Is anybody surprised by news of a problem with the U.S. Census finalized under the leadership of Secretary Gina Raimondo and her boss, Joe Biden, that appears to have erroneously salvaged one of Rhode Island’s Congressional seats and a bunch of federal funding?  The imbalance of the results is not, let’s say, what one would expect from a random sample:

• The five states with the highest overcounts all have Democrat governors:
  • Hawaii (6.79% over)
  • Delaware (5.45%)
  • Rhode Island (5.05%)
  • Minnesota (3.84%)
  • New York (3.44%)
• With the exception of Illinois, which has a large gap in the percentage from the others, the five states with the highest undercounts have Republican governors:
  • Arkansas (5.04%)
  • Tennessee (4.78%)
  • Mississippi (4.11%)
  • Florida (3.48%)
  • Illinois (1.97%)

It’s worth remembering that some of the same states (and those next on the list) were among those that stood out a year ago with Census revisions in the same partisan direction just after the Biden administration took the White House.  Hawaii, Rhode Island, New York, and others had surprising upward revisions, apparently (at least in part) because they were being overcounted.  Meanwhile, the same revisions kept Florida and Texas (also now thought to have been undercounted) from gaining as many Congressional seats as expected.

Featured image by Thomas Dumortier on Unsplash.