By Philip Rocco, chair and associate professor of political science at Marquette University and author of “Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census” (University Press of Kansas, 2025).
Standard Deviations blog posts represent the views of the author/organization, but not necessarily those of The Census Project.
Last month, President Trump announced that he has ordered a “new and highly accurate CENSUS” that excludes undocumented immigrants, which represents more than just another immigration crackdown. While even Trump’s Secretary of Commerce has acknowledged both the legal and practical hurdles this unprecedented effort would face, this plan bears a family resemblance to Trump’s efforts to eliminate noncitizens from apportionment counts in the 2020 Census. Even if a plan like this one were not implemented until 2030, it would have significant impacts on the quality of census data—shifting resources away from where they are needed and undermining the 14th Amendment requirement tо count the “whole number оf persons іn each state” for apportioning Congress.
As research for my book Counting Like a State demonstrates, state and local governments can play an important role in safeguarding threats to census integrity. Census taking is an intergovernmental project, not just a federal one. Though not formally responsible for census-taking, state and local officials proved essential partners іn maintaining data quality and democratic legitimacy. Beyond mundane tasks like making and checking address lists, these officials conducted outreach in hard-to-count communities leveraging public trust to counteract concerns that attempts to install a citizenship item on the 2020 questionnaire created. In sum, census accuracy now depends on a “many hands” model of governance.
How did “census federalism” come to be? There are three reasons for this. First, beginning in the 1960s, the meteoric growth of intergovernmental grants and new legal requirements for reapportioning Congress and state legislatures since the 1960s tied state and local revenues and representation to census data. At the same time, operational changes in census taking—most notably the rise of self-enumeration—made the Census Bureau more reliant on local knowledge about address lists and locally-rooted “trusted voices” who could get the word out about the importance of responding to the census. Finally, the discovery of systematic undercounts drew states and local governments into litigation and advocacy, making them central players in census politics.
Thus when the Trump administration threatened to add a citizenship item to the questionnaire and remove all undocumented persons from apportionment counts, state and local officials were ready to respond. Beyond mundane tasks like making and checking address lists, state and local officials funded and coordinated outreach in hard-to-count communities–leveraging public trust to counteract the disinformation and fear spread by the Trump administration’s efforts to install a citizenship item on the 2020 questionnaire. In coalitions led by state Attorneys General, states, cities, and nongovernmental organizations mounted legal challenges that successfully blocked Trump’s first attempt to add a citizenship question and ran out the clock on Trump’s plan to exclude noncitizens from apportionment counts.
Nevertheless, state and local investments in the 2020 Census were uneven. Many states at risk for significant undercounts—including Texas and Florida—did not invest in census outreach. States and cities with severe resource disparities also struggled with census investments. Governments that faced significant undercounts in 2020 struggled to appeal to the courts, Congress, and the Census Bureau for relief, but the options for remediating these problems after the fact are limited.
What united successful efforts by state and local governments was a strong degree of horizontal coordination. Instead of challenging the Administration in isolation, states and cities joined forces to defend their authority when their census interests were threatened. Of course, simply recycling the strategies that safeguarded the 2020 Census may not be enough today, but the fight over census taking provides critical lessons for the present. Above all, it shows that safeguarding the census requires action that extends far beyond the Beltway, by officials under far-flung state capitol domes, city halls, and county buildings.
