The evidence of Trump s final act of sabotage (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
President Donald J. Trump walks from the Oval Office to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2021, en route to Joint Base Andrews, Md. to begin his trip to Georgia.
SalonApril 28, 2021
Democratic lawmakers and election experts expressed concerns that Monday s release of the Census Bureau s congressional apportionment data reflected a systematic undercount of Latino residents that may be linked to former President Donald Trump s efforts to change census rules.
The Census Bureau announced that Texas would gain two House seats after the latest population count, while Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon and Montana would each gain one. California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia will each lose a seat. But those numbers were well short of the projected changes, particularly in states with fast-gr
The lead from The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein last Thursday was dire: “Democrats face a daunting future of severe Republican gerrymandering that could flip control of the House in 2022 and suppress diverse younger generations’ political influence for years to come.”
Brownstein’s assessment is drawn from a new Brennan Center for Justice report, which found that Republican state legislatures will fully control the U.S. House redistricting process in 18 states, while Democrats will control only seven. The redistricting process will begin soon, following the completion of the census, which will determine whether states gain or lose House seats. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ For the People Act includes a provision requiring states to use independent commissions, not state legislatures, to draw congressional district lines. As Republicans could create enough favorable districts to overcome the Democrats’ narrow House majority in the 2022 midterm elections, Brownstein counsels D
The Politics of Counting
Civic organizations worked hard to spread the word about the census in hard-to-count communities.
On December 31, 2020, the Census Bureau missed a crucial deadline that caused a huge sigh of relief in Democratic circles. Statutory law dictates the Bureau must report the data that will determine reapportionment of House seats to the president by the end of the year. But a global pandemic and administrative interference combined to make this impossible. It was the first missed census deadline since the December 31 date was established in 1976. As of January 12, bureau officials were telling courts that they were now working toward completing the count by March 6, 2021.
donald trump. i don t believe it s really about donald trump. i believe it s about the people who want to have the national popular vote count. we want to germany tee the presidency to the candidate two gets the most votes in all 50 states and d.c. that s what we want. irrespective of who is president because this could go both ways. sure. it could. i discussed that here in the past, as a matter of fact, with sam wong from the princeton election consortium. let me ask you this question. do you have any qualms with the possible outcome where your state, new mexico, may vote for candidate x but in the ends you are pledging your electors to candidates y. because that s the person who won the national popular vote? i think we need to look at it as a country, not a self centered my state, my state did this. my state did that.
i appreciate it. it was sensationalistic but it was worth it. thanks. thank you for that. dr. sam wong from the princeton election consortium. someone who can explain how the experts missed this in such a big way, andrew is a statistics and political science professor at columbia university. he explained that the margin of error in even the late campaign polls is often so wide that they re not reliable. welcome back, dr. gelman, i appreciate your being here. how do you assess what we just saw on tuesday? four years ago barack obama got 52% of the vote and mitt romney got 48% of the vote. hillary clinton from the polls was predicted to get 52% of the two-party vote herself and she only got half. so, she did 2 percentage points worse than obama did and she did 2 percentage points worse than