Q&A Of The Day – Did The Census Undercount Of Florida’s Population Cost Us Representation?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s entry: Brian- thanks for always finding things you don’t hear everywhere else. You caught my attention with something you said about the Census. If we were shorted by over 50,000 people, was it enough to cost us extra representation? I remember hearing that New York was close to not losing representation but didn’t hear about any other states.
Bottom Line: There were no shortage of questions about why Florida’s Census population count came in nearly 1% lower than estimates and consequently, why Florida failed to gain a second seat in Congress and 2nd Electoral College vote. Some, often news outlets like the Sun Sentinel, blamed Trump. Others suggested Florida just wasn’t as popular as had previously been suggested and growth was lower than had been expected. And then there was another thought by some on the right, that the Census Bureau intentionally throttled Florida’s population growth to not provide extra representation to an increasingly red trending state. As is often the case, the truth as we now know it, doesn’t clearly support any of the narratives.
Yesterday I brought you the information that Florida’s population grew at a much faster rate last year than we’d previously known based on the state’s population provided in the Uniform Crime Report, which showed Florida adding an additional 387,479 people, or 1,061 per day over 2019. The report also showed another key difference. Florida’s actual population was 57,881 people greater than what the 2020 Census revealed. So herein lies your question. If Florida was shorted by that many people, was it enough to cost us the 2nd Electoral College vote and 2nd Congressional seat we were expected to pick up heading into the Census? The answer is no, at least based on what we currently know.
While New York was only 89 people away from not losing a Congressional Seat or Electoral College vote, if you added Florida’s near 58,000additional unaccounted for people to our Census count, we still would come up about 113,000 people short of gaining the extra representation provided everything else was equal. The wild card would be when other states have their official tallies accounted for – if we were to see variances significant enough to bring it to within that 113,000-person threshold. It’s possible but not especially likely. I’d referenced this at the time the Census came out and it’s worth mentioning again. If the Census was intentionally playing politics with the apportionment for the benefit of Democrats, why would they have had New York lose a seat in Congress and an Electoral College vote over 89 people? That margin of error in a deep-blue state is far easier to overcome than greater than one-hundred thousand people in a traditionally purple state.