A 2006 scare-mongering op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — “It’s the Demography, Stupid” —warned of the threat to civilization posed by Muslim migration to Europe. Muslims’ high reproduction rate relative to Europeans meant creeping Islamization threatened to eradicate nice, white Christian culture as we know it. Tucker Carlson is a latecomer to that party.
That was ten years before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign warning of the brown peril from south of the border — Mexicans and others “from the Middle East. But we don’t know.”
It is not a hard guess what Carlson, Fox News and conservative commentators will do with the census data released on Monday. Population growth over the last ten years in the U.S. hit its lowest rate since the 1930s (Washington Post):
Unlike the slowdown of the Great Depression, which was a blip followed by a boom, the slowdown this time is part of a longer-term trend, tied to the aging of the country’s White population, decreased fertility rates and lagging immigration.
Five states gained a congressional seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon. Texas gained two. Seven states lost one seat each: California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
More granular details on race and ethnicity, incuding data used for redrawing state and federal voting districts, will not arrive until later this year. For now, William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells the Post:
Based on census estimates, in more than a dozen states, about half the gains are Hispanic people, including Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, Frey said. Whites accounted for more than half the growth in only five states, plus the District of Columbia.In 27 states, the number of Whites declined.
Data on race and ethnicity won’t be released until later this year, but some states with high immigrant populations, such as Texas, Florida and Arizona, came in with lower populations than projected. “So I think it is reasonable to ask whether there was some undercount of Latinos,” Frey said.
Carlson’s white-fright screeds won’t wait. Bet money on it.
It’s the Democracy, Stupid
Perhaps most surprising detail is that had 89 more New York residents filled out census forms, the state would have kept its seat and instead Minnesota would have lost one. Had more Latinos there responded, Texas might have gained three seats instead of two.
Participation matters. Voting matters. “Nobody would fight this hard to take something from us that wasn’t powerful,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II said of Republican efforts at suppressing opponents’ votes.
Given the last two very close presidential elections, Aaron Blake offers one take on what the data mean and don’t:
All told, five seats will migrate from blue states to red ones — owing to population shifts from the Rust Belt, the Northeast and California to the South and other portions of the West.
Five of the seven seats being added also go to states under complete GOP control of redistricting, with three of seven being taken away coming from states in which Democrats have some measure of control over the maps. Other states have more divided control or redistricting commissions.
That should help Republicans, at least marginally, draw better House maps for 2022. The Cook Political Report estimates the shifts are worth about 3.5 seats which, if no other seat shifted in the coming midterm election, would put the House near-even (either 218-217 or 219-216 in Democrats’ favor, versus the current 222-213).
As for the electoral college in future presidential elections, it’s more of a mixed bag. Two states that are losing seats — Michigan and Pennsylvania — went for President Biden in 2020 but also for Donald Trump in 2016. But those are states Democrats probably need to win in the near future, meaning it’s probably a bigger loss for them.
How those maps will look will wait until perhaps the end of this year because of delays in releasing census data. NPR:
The results had been held up for months due to delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s interference last year. Under current federal law, these state population numbers were due by the end of 2020. But the bureau had been warning since April 2020 that census results would be delivered later than originally planned. A bipartisan group of lawmakers recently renewed a push in Congress to extend legal reporting deadlines formally for the 2020 count.
Alabama and Ohio have asked federal courts to force the release of data by the end of July so they can complete their redistricting process on schedule.
NPR adds:
Alabama’s lawsuit is also trying to stop the bureau from adopting a new technique, known as differential privacy, for keeping personal information in anonymized census data confidential. If Alabama wins, the data’s release would be delayed by “multiple months” past August, the agency’s chief scientist said in a recent court filing.
Candidates and kitchen cabinets across the country are standing by to analyze how redistricting may affect their chances of winning election should they jump into state and federal races. Delays equal dollars and compress campaign schedules. The longer it takes to get the lay of the land and to find out which officials end up double-bunked, the tougher the prospects for winning as a non-incumbent.