The NPR Politics Podcast - Census: More Seats For Texas, Fewer For California and New York

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

The first round of Census numbers out this week will help to determine each community's electoral clout and share of federal resources. An ongoing audit will help to determine if groups were correctly counted and the margin of error.This episode: demographics and culture reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and Census correspondent Hansi Lo Wang.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Kristen calling from Washington, D.C. I just dropped my dog off at the groomers for a long overdue haircut. This podcast was recorded at 2.08 p.m. on Thursday, April 29th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this. Notably, my dog's hair will be a lot shorter for summer. Have fun. Enjoy the show. Wait, did people delay dog haircuts because of the pandemic, too? I was wondering the same thing. I don't have a pet. I'm not a pet person. Me neither. I'm very confused. I have questions. People, tell us these things.

All right. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. Hello. I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And Hansi Lo Wong is here again to talk about the census. Hansi, hello. Hello. Thank you for having me back. Of course. I mean, this week must be, I was going to say Christmas, but it must be Christmas factorial for you, considering that this is the culmination of years of work, right? The first big batch of results from the 2020 census are out. How have you been experiencing this? Just a lot of work. Are you excited?

It's all of the above. All of the above. It's the first batch. I would just emphasize first, the census is not over, folks. Okay. Multiple more Christmases to come for Hansi. But yes, we're going to talk all about these numbers today. They determine the U.S. congressional seats for a whole decade. The numbers also relatedly affect each state's electoral college votes. But first, we're just going to talk about the raw data. We're going to talk about the fun stuff about how much the country has grown in the last 10 years. So, Hansi, just start off with what numbers were most interesting to you? Well, since we're in the politics podcast, I got to say that 13 states

saw changes in the number of seats in the House of Representatives. And of course, that translates into changes in their number of votes in the Electoral College. Of those 13 states, seven states each lost one House seat. Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and California, which lost a seat for the first time since it became a state in 1850. Five states picked up one seat each, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon. And one state is the big winner here, the Lone Star State, with two more seats, Texas. Well, and Hansi, aside from those politics numbers, we just got the total U.S. population number. What did that look like? The official count, according to the 2020 census, is 331,449,281. That's up about 7.4%

compared to the previous census in 2010. And it's the slowest rate of population growth in the country's history. Haven't seen this kind of sluggish growth since the 1930s during the aftermath of the Great Depression. That was really striking data point to me. I mean, obviously, in my own universe, I care a lot about redistricting and what it means for the House and elections. But that kind of slow growth is a big red flashing light for the country. And continued slow growth like that is really bad for democracies. It's really bad for all developed countries. And why I think it's so interesting now is I'm curious to see if that impact is going to have any ripple effects in a couple of debates we're having right now. You know, on the one hand, you have Democrats

who are pushing things like universal pre-K education, more money for child care. One of the big problems of slow population growth is people aren't having enough children. And people a lot of times say they're not having enough children because they can't afford it. So those kind of programs can be seen as sort of incentivizing people to have bigger families. And then on the other side, immigration. There's always been this question in immigration of do you need to grow your population in other ways if people in your country aren't having kids on their own? And those kind of numbers are not good. And demographers say it's part of a trend that they expect to continue. Part of it is from the Great Recession and people putting off marriage and kids because

of that. And partly is we just don't have as many kids as we used to. So I'm just personally really fascinated in the ripple effect of having really slow population growth. Well, Sue, on that point, very quickly, I'm just curious. I totally understand why slow population growth could be bad economically. Slow population growth equals slow economic growth, for example. Why would that be bad for democracy? Well, you need people to keep your economy afloat. And when your economy starts to crumble,

democracy has some problems too, right? You know, especially in the US, where so much of our national security strength comes on our economic strength. So if one part of those pillars starts to crumble, the House, you know, isn't built on a strong foundation at that point. And I think that's why you have seen for years people in Congress offering sort of proposals, not many have gone many places, of trying to tackle this problem. Maybe now that you actually have official data saying, wait a minute, we're now entering this period of slow growth, it might change the conversation. Gotcha. Hansi, I want to come back to you. Like you mentioned, you listed off all

those states that lost and gained seats. New York lost a seat very narrowly, Texas added two, etc. I'm curious, were any of those surprising to you, or are a lot of these pretty much following longstanding trends? Well, New York has been losing at least one seat for decades now. But really, just this really eye-popping number was revealed during the Census Bureau's press conference. If New York's census numbers had 89 more people, 89, that state would have had a higher ranking than Minnesota in the rankings used to reassign House seats according to the census numbers. And New York would have received that last House seat that was reassigned. And instead, that seat went to Minnesota, which is keeping all of its seats. So these are all just stark reminders that,

you know, the size of the House of Representatives has basically stayed the same for more than a century. So some states will be winners and some states will be losers after each census in terms of power in Congress and power in the Electoral College. And small census numbers can make a big difference in determining whether a state is a winner or a loser. Sue, I want to turn to you. I know it's very early to be asking you this, but you are a congressional expert. At first glance, how does this new map change the calculus for the House, for either party in next year's midterm elections? I don't think it's going to have as big of an impact as many people were bracing for because the population numbers were smaller than a lot of people had expected, because certain states didn't gain as many as expected. Only Texas gained two seats.

But on the whole, I think if you had to give a party an advantage, I think that Republicans walk away feeling better about these numbers than Democrats. I don't think that they're prescriptive or determinative, but there's more in there for them to feel encouraged by. At the end of the process, Republicans have more control over more districts and how they'll be drawn. And this is a really mishmash system, right? Every state does it differently. Some it's partisan control, some it's controlled by commissions or independent boards. But Republicans in the way the current system set out and in the growth in places like Florida and Texas, those are states where Republicans will control the process. And it doesn't mean that the districts won't be fair. It just means that it's always better to be the party that's the one more in charge of drawing the lines.

And Republicans are only five seats away from a majority. And as we've said before, there's other fundamentals in 2022 being a midterm that plays in their direction. So if you had to say who walks away feeling slightly better, I think the Republican Party does. All right, we're going to take a very quick break. And we're going to talk more about the politics of the new census numbers in a second. I'm Yoé Shaw. I'm Kia Miy Yakanatis. We're the hosts of the NPR podcast, Invisibilia. You can think of Invisibilia kind of like a sonic blacklight. When you switch us on, you will hear surprising and intimate stories. Stories that help you notice things in your world that maybe you didn't see before. Listen to the Invisibilia podcast from NPR. And we are back. Now, Sue, I couldn't help but notice when Hansi was rattling off those states that are gaining or losing seats that some of those states are ones that we watch really closely in presidential years. I'm thinking Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania. How would this new map we're going to be looking at, how would that have changed the Electoral College? And how does it change how we look at 2024? Yeah, I mean, if these had been the counts on Election Day 2020, Joe Biden still would have won this election. Obviously, his popular vote would not have changed, but he would have won the Electoral College with three fewer votes. He would

have gotten 303 electoral votes compared to the 306 margin that he had. And why I think that's interesting, and we heard it a lot in the 2020 race, is that he had. And why I think that's interesting, and we heard it a lot in the 2020 race, is this growing sort of call, I think almost exclusively from Democrats, from people who want to scrap the electoral college, who they don't think it's small d democratic. And we are seeing, you know, and when we live in these hyper partisan times, that the popular vote and the electoral college vote and the sort of the gulf between them keeps growing. And you could see a scenario again in 2024, where a popular vote margin continues to grow, and that the electoral college margin continues to shrink.

And that's a conflict. And I would imagine that people who believe in abolishing the electoral college are going to look at these census numbers and say, this is all the more reason to do it when you can see that Biden would have won by that historic margin, 7 million votes, and yet would have had fewer Electoral College votes. Hansi, I want to turn to you and ask you about some other big concerns around the census, particularly about how accurate the count was and how accurate the count of Latino voters might be. That was a concern going into it. Tell us about why there were those worries and also what the numbers tell us about how valid those concerns were. I think it's important to remember

no U.S. census has been a perfect count. And this time, there are particular concerns about historically undercounted groups, including Latinos, especially other people of color, immigrants, renters, rural residents. All of these groups face higher risks of being undercounted because, in part, the Trump administration's failed push for a citizenship question in the years leading up to the actual start of the counting, that all set up a chilling effect for many communities. A lot of worries about participating in a government headcount and possibly raising the levels of distrust that was already a major challenge for the Census Bureau. And during the actual counting, the country was hit with the pandemic and made it very difficult to send out those really important door knockers needed to reach households less likely to fill out a census form themselves. And on top of that, the Trump administration made a

last minute decision to cut short the time for counting and force the Bureau to curtail some of its early quality checks. And you know, it's really important to keep in mind here, though, that what we have so far from the Census Bureau this week is just a really basic set of state population numbers. And it's really too early to really know how accurate these numbers are. It's going to be a while before we have any substantial indicators of the quality of the census. June is when the American Statistical Association has a team of researchers putting out a report as part of their independent audit of the Census Bureau's work. And December is when the Census Bureau is expected to start putting out estimates of how many people may have been missed. Hansi, if they do in the course of these audits find out that some of the numbers weren't right, right?

Maybe they did undercount some Latinos in Texas or Florida. Are these results that came out this week set in stone? Could they be changed based on updated audits? Or are these fixed now? The census numbers used to reallocate House seats, those are known as the apportionment counts, those are pretty much locked in unless there are court challenges that are successful. And near Governor Andrew Cuomo, from the state that lost one seat seat and with the census numbers just shy or census numbers that needed just 89 more people in order to save that seat, Cuomo says they're looking at potential legal options. I want to ask one more question about looking ahead, where the rubber meets the road on all of this. When does redrawing all of these new district maps happen And how contentious should we expect all of that to be? Well, mapmakers need data first. And the new redistricting data from the

2020 census, they're expected out by August 16th, which would be about five minutes later than originally planned. But the Bureau says it needs more time to run quality checks after the pandemic and the Trump administration's interference last year with the schedule. But that release date may shift because Ohio and Alabama are suing to try to force the Bureau to release that data by the end of July. And also, Alabama's lawsuit is challenging the Census Bureau's plans to use a different way of keeping people's personal information in anonymized census data to keep that information confidential. Alabama is against this new way of doing it that the Census Bureau is planning to use, it's known as differential privacy. And here's the thing,

if Alabama is successful in that lawsuit, and the Bureau is not allowed to use this new way of keeping data confidential. The Bureau says it may have to push back the release of redistricting data by multiple months. So this could get very chaotic. It's already chaotic, I would say. Yeah. All right. Well, Hansi and Sue are both going to be very busy with all of this. But for now, we're going to leave it there. Hansi, you're the best. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. And before we go, one more quick announcement. We are announcing our Politics Podcast book club picks further in advance now to give you all more time to give the books a read. Our May pick, like we have announced, remains Fulfillment by Alec McGillis. And now we announce our July pick, America on Fire,

The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Re black rebellion since the 1960s by Elizabeth Hinton. It is on sale next month, but you can preorder it at bookshop.org or lots of other places you buy books. Get after it. Get excited. It's going to be great. Until then, I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Susan Davis.

I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.