Guest host Michael Bitzer and a panel will sort through the first batch of results from the 2020 census, including the political clout it will give North Carolina and the questions about the census' accuracy.
Bill Scher
Apr 28, 2021 8:55 PM ET
We can’t know exactly what each state will do. But, after accounting for the newly announced reapportionment, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman estimates Republicans will net three or four seats from redistricting (while offering a range of zero to eight.) Real Clear Politics’ Sean Trende similarly estimates a net gain of four from a “normal redistricting,” in which Republicans do not pursue extreme gerrymanders.
A four-seat net gain from reapportionment and redistricting would help Republicans take the House in 2022 but they need to net five seats. (That number could change depending on how the parties fare in upcoming special elections to fill House vacancies. Democrats have two outside chances this year to flip Republican-held seats, in Texas’s sixth district and Ohio’s fifteenth district. Republicans are not expected to win the specials for three Democratic-held vacant seats.)
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.