USA 2020 Census Results Thread (Release: Today, 26 April)

[Tintrlvr]

These patterns seem extremely suggestive of large Latino under-counts, likely down to the Trump admin's relentless politicizing and citizenship question.

I don’t see it. Arizona was way overestimated, but California, Texas, Florida etc. were not overestimated meaningfully, they were just not underestimated to the degree of New York, New Jersey, etc. And nationally the population was underestimated, not overestimated. It seems more likely that the estimates overstated interstate migration and understated immigration in the Northeast, while the Census got them right. The estimates are always off a fair amount.

[Tintrlvr]

Puerto Rico lost 11.8% of it's population since 2010 and hasn't had this few people on the island since the 1980s.

Here’s a big part of your explanation for those NY/NJ undercounts.

[Tintrlvr]

Puerto Rico lost 11.8% of it's population since 2010 and hasn't had this few people on the island since the 1980s.

Here’s a big part of your explanation for those NY/NJ undercounts.

This is probably wrong but I assume it's harder to count PR-born residents since they can move freely to the US? It'd be like tracking inter-state movements.

You mean track them in the estimates? Yes, I do think the Census Bureau not being great at estimating interstate (and sometimes intra-state, too — see Detroit in the 2010 Census) migration (including PR and the other territories) is usually the cause of a lot of the error in the annual estimates.

[Tintrlvr]

New York was 89 people away from not losing any seats?

What.

I guess when those people were declaring "I'm leaving New York!" they actually meant leaving Manhattan for Westchester or LI.

Or barely anyone other than a few self-important pundits actually left cities?

Anyway, this is good but CA losing while so many other places don't is just disgusting.

Oh there were definitely people who left cities, just 1) not as much as the media portrayed it, and 2) not as far from major cities as the media also portrayed--people moved from Manhattan to Jersey City/Westchester, or from DC to Arlington/Alexandria

The answer was incorrect in terms of the intent of the question. By my calculation NY needed 3,056 more people to overtake MN. The spread in the proportional value for the seat was less than 100. I'll post the bubble seats with their proportional value shortly so you can judge how close states were to the threshold.

I think
89 is the correct answer.

Quotient for Minnesota is 5,709,752 / sqrt (7* = 762998

New York would need a population of 762998 * sqrt (26*27) = 20,215,840

New York change needed is 20,215,840 - 20,215,751 = 89

I agree with this. I relied on the table in Tender's original link, and that turned out to not include overseas population. That cut the shortage from over 3K to under 100. Given all the uncertainty in the Census collection and given that the pandemic was most prominent in NYC on Census Day, I would not be surprised to see a lawsuit to address the NY situation.

Utah's lawsuit over the 2000 Census was based on a significantly larger differential, wasn't it? I seem to recall they lost out on their fourth seat to North Carolina based on a few hundred people at least. Of course, they ultimately lost their suit, too, but I think it did result in some shifts in the numbers, maybe even enough to make a difference for New York this time if the same changes applied.

[Tintrlvr]

I actually wonder if Orthodox Jews had something to do with NY and NJ growing more than expected.

Orthodox Jews don't make up even 4% of the population of NY (and Jews generally might not make up 4% of NJ, or at least it's close), so they certainly couldn't make that much of a difference.

[Tintrlvr]

I'm not sure how large of an effect this is, but I think a NY overcount could have something to do with colleges. According to the Census Bureau, college students living on campus should have been counted at their dorms by their colleges, and not included at their family's address. I was included by my family in Utica because I was at home on April 1, which means I was counted twice. I talked to a couple other students I know and they said the same thing.

As of 2018, there were 732,000 full time undergraduate college students studying in New York. That's a lot of potential error.

This happens every Census, though. I was double-counted in 2010 because I filled out a Census form in Massachusetts, where I was in college, but I later found out my parents also listed me as living at home in New Jersey on their Census form, thinking that was the right place for me to be recorded.

This Census, my double-count would have disappeared, vaporizing one Northeasterner.

[Tintrlvr]

Looks like these numbers are good for Dems, no?

Overall definitely better proportionally than the most recent county estimates, but not overwhelmingly so, maybe a marginal impact on congressional seats of +1 or 2 seats for the Democrats.

[Tintrlvr]

New York’s top 10 cities:

1. (-) New York City - 8,804,190 (+7.7%)
2. (-) Buffalo - 278,349 (+6.5%)
3. (+1) Yonkers - 211,569 (+7.9%)
4. (-1) Rochester - 211,238 (+0.4%)
5. (-) Syracuse - 148,620 (+2.4%)
6. (-) Albany - 99,224 (+1.4%)
7. (-) New Rochelle -
8. (-) Mount Vernon - 73,893 (+9.8%)
9. (-) Schenectady
10. (-) Utica - 65,283 (+4.9%)

Growth in Mount Vernon is pretty surprising; it hasn't had a notable increase in population (above +2%) since the 1960 Census. And Buffalo of course as others pointed out had declined at every Census since 1950!

[Tintrlvr]

Detroit still dropped over 10%, or around 75,000 people; not as fast as the 2000s but still pretty severe. So much for the "revitalization" narrative there (in contrast to so many other cities like Buffalo).

[Tintrlvr]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1425877136997502988?s=20

Honestly, I'm not buying it - unless there's some really good evidence to suggest that even post-AVR like 75% of non-voters in the state are non-white.

CVAP would be like 56% white, which makes sense with election results.

[Tintrlvr]

Image Link

-Mormons
-Amish
-Native Americans
-A smattering of plains counties with tiny populations?

Only certain types of Native Americans (the Navajo Nation for example does not stand out at all - even though most of the population in those counties that is neither Navajo nor Hopi is Mormon).

As others pointed out, some Hispanic populations (particularly farmworker areas in the Central Valley and the Tri-Cities and meatpacking workers in SW Kansas - maybe also that spot on the Iowa/Missouri border?) stand out as well.

Some odd patches in the South too that don't seem immediately explicable. And Ocean County, New Jersey stands out likely because of Hasidic Jews.

[Tintrlvr]

https://twitter.com/RedistrictNet/status/1759638217345687925

This is a weird one because the merits seem not that strong, but the plaintiffs should have standing, and the appeal right now is all about standing. Of course the Supreme Court at least and therefore probably also the DC Circuit loves dismissing suits where they doubt the merits by using standing as a cudgel.

[Tintrlvr]

https://twitter.com/RedistrictNet/status/1759638217345687925

This is a weird one because the merits seem not that strong, but the plaintiffs should have standing, and the appeal right now is all about standing. Of course the Supreme Court at least and therefore probably also the DC Circuit loves dismissing suits where they doubt the merits by using standing as a cudgel.

This is an authentically fascinating one, because the Census Bureau has never before admitted to mistakes of a similar magnitude; it actually seems beyond dispute that MN and RI got an extra seat, and TX and FL were stiffed one, and several other changes are plausible.

On the one hand, my understanding is that the Census Bureau's assessment is final and can't be changed, but I think that's statutory, such that if the Supreme Court feels like it, it could probably just unilaterally give those seats away using due process or something. Fascinating case (though my guess is that SCOTUS doesn't want to rock this boat and won't introduce any really novel remedies, but I don't see why residents of Texas and Florida deprived of their constitutionally-guaranteed representation wouldn't have standing).

Fundamentally, it's important to understand what the Census Bureau is saying. The Bureau has not said that there were mistakes in the 2020 Census. Instead, what it has asserted is that the methodology it uses for estimating population on an intercalated basis and the methodology it used for implementing the 2020 Census produced different results. There is no reason to believe that the intercalated estimates are more accurate than the Census itself, and in fact generally speaking the estimates have historically performed worse than the Census when examined by private studies. (A classic example is the wild overestimate of Detroit's population in the 2009 estimates vs. the 2010 Census because the estimates were exceptionally bad at tracking home abandonment.) 2020 was an extreme example because it did take place during the Covid pandemic, and it's possible that the circumstances of 2020 made the Census itself worse than the estimates, but we really do not know that at all.

Anyway, the merits of the case are about something completely different. The plaintiffs in this case claim that various voter ID laws sufficiently abridge the right to vote such that the Penalty Clause of the 14th Amendment kicks in and should reduce the population used for those states' allocation of seats by those disenfranchised by the laws. The Supreme Court at least is extremely unlikely to agree that voter ID laws rise to the level of triggering the Penalty Clause. But either way, the plaintiffs are not disputing the Census results, only how they are implemented in apportionment. So I'm not sure why we're even talking about this.