trump’s administration.Trump unsuccessfully sought to undermine the count by adding a question asking about citizenship to the survey. When that move was blocked by the supreme court, Trump instructed census officials to come up with redistricting data that only counted citizens. Joe Biden reversed that effort on his first day in office. More