The Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question, not because of
the arguments leftists made, but because of the Trump administration’s
repeated own goals.
The results are a striking rebuke to a recent leftist orthodoxy: Adding a citizenship question to a test-run of the census had no statistically significant effect on overall response rates.
So their theory ran that the Trump administration added the question knowing or suspecting it would cause a Hispanic undercount, which would result in blue state populations being underestimated, and thus their congressional apportionment reduced after the 2020 census.
As for motive, who could say? I did raise a concern that it might technically be too late to add a question to the census, but few commentators focused on that issue.
Incompetence Killed the Citizenship Question But today, with the release of the formal test of the citizenship question, we can finally count up the score: Who was right? First, credit to leftists where credit is due: Trump administration officials, in a veritable festival of incompetence, failed to complete many of the basic administrative tasks required by the Administrative Procedure Act for alterations to the census.
The exact forecast varied, but a group of analysts at the Census Bureau eventually produced a series of papers arguing a citizenship question would reduce response rates to the census by 2.2 percentage points.
Could one question really discourage so many millions from answering the census? When Justice Neil Gorsuch raised a question during oral arguments about the Census Bureau's research, noting it wasn't an actual empirical test of the question being considered, leftists mocked him on Twitter and treated him as an innumerate bumpkin.
The left also trotted out a panoply of nonsense arguments that have since been proven wrong: Missing a single reporting deadline didn't make the question unconstitutional, collecting basic demographic information isn't a privacy violation, the possibility of an undercount can't nullify the addition of a census question, and adding one fairly mundane question will not cause catastrophic population undercounts.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/01/census-test-proves-asking-about-citizenship-doesnt-scare-hispanics/
The results are a striking rebuke to a recent leftist orthodoxy: Adding a citizenship question to a test-run of the census had no statistically significant effect on overall response rates.
So their theory ran that the Trump administration added the question knowing or suspecting it would cause a Hispanic undercount, which would result in blue state populations being underestimated, and thus their congressional apportionment reduced after the 2020 census.
As for motive, who could say? I did raise a concern that it might technically be too late to add a question to the census, but few commentators focused on that issue.
Incompetence Killed the Citizenship Question But today, with the release of the formal test of the citizenship question, we can finally count up the score: Who was right? First, credit to leftists where credit is due: Trump administration officials, in a veritable festival of incompetence, failed to complete many of the basic administrative tasks required by the Administrative Procedure Act for alterations to the census.
The exact forecast varied, but a group of analysts at the Census Bureau eventually produced a series of papers arguing a citizenship question would reduce response rates to the census by 2.2 percentage points.
Could one question really discourage so many millions from answering the census? When Justice Neil Gorsuch raised a question during oral arguments about the Census Bureau's research, noting it wasn't an actual empirical test of the question being considered, leftists mocked him on Twitter and treated him as an innumerate bumpkin.
The left also trotted out a panoply of nonsense arguments that have since been proven wrong: Missing a single reporting deadline didn't make the question unconstitutional, collecting basic demographic information isn't a privacy violation, the possibility of an undercount can't nullify the addition of a census question, and adding one fairly mundane question will not cause catastrophic population undercounts.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/01/census-test-proves-asking-about-citizenship-doesnt-scare-hispanics/
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