The first batch of once-every-decade data from the U.S. Census Bureaushows a United States that is growing less quickly but still seeing its population shift to the South and the West.
The data released Monday was relatively basic — containing national and state-level population figures and details of how they affect states’ representation in Congress. Still, it contained some surprises and pointed to some consequential trends.
Five takeaways from the new census data:
MORE SLUGGISH GROWTH AHEAD?
The U.S. population grew to 331 million, a 7.4% growth rate from the last time the Census Bureau counted every person in the country, in 2010. Those may sound like big numbers, but it’s actually the second slowest rate of population growth the census has ever recorded, just behind the 7.3% growth in the 1930s.
That decade’s slowed growth was rooted in the Great Depression. Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse.
But while U.S. population growth recovered after the Great Depression, demographers are not optimistic it will pick up anytime soon. Most forecast even slower population growth in the decades to come. Americans are getting older — the median age in the U.S. is 38, up one year from 37 in 2010. Immigration had been dropping even before the pandemic effectively shut it down. And many Republicans have largely turned against the idea of immigration, legal or illegal, a new political barrier to the country adding more population quickly.
“Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
That has potentially grim consequences for the nation’s future. “The big demographic advantage the U.S. once enjoyed over other rich nations has evaporated,” John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, tweeted after the census data release. “Now there are more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger.”
THE GREAT MIGRATION CONTINUES
The U.S. population may be growing more slowly, but it continued its 80-year-long trend of shifting to the South and the West.
Florida, Montana and North Carolina each saw enough growth to add a congressional seat, while booming Texas gained two. Colorado and Oregon also gained new seats, while Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania lost seats.
The snapshot tells a familiar story: Americans have moved out of the industrial Midwest and Northeast, chasing jobs, more affordable housing, growing new suburbs and vibrant cities.
But, strikingly, the longtime symbol of Americans’ search for the new and the next wasn’t part of that story. California’s growth rate wasn’t enough to retain its 53-seat delegation in the House. The nation’s most populous state lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history, a fact that is already forcing debate over whether Democrats’ control of state government is to blame.
GOOD NEWS FOR THE GOP — FOR NOW
Those population changes will be quickly translated into political shifts. The census data officially kicked off the redistricting process, in which states will redraw congressional and statehouse districts to adjust for the new headcounts.
The news Monday was generally good for Republicans. They control the redistricting process in Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which account for four of the seven new seats.
The two Democratic states that gain seats — Colorado and Oregon — won’t give that power to their Democratically controlled legislatures. In Oregon, Democrats have agreed to give GOP lawmakers equal say in exchange for a pledge not to hold up other legislation. And Colorado’s voters took the drawing of district lines away from state lawmakers and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.
The new seats are only part of the often cutthroat redistricting fight. As soon as August, the Census Bureau is expected to release detailed information showing, down to the block, where almost every person lives. New legislative maps will be redrawn in each state to ensure equal representation. But one party can gain advantage by packing rivals into a single district, or spreading them out so that they can never win an election.
Right now, the GOP controls more statehouses overall and has an edge in growing states. Republicans only need to net a handful of seats to win control of the U.S. House.
“I think Republicans, when all this is done, will be in great shape to retake the House majority in 2022,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which is coordinating the GOP redistricting push.
But there will be limits. Many of the new residents of those states are young and voters of color, groups that lean strongly Democratic. It may be hard for Republicans to maintain their edge for much of the decade, regardless of how they draw their lines.
TROUBLE COUNTING LATINOS?
In fact, the process was expected to go even better for the GOP. Texas had been predicted to gain three seats, Florida two and Arizona one. Those shortfalls were a shocker for demographers, and there were so few details in the data it was hard to understand what happened.
One possibility is that Latinos weren’t properly counted. Latinos make up a large segment of the population in the three states that didn’t gain expected seats. Trump unsuccessfully pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, sparking allegations that he hoped to intimidate immigrants or people in the country illegally from participating in the process. The actual count started during the coronavirus pandemic when it was especially hard to reach certain populations.
It may be that the gap between expected gains and actual ones is the first sign of a Hispanic undercount. But it’s too soon to tell without the more detailed data due out in the fall.
“The initial results are surprising enough that once more details are released, we will be able to better determine to what extent the Latino population was fairly and accurately counted,” said Arturo Vargas, president of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said he wasn’t ready to “sound the alarm” about an undercount yet, noting that growth among Latinos may have helped New York avoid losing a second House seat.
A GAME OF INCHES
This census count was a tough one for New York. Growth has been slowing for years and there’s been a particular exodus of people from its upstate region north and west of New York City. But, during a Monday news conference, Census Bureau officials revealed the state was 89 people short of dodging the demographic bullet of losing a congressional seat.
Congressional reapportionment is a zero-sum game, with states divvying up the 435 House seats based on population. Minnesota barely edged out New York to avoid being the last state to lose a seat. If New York had counted 89 more residents, and all other states stayed the same, the state would have kept its seat and Minnesota would have lost one.
Minnesota, which had the nation’s highest self-response rate, also secured the last House seat in 2010.
Fear, lack of funding hurt census in Sun Belt, advocates say
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — According to the new census, the booming Sun Belt isn’t booming quite like the experts thought.
Population counts released Monday came as a shock to many demographers and politicians who expected to see growth that could add numerous congressional seats to a region that’s apparently been gaining people rapidly all decade. Instead, the census found more modest growth that added only three seats total in Florida and Texas. Arizona, the second-fastest growing state in 2010, didn’t add a seat at all.
The questions that advocacy groups and officials are now asking are whether all the new subdivisions and shopping centers are a mirage; whether those states erred in not investing more in encouraging residents to fill out census forms — and whether Latinos in particular were reluctant to trust the Trump administration with their information.
Many demographers caution it’s too early to conclude that the nation’s once-a-decade count missed any specific population groups. That won’t be known until more local data is released later this year and the Census Bureau has completed an independent survey measuring the accuracy of the 2020 head count.
But one thing is indisputable — when compared to the most recent population estimates, the three Sun Belt states underperformed during the count used for determining how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. Texas got two extra seats instead of three; Florida added only a single new seat instead of two, and Arizona failed to gain the seat it was expecting to add.
All three states are led by Republican governors who devoted less resources than other states to encouraging participation in the 2020 census. And in all three states, Hispanics have accounted for about half of the population growth over the decade, according to American Community Survey data.
In Arizona, activists blamed Gov. Doug Ducey for supporting the Trump administration’s failed effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire. Those efforts intimidated Latinos and kept them from fully participating in the census, they said.
“What we saw from the government, Ducey and the Trump administration, was intimidation from Day 1 on the census,” said Eduardo Sainz, national field director for Mi Familia Vota, a political advocacy group. “Because of this narrative of fear, and this narrative of not funding, we lost that seat.”
The Ducey administration released a statement from the state demographer saying that more data is needed to determine why the count fell short of estimates of Arizona’s growth.
During outreach efforts to get people to fill out their census forms, Hispanic residents would ask Adonias Arevalo about Trump’s push on citizenship. Arevalo, state director for Poder Latinx in Phoenix, said, ”Despite the fact that we said a citizenship question will not be present, folks didn’t trust the Trump administration.”
He said Arizona’s undercount is partly the legacy of Republican leaders, including former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and anti-immigration laws.
“For years, people have distrusted the system,” Arevalo said. “People fear to participate in these processes due to years of criminalization.”
Arizona, Florida and Texas were laggards compared to other states in efforts to form statewide committees aimed at driving census participation. Arizona only named members to its committee in August 2019, and Florida set one up in January 2020, just weeks before the national head count began in a rural Alaska village. Texas never even set up a statewide committee, which some census activists attributedto Texas lawmakers not wanting to take a stand on the citizenship question by promoting the census.
Democrats slammed the GOP for those moves.
“From the very beginning, we knew our state was particularly at risk of undercounting our neighbors,” State Rep. Chris Turner, the Texas House’s Democratic Caucus Chair, said in a statement. “A concerted, organized outreach effort is essential to ensuring maximum participation in the census and getting the most accurate count,” he added in an interview.
But state demographer Lloyd Potter in an interview contended there’s little evidence that massive state spending increases census accuracy. Instead, he said, Texas has a lot of the types of people who routinely get undercounted — rural citizens and African-Americans and Latinos.
“Those are factors for all states and may have been more of a factor for Texas,” Potter said. “We have a lot of rural areas in Texas, we have a very significant and growing Latino population.”
Texas Republicans released a statement after the census count that said: “Representation in Texas must be based upon citizenship, and strategically we can ascertain why the left wants to flood Texas with thousands of illegals.”
In Florida, a spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t respond to an email inquiry.
Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert in California, a state that spent $187 million on census outreach, said there was a clear pattern in the numbers. States that funded major census-participation campaigns did well, while Republican-led ones, who viewed efforts like that as criticisms of then-President Donald Trump, did not, he said.
“Texas, Florida, Arizona, they didn’t do big outreach efforts to improve the count,” Mitchell said. “In Texas, particularly, it was anathema to say anything in the Legislature that could be seen as critical of Trump.”
Mitchell said the dynamic with Latinos seems clear given the populations of the underperforming states. He noted that some states that did comparatively better, like his own California, promised to protect their immigrants while low-spending GOP ones did not.
“It does just kind of stare you in the face,” Mitchell said of the pattern.
The actual population count from the 2020 census for Arizona was 3.3% short of what previous population estimates had shown. Florida and Texas were short by 0.7% and 0.5%, respectively.
On the flipside, the population counts in two states that had been expected to lose seats, Alabama and Rhode Island, exceeded their estimates by 2% or more.
During this census cycle, Rhode Island for the first time devoted $1.5 million in public and private money on census outreach efforts. That, along with the fact that Rhode Island hosted the only test run of the census in 2018, helped keep the head count in the public eye, said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.
“There was this constant drumbeat that we could lose our second seat,” Marion said.
If New York had counted 89 more residents, and all other states stayed the same, the state would have kept its seat. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said the state was exploring its legal options.
“Because when you’re talking about 89, that could be a minor mistake in counting,” Cuomo said.
The narrow margins by which New York narrowly lost a seat, Alabama and Rhode Island hung onto theirs and the three Sun Belt states underperformed have aroused suspicions that something “doesn’t seem quite right,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of NALEO Educational Fund, a Hispanic advocacy group.
“I smell smoke,” Vargas said. “We will have to wait a few months to see what kind of fire there is.”
___
AP reporter Marina Villaneuve in Albany, New York, contributed to this report.
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