Census Data: Metro Areas Increased Population, Rural Counties Declined In Population

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If you want to know why the white Christian nationalist MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump is working overtime to pass GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement laws, and will now engage in extreme gerrymandering in order to maintain its tyranny of the minority, today’s  release of U.S. Census data holds the answer.

Expect the white Christian nationalists at Fox News to be apoplectic, while again promoting the “great replacement theory” tonight.

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CNN reports, Census release shows America is more diverse and more multiracial than ever:

America is more diverse and more multiracial than ever before, according to new 2020 Census data released on Thursday.

“Our analysis of the 2020 Census results show that the US population is much more multiracial, and more racially and ethnically diverse than what we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, the director and senior advisor of race and ethnic research and outreach in the US Census Bureau’s population division.

People of color represented 43% of the total US population in 2020, up from 34% in 2010.

The non-Hispanic White share of the US population fell to 57% in 2020, shrinking by six percentage points since 2010, the largest decrease of any race or ethnicity. The share of those who identified as Hispanic or Latino or as multiracial grew the most.

Non-Hispanic White Americans continue to be the most prevalent group in every state, except for in California, Hawaii and New Mexico, as well as in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
There are now seven states and territories — California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Maryland, Hawaii and Puerto Rico — where the non-Hispanic White share of the population is below 50%.

In California, the Hispanic or Latino population officially became the largest racial or ethnic group in the state for the first time. The Hispanic or Latino community now represents 39.4% of Californians, an increase from 37.6% in 2010. The non-Hispanic White population in California was 34.7% in 2020.

The Census retooled their survey for 2020 to ask American residents more detailed questions about how they identify their race and ethnicity. The Census Bureau reported that these and other technical changes “enable a more thorough and accurate depiction of how people self identify.”

The Census Bureau said comparisons on race and ethnicity between 2010 and 2020 should be “made with caution,” though they are “confident that the changes we are seeing from 2010 to 2020 in the diversity measures … likely reflect actual demographic changes in the population over the past 10 years, as well as improvements to the question designs, data processing and coding.”

Almost all of the nation’s population growth was in its cities. ​​More than half of all counties saw their population decline since 2010.

“Population growth this decade was almost entirely in metro areas,” said Marc Perry, a senior demographer at the Census Bureau. “Texas is a good example of this, where parts of the Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas Fort Worth, Midland and Odessa metro areas had population growth, whereas many of the state’s other counties had population declines.”

Hence the Special “Tyranny Session” going on in Texas right now. (“If the [first] special session might be called the “Suppression Session,” we might call this the “Tyranny Session.”)

Cities have grown faster than the nation as a whole. Population in metro areas grew by 8.7% since 2010. The US population grew from roughly 308.7 million in 2010 to 331.4 million, a 7.35% increase. That’s the slowest population growth since 1930-1940 — the decade of the Great Depression.

The Census Bureau’s decennial count was released Thursday after being delayed several months due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data includes detailed demographic breakdowns of everyone living in the United States as of April 1, 2020, down to the neighborhood level.

The delayed release kicks off the rush for states to redraw their political boundaries ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. All 50 states will use the new data to adjust their congressional and state legislature district lines to reflect the updated count of their residents.

And yet Senate Democrats went on August recess instead of passing critical voting rights legislation that can’t wait until September.

Partial Census data released in April indicated that 13 states would gain or lose seats in the US House of Representatives based on their state’s population change from the 2010 Census. Those states will redraw their boundaries to reflect those seat changes as well.

The new population counts will also help policymakers distribute more than $675 billion each year in federal funding among state and local governments.

Brad Reed adds, New census data is ‘much’ more favorable than Democrats had feared: top elections experts:

The results of the 2020 census are in and two top elections experts say they’re “much” more favorable for Democrats than many party leaders had feared.

The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn points out that the areas where Democrats perform the worst — namely in rural parts of the country — saw their populations decline over the past ten years.

“Vast swaths of rural America — and an outright majority of all counties — lose population, per Census,” he observes.

Cook Political’s Dave Wasserman similarly says that his “early read” on the census is that “based on the strong urban and weaker rural numbers I’m seeing, this is a *much* more favorable Census count than minority advocacy groups/Dems had feared.”

But extreme GQP gerrymandering is the great equalizer. According to FiveThirtyEight’s count, Republicans will control the redrawing in 187 districts in 2021, bipartisan and independent commissions 167, and Democrats only 75. The GQP will gain seats just by redrawing these districts.

Wasserman also shows that the white population in the census came in a full two percentage points lower than estimates had projected, while population counts of Asian and other minority groups came in two points higher than expected.

One thing that might be particularly heartening for Democrats to see, writes Cohn, is that the state of Georgia is now just 50.1 percent non-Hispanic white, which could bode well for its efforts to hang onto the two Senate seats it won earlier this year in the Peach State.

Hence the radical Georgia GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression bills based upon the Big Lie passed earlier this year.

You need to pay close attention to Arizona’s supposedly “Independent” Redistricting Commission’s use of this Census data in redistricting, and make full use of public comments.





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