The Capital Research Center, a partisan targeting operation that personally briefs senior White House officials on progressive nonprofits in an effort to weaponize disinformation against their perceived enemies, is now setting its sights on the 2030 census. Its newest piece recycles debunked claims from a known election-integrity fabricator, misrepresents what the Census Bureau’s own data actually shows, and treats basic civic participation, like filling out the census and working as a door-knocker, as a nefarious plot. But the receipts tell a different story. Below, we break down the rhetoric and reality, claim by claim.
RHETORIC: Capital Research Center claims it is nefarious for civil society groups to train individuals and groups on “the best ways to motivate constituents to take the census, tech tools to improve census turnout, and even ‘when and how the census bureau would be hiring door-to-door staff.’”
REALITY: As even the right wing Heritage Foundation notes, filling out the census is “one of many civic duties.” While the Capital Research Center may think participating as a Census worker is a liberal plot, the first Trump administration was offering awards to those volunteers who “maximize[d] hours worked” and the agency’s own watchdog acknowledged the agency was “short by more than 25% of the door knockers needed for the 2020 census,” likely due to the ongoing global pandemic.
RHETORIC: Philanthropic organizations’ funding to promote census participation in 2020 created “the worst census in recent history” with “$118 million worth of thumbs being placed on the scale.”
REALITY: President Trump’s administration and oversight of the 2020 census has certainly received lots of criticism but Capital Research Center may be the first to suggest that the MAGA President and his administration were somehow influenced or outsmarted by civil society groups. Furthermore, the 2020 US Census cost $13.7 billion to administer, and the supposed $118 million in “thumbs on the scale” amounts to just 0.86% of that total.
RHETORIC: “The results of the 2020 Census were not good. The reasons for this are manifold, but the most important statistic is that, by the Census Bureau’s own admission, there was massive overcounting, mostly in blue states, and massive undercounting, mostly in red states. The 2010 Census was reported to have a minuscule error rate of less than 1 percent; states such as Delaware and Arkansas were over and undercounted by more than 5 percent, respectively. As Hans Von Spakovsky explained in 2022, the Census Bureau’s post-census survey data for the 2020 count shows that the over and under counts were so egregious that Minnesota and Rhode Island were apportioned two congressional seats that ought to have rightfully been assigned to Florida.”
REALITY: This spurious claim is based on the writings of right wing activist Hans von Spakovsky, a supposed voter-fraud expert who’s repeatedly been caught misrepresenting the facts about election security.
The actual census Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) data this claim is based on shows that among the “overcounted states” was right-leaning Ohio and bright red Utah, and the undercounted states included deep blue Illinois, undercutting any claim that the errors map neatly onto partisan lines. Furthermore, the Census Bureau notes that the data is “based on survey estimates derived from 114,000 household responses [and] as such, it is subject to statistical uncertainty as with all survey-based estimates.” Additionally, the Bureau notes that while their data “can estimate undercounts and overcounts in the census, PES data cannot answer why a particular state may have experienced one.”
Perhaps most notably, PES data cannot be used to revise apportionment — the Census Act prohibits it, a rule Republicans went to the Supreme Court in 1999 to enforce.
Beyond the problems with leaning on PES data, Capital Research Center provides no specific anecdotes or data suggesting non-profit groups’ efforts (which amounted to less than 1% of what the government itself spent on the census) are at all connected to any problems they claim to have identified. Those problems are just as likely to be linked to the Trump administration’s decision to stop the census count early and their general obstruction of the overall effort amidst a global pandemic.
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