At the risk of overusing a phrase, the 2024 presidential election may be the most important — and perhaps the closest — in history. Last week’s Census Bureau announcement of serious errors will impact the next decade’s congressional apportionment and delegations, and play a crucial role in the presidential race. Given the nature of the mistakes, Democrats could hang onto the presidency under particularly controversial circumstances due to publicly-acknowledged errors.
The Census Bureau acknowledged that 14 states had significant miscounts in the 2020 census. See if you notice a pattern here: Among the overcounted states are Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts. Five of these six voted for Joe Biden in that year’s presidential election. The undercounted states were Texas, Illinois, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. Five of these six voted for Donald Trump.
The ability for any agency to accurately count each person in a nation of 330 million is a logistical challenge, to be sure. However, it is difficult to understand how the Census Bureau missed more than 5 percent of the populations of Arkansas, Delaware and Hawaii.
The changes will impact national politics in a dramatic fashion. The 2020 census led to significant changes to congressional seats apportioned to states. Texas gained two congressional seats, while North Carolina, Florida, Montana, Colorado and Oregon each gained one. New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and California each lost one seat in Congress. There was significant surprise that population growth winners such as Texas and Florida didn’t gain more seats. With the possible exception of Illinois not losing a seat, the likely effects of an accurate count would have overwhelmingly aided red states. Simply put, the revised figures show that (mostly) red states had even quicker relative population growth compared to the rest of the country — and especially compared to (mostly) blue states. It is entirely possible that undercounted states could have gained at least one seat in Congress, while overcounted states may have lost at least one each.
The error resulted in over 600,000 overcounted residents in New York and a similar amount undercounted in Texas. Last year, media coverage lamented that New York lost a member of Congress by being 89 residents short. With the revised, accurate numbers, New York may have lost a second seat — had the corrected numbers been available earlier. Considering that Republicans need to flip just five seats to retake Congress, each misplaced seat is crucial....
Census blunder may tip 2024 to Democrats
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Originally Posted by BoogyMan
