Trump administration's efforts to tilt the census may have cost states that voted for him seats in the U.S. House

"The Trump administration spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort messing with the census over four years. Its apparent aim: It wanted to exclude undocumented immigrants from population counts, thereby allowing Republicans to draw more favorable maps in redistricting and gain more ground in the House," Aaron Blake writes for The Washington Post. "The effort ultimately failed. And it now seems possible that these efforts might have played a role in costing red states seats." 

According to a new Census Bureau report, the census significantly miscounted 14 states; in six, the counts are estimated to be off by 4 percentage points or more. "A trend you might notice if you peruse the data is that most of the states with significant overcounts were blue states like Hawaii (e.g., Delaware, Rhode Island, New York and Massachusetts), while most with undercounts were red, Southern states like Arkansas (e.g., Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi and Texas)," Blake notes.

That means that red states might not have received as many U.S. House seats as they should have during reapportionment, while blue states might have received more. So many factors are in play that it's difficult to estimate the exact impact of the miscounting, but it seems clear that blue-leaning states Minnesota and Rhode Island got to keep seats they should have lost, and red-leaning states Florida and Texas didn't get seats they should have gotten, Blake writes.

Blake notes that pandemic chaos could have contributed to the miscounts, as well as the fact that some undercounted states didn't do as much to encourage people to complete the census. He also notes that "adding a seat to a blue state doesn’t necessarily translate to a blue seat. That depends on how the maps are drawn in a particular state, given the distribution of population. The red-state undercounts mean those states could be deprived of billions of dollars in federal funding over the next decade, since much funding is calculated based on population counts, Reid Wilson reports for The Hill.