When I heard that New York State was to lose a Congressional seat after the next reapportionment, it didn’t particularly upset me. The projections from months ago had suggested the possibility of the state losing one or even two seats.
UNTIL I heard that if the state had counted 89 more people, and the other numbers had stayed the same, the number in New York would have stood pat. Minnesota would have lost a House seat.
THEN it hurt. I mean almost physically pained me. I took it personally. I’d spent months trying to plug the Census. Then I WORKED the Census as an enumerator for six or seven weeks. I was SO invested.
Put in your favorite sports cliche here. US football last play of the game, down 4 points, and the running play stops three inches shy of the goal line. Two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning in baseball, down one, runner on base, and the blast from the batter is caught at the fence. The basketball three-pointer to win hits the rim and bounces away.
I Heart NY
New York was the 32nd fastest-growing state in the nation. The US gained 7.4% overall. With 20,201,249 residents, NY’s count was 4.2% higher than in 2010. But the New York delegation will fall from 27 to 26 members of the House of Representatives.
BTW, the US saw the lowest overall population growth since the Great Depression. “Experts say that paltry pace reflects the combination of an aging population, slowing immigration, and the scars of the Great Recession more than a decade ago,” reports the Associated Press, “which led many young adults to delay marriage and families.”
Incidentally, these pieces may be of interest:
A Preliminary Analysis of U.S. and State-Level Results From the 2020 Census.
How the Census Bureau Unduplicated Responses in the 2020 Census.
I wonder if it’s not time to expand the House. The number of reps hasn’t gone up in almost a hundred years, since which the US population has more than doubled. I doubt it will happen, since we seem to be pathologically insistent as a nation on keeping our government the exact same as always, even though it works less and less well the farther we get from those Founders who we seem to oddly worship.