7 ms·

2020 Census Apportionment Results

68 points by kochb 5y ago

sethbannon 5y ago
New York lost a congressional seat by falling 89 residents short. Given that the response window fell during the peak COVID crisis for NYC, it's hard to imagine it didn't have a negative impact on response rate.
- mc32 5y ago
  Weren’t many places affected by the pandemic and not just NYC? I guess you could argue given their raw numbers it affected them more.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    NY was certainly hit harder earlier than other states, and during the census window.
  - sethbannon 5y ago
    Households received their census cards March 12-20 and "Census Day" -- when there was a big marketing push to get folks to respond -- was April 1. That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country. Census workers then sent folks physically out to try and reach non-responding households, but that's super hard to do.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country. Except California, but, mostly, yes.
- contrahax 5y ago
  I think there is a case for the opposite trend as well - anecdotally I and many others I know moved from NY to another state after responding to the census as a resident of NY. From what I observed (and when I responded) most of the census outreach in NYC was early in 2020 before the pandemic really hit. USPS published some data using change of address information that shows NY lost a good number of residents during 2020, how many of those responded to the census before or after they moved is a toss up though. No conclusion, just adding some context.
  - codezero 5y ago
    Even in California when we saw folks moving away I had a census worker on foot knocking door to door trying to ask about who lived in the various apartments - and at the time I know a lot of folks had moved away even if temporarily.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Yeah this is such a cluster. Makes you think that maybe we should not be doing point in time counts every ten years. That can have a huge impact on entire generations of people. American Community Surveys run far more often, showing that we can potentially change our ways.
    - xnx 5y ago
      It's also astounding that this is the standard method when Apple/Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon could trivially give an instantaneous and probably more accurate count.
      - danso 5y ago
        None of those companies are likely to uniformly count all of the things that the Census purports to do, such as race/ethnicity and housing status.
      - economusty 5y ago
        So I change my Facebook profile and get counted as a resident? Is that what you are suggesting?
    - danso 5y ago
      Sure, but (ignoring the Constitutional decennial mandate, which also requires Census subjects to be defined 3 years before the actual counting [0]) what's a cost-effective alternative? The budget for the 2020 Census was $7+ billion [1]. And while the ACS annual surveys are considered accurate, what would be the right period for changing Congressional seat counts? It obviously can't be annual (since House terms are every 2 years). [0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/about/census-constitution.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/abo... [1] https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html
- betterunix2 5y ago
  I see 89 residents and immediately think less of COVID and more of the Trump administration's effort to scare certain demographics off. The results were tainted by an administration that acted in bad faith.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Well, the absolute easiest way to gain 89 residents would have been to let the YIMBYs build one more highrise in Brooklyn.
- keepkalm 5y ago
  AOC could lose her district and opt to run against Schumer instead of staying in the House. Payback for AOC beating another incumbent Democrat that ends in her beating Schumer for US Senate. That is the most interesting thing that could happen at least.
seneca 5y ago
The most important bit: > Texas will gain two seats in the House of Representatives, five states will gain one seat each (Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon), seven states will lose one seat each (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia), and the remaining states’ number of seats will not change based on the 2020 Census.
sethbannon 5y ago
For those wanting to know state congressional seat gains and losses... Gaining 2 seats: Texas Gaining 1 seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon Losing 1 seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia
- swyx 5y ago
  how does this work for congresspeople already in those seats? does this only take effect next congress?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The changes will come into play as of 2023's Congress.
  - mbauman 5y ago
    State governments re-draw the lines. Sometimes they try to preserve existing districts and existing constituents for existing congresspeople, and sometimes they intentionally obliterate them (based on where the congressperson's house is). Precisely how they do so varies by state.
  - tharne 5y ago
    Yes, this would impact the next election cycle, occurring in 2022, and the effects would first be seen in the congress sworn in in January of 2023. The states with changes in seats are responsible for the redistricting. What this means in practice is that in a state losing one seat, one district will disappear and the map gets redrawn. Then you'll typically have a primary or a general election where both candidates are incumbents. If both incumbents are in the same party, they'll face off in the primary for that party, if they're in different parties they'll face off in the general election. Alternatively, one incumbent may choose to retire.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The states with changes in seats are responsible for the redistricting. So are the states without changes; no net changes in seats doesn’t mean no internal population movement that would render existing districts no longer sufficiently equal to satisfy equal representation (the exception being states that have no change in seats and exactly one seat.)
thestoicattack 5y ago
House seat changes by state: (+2) TX (+1) CO, FL, MT, NC, OR (-1) CA, IL, MI, NY, OH, PA, WV (0) everyone else
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elliekelly 5y ago
> Puerto Rico's resident population was 3,285,874, down 11.8% from 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census. Is there any explanation for this?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Hurricane drove a lot of people away. https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/research-briefs/puerto-rican-exodus-one-year-hurricane-maria https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/resear...
- exegete 5y ago
  Hurricane Maria was pretty devastating and the lack of Federal aid exacerbated it. I imagine people left after that.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    Another one of Trump's short sighted policy backfires. In his effort to paint Puerto Rico as a failed and corrupt liberal state, he denied them aid, causing half a million American citizens to move from a place where they couldn't vote in federal elections to places where they could.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Hurricane Maria in 2017 must be partially responsible? Property damage (estimated at $90B) and loss of economic opportunity surely forced many people to move to the mainland.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Everyone is pointing to Hurricane Maria, which is a big factor, but even before that there was a major financial crisis creating substantial misery.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Massively devastating natural events + crappy economy + local governmental corruption + freedom of movement into the US = a lot of people leaving. Honestly, the fact that even more people don't flee that island for mainland US is a testament to the importance people place on their "homeland".
MattGaiser 5y ago
Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district survives for another decade.
standardUser 5y ago
The slowing of immigration is starting to make our falling birthrates more noticeable. We'll need to see a surge in immigration in the coming years to avoid the aging problem facing most other wealthy countries. Biden's proposed $2 trillion family plan might help if it could ever get passed, but it might be too little too late. Other countries have had far more extreme incentives to have kids for decades and still ended up much farther down the wrong side of the aging curve than we are. EDIT: I appreciate the downvotes. But I wonder which you prefer: higher taxes for working people, reduced benefits for the elderly, or more immigrants coming to our nation of immigrants? We need to pick one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Birthrates are depressed because prime child-rearing ages, (22-35?) are increasingly unable to afford adequate housing and health insurance. Solve those, families will feel more secure and be able to live close to relatives to help out with children, and the issue is much more tractable.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    That perspective is not compatible with what we know about birthrates in other developed nations. More highly educated societies exhibit lower birthrates, more or less universally. Even within the US, people with more education have children later and fewer children, even though they also have higher incomes and better insurance, etc. In many European countries, families are given considerable support and incentives far beyond what American families receive, yet birthrates still continue to drop.
    - genmud 5y ago
      Affordable housing isn't a US centric problem, I think that it is fair to say that it is still a big concern for many families across the world. If you look at what % people are paying for housing vs. other stuff, I imagine a pretty clear trend over the last 50-80 years would start to show.
Rafuino 5y ago
Now the Q is how will the districts be drawn to make those two new TX districts reliably red, eh?
- tenpies 5y ago
  Probably in much the same way that the seats in the other states will be re-drawn to make them as Blue as possible, so it will not even out, but at least Texas will remain Texas. That said, given what the Democrats are doing, seats may be entirely inconsequential going forward. This may all be a huge waste of time.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Do you mean in terms of granting DC and Puerto Rico statehood, or reallocating representatives based on population?
  - skystarman 5y ago
    Democrats are committed to the idea that politicians shouldn't choose their voters. They have fought in court over it and the SCOTUS decided gerrymandering is fine, even many egregious examples. The GOP has always been on board with this. Why I'll never understand. The only excuse you ever get is "Dems do it too!" As if Democrats should just lay down arms and not participate in the practice and let the GOP gerrymander every state to oblivion out of principle or something.
exegete 5y ago
Is it time to expand the House? It feels like as the population grows we shouldn’t dilute and move around representation.
- vinay427 5y ago
  Personally, I say yes. The US is a huge outlier among OECD nations [1] and this definitely shows in the connection and level of interaction people feel to their representatives, at least based on my experience living in both the US and a country with a far lower ratio. [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representation-ratio-district-size-chart-graph https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representatio...
  - tharne 5y ago
    It's not such an easy decision. Sure if you have more reps, each constituent arguably has more access. The flip side is that they have more access to a less powerful rep. If you had 10,000 people in congress, sure it'd be a lot easier to get in touch with one of them, but 1 person in a group of 10,000 doesn't have much influence, so how much is that interaction really worth? Even at 435, unless your rep is a senior member with some important committee assignments and they happen to be in the majority party, getting the ear of your rep isn't worth all that much.
    - diggernet 5y ago
      > so how much is that interaction really worth? Wait, you mean more reps results in less value in buying them? Sign me up for that plan! Bottom line: More, and less powerful, reps means more diverse representation, and less power to abuse. Win-win.
    - CameronNemo 5y ago
      Getting the ear of your rep could lead to your rep getting the ear of other reps, or the scruff of some federal agency.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
CameronNemo 5y ago
It seems absolutely wild to me that we are using pre pandemic population counts to apportion seats.
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  For the next 10 years
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    At least it is better than the UK. IIRC they completely stopped updating their seats.
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  The pandemic was and is horrible, but it didn't take enough lives above the expected death rate to really have an appreciable impact on census data. (I am not a COVID denialist, we had more deaths than expected rates, it is worse than the flu etc. etc.) Unless you are talking about out-migration from big cities to small cities, but then again I think it could be just as illogical to say "lets base it off of immediate post-pandemic numbers" as I would best a good many people will move _back_ to the big cities. That is the risk of a point-in-time count. So many external factors. But generally they all cancel one another out, and each point-in-time count has similar but unique circumstances that in the aggregate could have an impact. Just the way these counts are.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    I am explicitly concerned about the point in time nature. I am glad you pointed out all of the migration anomalies, as well as the future possibility for more. Edit: also I would not balk at 500k deaths. There will be more to come as well. That is a significant portion of the voting age and likely voter populations.
    - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
      Especially since we are talking 10-year increments here, for the pandemic to have a real impact on census stuff, it would have to have killed many people _who were not otherwise going to die over the next decade_. Most likely, we front-loaded a lot of these expected deaths to the early part of the decade. That is to say, at some point in the next 10 years the census will be an accurate representation of living voting-age people in the USA. I didn't balk at 500k deaths. In fact, I tried to make sure that nobody would accuse me of downplaying the deaths/impact of the pandemic.
1270018080 5y ago
I'm interested to see how Montana will be drawn. I didn't think I'd ever see that happen.
- jlangemeier 5y ago
  Perfect world, it probably has a jagged split north to south drawing through Great Falls down to Billings/Hardin. With this year's state legislature and Governor Body-slam; they'll try some stupid ass bs drawing down the rockies along the I15 corridor and splitting the two major dem hubs in the state (Bozeman and Missoula) rendering it set up perfectly for 2 republican representatives from here to eternity.
abeppu 5y ago
In all the press surrounding the shortened door-to-door period, as well as the legal kerfuffle about asking about citizenship, it was repeatedly stressed that lower counts could also impact federal funding for a range of programs. I know the census is supposed to release other stats later this year, but are these state-level resident counts enough to make educated guesses about impacts to stuff beyond the house?
deanCommie 5y ago
Don't forget - the 2020 census was interfered with for expressly political gains. That seems relevant to any discussion if it's outcomes. While states themselves are not nearly as red/blue at the district level as they might be in the aggregate, it is absolutely worth noting that a net 6 additional congressional seats are going from "Blue" states to "Red" states. The actual impact of the census may be even bigger than this - for all we knew the REVERSE trend should have occurred as the country's demographics shift. * https://publicintegrity.org/politics/system-failure/trump-obstruction-of-2020-census/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/system-failure/trump-ob... * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/trump-is-ending-the-census-count-early-its-a-feat-of-profound-political-cynicism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/trump-... * https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/08/07/trumps-new-plan-to-hijack-the-census-will-imperil-americas-future/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/08/07/trumps-...
- pianom4n 5y ago
  Red states gaining seats is in no way incompatible with demographic changes. Red states become less red via population growth could fully explain this effect, and seems like a completely plausible explanation.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Also 6 electoral college votes.
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Wait is that true? Is a democratic president ever going to be elected again?
    - danso 5y ago
      Of the 6 states that gained an electoral vote [0]: - Biden's 6-point loss in Texas [1] was the slimmest margin since 1996 (and 92 and 96 featured Ross Perot, a strong third-party conservative); the margins for 2012 and 2016 were 16% and 9%, respectively. - North Carolina went for Trump by just 1.5%, and has had similar slim margins since Obama's 0.3% victory in 2008 [2] - Colorado and Oregon both went blue by ~15% margins - Montana has been reliably red. - Florida has become more and more reliably red, but not as much as Ohio (which lost a vote) has. More guaranteed-blue states (CA, NY, IL) lost votes than guaranteed-red (WV), but this isn't a seismic, immutable shift by any means. [0] https://www.wbur.org/npr/983082132/census-to-release-1st-results-that-shift-electoral-college-house-seats https://www.wbur.org/npr/983082132/census-to-release-1st-res... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
rossdavidh 5y ago
Spare a thought for the census bureau folks, who in an incredibly stressful year and in an incredibly polarized political climate, had to nonetheless get the job done and try to release the data on time and keep their cool and remain objective, all the while knowing that their best case scenario is nobody really thinks about how they did it. Not an easy job.

68 points by kochb 5y ago

New York lost a congressional seat by falling 89 residents short. Given that the response window fell during the peak COVID crisis for NYC, it's hard to imagine it didn't have a negative impact on response rate.

mc32 5y ago
Weren’t many places affected by the pandemic and not just NYC? I guess you could argue given their raw numbers it affected them more.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  NY was certainly hit harder earlier than other states, and during the census window.
- sethbannon 5y ago
  Households received their census cards March 12-20 and "Census Day" -- when there was a big marketing push to get folks to respond -- was April 1. That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country. Census workers then sent folks physically out to try and reach non-responding households, but that's super hard to do.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country. Except California, but, mostly, yes.
contrahax 5y ago
I think there is a case for the opposite trend as well - anecdotally I and many others I know moved from NY to another state after responding to the census as a resident of NY. From what I observed (and when I responded) most of the census outreach in NYC was early in 2020 before the pandemic really hit. USPS published some data using change of address information that shows NY lost a good number of residents during 2020, how many of those responded to the census before or after they moved is a toss up though. No conclusion, just adding some context.
- codezero 5y ago
  Even in California when we saw folks moving away I had a census worker on foot knocking door to door trying to ask about who lived in the various apartments - and at the time I know a lot of folks had moved away even if temporarily.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Yeah this is such a cluster. Makes you think that maybe we should not be doing point in time counts every ten years. That can have a huge impact on entire generations of people. American Community Surveys run far more often, showing that we can potentially change our ways.
  - xnx 5y ago
    It's also astounding that this is the standard method when Apple/Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon could trivially give an instantaneous and probably more accurate count.
    - danso 5y ago
      None of those companies are likely to uniformly count all of the things that the Census purports to do, such as race/ethnicity and housing status.
    - economusty 5y ago
      So I change my Facebook profile and get counted as a resident? Is that what you are suggesting?
  - danso 5y ago
    Sure, but (ignoring the Constitutional decennial mandate, which also requires Census subjects to be defined 3 years before the actual counting [0]) what's a cost-effective alternative? The budget for the 2020 Census was $7+ billion [1]. And while the ACS annual surveys are considered accurate, what would be the right period for changing Congressional seat counts? It obviously can't be annual (since House terms are every 2 years). [0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/about/census-constitution.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/abo... [1] https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html
betterunix2 5y ago
I see 89 residents and immediately think less of COVID and more of the Trump administration's effort to scare certain demographics off. The results were tainted by an administration that acted in bad faith.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Well, the absolute easiest way to gain 89 residents would have been to let the YIMBYs build one more highrise in Brooklyn.
keepkalm 5y ago
AOC could lose her district and opt to run against Schumer instead of staying in the House. Payback for AOC beating another incumbent Democrat that ends in her beating Schumer for US Senate. That is the most interesting thing that could happen at least.

seneca 5y ago

The most important bit: > Texas will gain two seats in the House of Representatives, five states will gain one seat each (Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon), seven states will lose one seat each (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia), and the remaining states’ number of seats will not change based on the 2020 Census.

sethbannon 5y ago

For those wanting to know state congressional seat gains and losses... Gaining 2 seats: Texas Gaining 1 seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon Losing 1 seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia

swyx 5y ago
how does this work for congresspeople already in those seats? does this only take effect next congress?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The changes will come into play as of 2023's Congress.
- mbauman 5y ago
  State governments re-draw the lines. Sometimes they try to preserve existing districts and existing constituents for existing congresspeople, and sometimes they intentionally obliterate them (based on where the congressperson's house is). Precisely how they do so varies by state.
- tharne 5y ago
  Yes, this would impact the next election cycle, occurring in 2022, and the effects would first be seen in the congress sworn in in January of 2023. The states with changes in seats are responsible for the redistricting. What this means in practice is that in a state losing one seat, one district will disappear and the map gets redrawn. Then you'll typically have a primary or a general election where both candidates are incumbents. If both incumbents are in the same party, they'll face off in the primary for that party, if they're in different parties they'll face off in the general election. Alternatively, one incumbent may choose to retire.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The states with changes in seats are responsible for the redistricting. So are the states without changes; no net changes in seats doesn’t mean no internal population movement that would render existing districts no longer sufficiently equal to satisfy equal representation (the exception being states that have no change in seats and exactly one seat.)

thestoicattack 5y ago

House seat changes by state: (+2) TX (+1) CO, FL, MT, NC, OR (-1) CA, IL, MI, NY, OH, PA, WV (0) everyone else

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

elliekelly 5y ago

> Puerto Rico's resident population was 3,285,874, down 11.8% from 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census. Is there any explanation for this?

MattGaiser 5y ago
Hurricane drove a lot of people away. https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/research-briefs/puerto-rican-exodus-one-year-hurricane-maria https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/research/data-center/resear...
exegete 5y ago
Hurricane Maria was pretty devastating and the lack of Federal aid exacerbated it. I imagine people left after that.
- darksaints 5y ago
  Another one of Trump's short sighted policy backfires. In his effort to paint Puerto Rico as a failed and corrupt liberal state, he denied them aid, causing half a million American citizens to move from a place where they couldn't vote in federal elections to places where they could.
pavlov 5y ago
Hurricane Maria in 2017 must be partially responsible? Property damage (estimated at $90B) and loss of economic opportunity surely forced many people to move to the mainland.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Everyone is pointing to Hurricane Maria, which is a big factor, but even before that there was a major financial crisis creating substantial misery.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Massively devastating natural events + crappy economy + local governmental corruption + freedom of movement into the US = a lot of people leaving. Honestly, the fact that even more people don't flee that island for mainland US is a testament to the importance people place on their "homeland".

MattGaiser 5y ago

Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district survives for another decade.

standardUser 5y ago

The slowing of immigration is starting to make our falling birthrates more noticeable. We'll need to see a surge in immigration in the coming years to avoid the aging problem facing most other wealthy countries. Biden's proposed $2 trillion family plan might help if it could ever get passed, but it might be too little too late. Other countries have had far more extreme incentives to have kids for decades and still ended up much farther down the wrong side of the aging curve than we are. EDIT: I appreciate the downvotes. But I wonder which you prefer: higher taxes for working people, reduced benefits for the elderly, or more immigrants coming to our nation of immigrants? We need to pick one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reducesuffering 5y ago
Birthrates are depressed because prime child-rearing ages, (22-35?) are increasingly unable to afford adequate housing and health insurance. Solve those, families will feel more secure and be able to live close to relatives to help out with children, and the issue is much more tractable.
- standardUser 5y ago
  That perspective is not compatible with what we know about birthrates in other developed nations. More highly educated societies exhibit lower birthrates, more or less universally. Even within the US, people with more education have children later and fewer children, even though they also have higher incomes and better insurance, etc. In many European countries, families are given considerable support and incentives far beyond what American families receive, yet birthrates still continue to drop.
  - genmud 5y ago
    Affordable housing isn't a US centric problem, I think that it is fair to say that it is still a big concern for many families across the world. If you look at what % people are paying for housing vs. other stuff, I imagine a pretty clear trend over the last 50-80 years would start to show.

Rafuino 5y ago

Now the Q is how will the districts be drawn to make those two new TX districts reliably red, eh?

tenpies 5y ago
Probably in much the same way that the seats in the other states will be re-drawn to make them as Blue as possible, so it will not even out, but at least Texas will remain Texas. That said, given what the Democrats are doing, seats may be entirely inconsequential going forward. This may all be a huge waste of time.
- tolbish 5y ago
  Do you mean in terms of granting DC and Puerto Rico statehood, or reallocating representatives based on population?
- skystarman 5y ago
  Democrats are committed to the idea that politicians shouldn't choose their voters. They have fought in court over it and the SCOTUS decided gerrymandering is fine, even many egregious examples. The GOP has always been on board with this. Why I'll never understand. The only excuse you ever get is "Dems do it too!" As if Democrats should just lay down arms and not participate in the practice and let the GOP gerrymander every state to oblivion out of principle or something.

exegete 5y ago

Is it time to expand the House? It feels like as the population grows we shouldn’t dilute and move around representation.

vinay427 5y ago
Personally, I say yes. The US is a huge outlier among OECD nations [1] and this definitely shows in the connection and level of interaction people feel to their representatives, at least based on my experience living in both the US and a country with a far lower ratio. [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representation-ratio-district-size-chart-graph https://www.vox.com/2018/6/4/17417452/congress-representatio...
- tharne 5y ago
  It's not such an easy decision. Sure if you have more reps, each constituent arguably has more access. The flip side is that they have more access to a less powerful rep. If you had 10,000 people in congress, sure it'd be a lot easier to get in touch with one of them, but 1 person in a group of 10,000 doesn't have much influence, so how much is that interaction really worth? Even at 435, unless your rep is a senior member with some important committee assignments and they happen to be in the majority party, getting the ear of your rep isn't worth all that much.
  - diggernet 5y ago
    > so how much is that interaction really worth? Wait, you mean more reps results in less value in buying them? Sign me up for that plan! Bottom line: More, and less powerful, reps means more diverse representation, and less power to abuse. Win-win.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Getting the ear of your rep could lead to your rep getting the ear of other reps, or the scruff of some federal agency.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago

CameronNemo 5y ago

It seems absolutely wild to me that we are using pre pandemic population counts to apportion seats.

darth_avocado 5y ago
For the next 10 years
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  At least it is better than the UK. IIRC they completely stopped updating their seats.
PraetorianGourd 5y ago
The pandemic was and is horrible, but it didn't take enough lives above the expected death rate to really have an appreciable impact on census data. (I am not a COVID denialist, we had more deaths than expected rates, it is worse than the flu etc. etc.) Unless you are talking about out-migration from big cities to small cities, but then again I think it could be just as illogical to say "lets base it off of immediate post-pandemic numbers" as I would best a good many people will move _back_ to the big cities. That is the risk of a point-in-time count. So many external factors. But generally they all cancel one another out, and each point-in-time count has similar but unique circumstances that in the aggregate could have an impact. Just the way these counts are.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  I am explicitly concerned about the point in time nature. I am glad you pointed out all of the migration anomalies, as well as the future possibility for more. Edit: also I would not balk at 500k deaths. There will be more to come as well. That is a significant portion of the voting age and likely voter populations.
  - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
    Especially since we are talking 10-year increments here, for the pandemic to have a real impact on census stuff, it would have to have killed many people _who were not otherwise going to die over the next decade_. Most likely, we front-loaded a lot of these expected deaths to the early part of the decade. That is to say, at some point in the next 10 years the census will be an accurate representation of living voting-age people in the USA. I didn't balk at 500k deaths. In fact, I tried to make sure that nobody would accuse me of downplaying the deaths/impact of the pandemic.

1270018080 5y ago

I'm interested to see how Montana will be drawn. I didn't think I'd ever see that happen.

jlangemeier 5y ago
Perfect world, it probably has a jagged split north to south drawing through Great Falls down to Billings/Hardin. With this year's state legislature and Governor Body-slam; they'll try some stupid ass bs drawing down the rockies along the I15 corridor and splitting the two major dem hubs in the state (Bozeman and Missoula) rendering it set up perfectly for 2 republican representatives from here to eternity.

abeppu 5y ago

In all the press surrounding the shortened door-to-door period, as well as the legal kerfuffle about asking about citizenship, it was repeatedly stressed that lower counts could also impact federal funding for a range of programs. I know the census is supposed to release other stats later this year, but are these state-level resident counts enough to make educated guesses about impacts to stuff beyond the house?

deanCommie 5y ago

Don't forget - the 2020 census was interfered with for expressly political gains. That seems relevant to any discussion if it's outcomes. While states themselves are not nearly as red/blue at the district level as they might be in the aggregate, it is absolutely worth noting that a net 6 additional congressional seats are going from "Blue" states to "Red" states. The actual impact of the census may be even bigger than this - for all we knew the REVERSE trend should have occurred as the country's demographics shift. * https://publicintegrity.org/politics/system-failure/trump-obstruction-of-2020-census/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/system-failure/trump-ob... * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/trump-is-ending-the-census-count-early-its-a-feat-of-profound-political-cynicism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/trump-... * https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/08/07/trumps-new-plan-to-hijack-the-census-will-imperil-americas-future/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/08/07/trumps-...

pianom4n 5y ago
Red states gaining seats is in no way incompatible with demographic changes. Red states become less red via population growth could fully explain this effect, and seems like a completely plausible explanation.
hinkley 5y ago
Also 6 electoral college votes.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Wait is that true? Is a democratic president ever going to be elected again?
  - danso 5y ago
    Of the 6 states that gained an electoral vote [0]: - Biden's 6-point loss in Texas [1] was the slimmest margin since 1996 (and 92 and 96 featured Ross Perot, a strong third-party conservative); the margins for 2012 and 2016 were 16% and 9%, respectively. - North Carolina went for Trump by just 1.5%, and has had similar slim margins since Obama's 0.3% victory in 2008 [2] - Colorado and Oregon both went blue by ~15% margins - Montana has been reliably red. - Florida has become more and more reliably red, but not as much as Ohio (which lost a vote) has. More guaranteed-blue states (CA, NY, IL) lost votes than guaranteed-red (WV), but this isn't a seismic, immutable shift by any means. [0] https://www.wbur.org/npr/983082132/census-to-release-1st-results-that-shift-electoral-college-house-seats https://www.wbur.org/npr/983082132/census-to-release-1st-res... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

rossdavidh 5y ago

Spare a thought for the census bureau folks, who in an incredibly stressful year and in an incredibly polarized political climate, had to nonetheless get the job done and try to release the data on time and keep their cool and remain objective, all the while knowing that their best case scenario is nobody really thinks about how they did it. Not an easy job.