The census

Spotify and text-a-thons: How the census is reaching out during coronavirus

By MAYA KING and DANIELLE MUOIO

As the coronavirus bears down on cities and states across the nation, the Census Bureau has scrubbed in-person get-out-the-count work in favor of ad buys on Spotify, thousand-person text-a-thons and virtual speakers series.

But despite an extensive statistical database and half-billion-dollar ad strategy to get a proper count, local officials warn that millions could still slip through the cracks. Spotify may not reach the hardest to count parts of the U.S. population. Those are the people in-person canvassers normally try to cajole to fill out census forms in person or online.

That means the places people who aren't counted live may miss out on federal funding. And the people who aren't counted can lose political representation at both the state and federal levels. Legislative and congressional districts are drawn based on population, and the areas where people are hardest to count skew Democratic.

Moving the 2020 Census online in the absence of field canvassers and public events creates a unique challenge for large cities and places with high concentrations of Covid-19 cases. Typically, door knockers play a key role in corralling much of the public to fill out the questionnaire. But without extensive physical outreach, Democrats and voting rights advocates warn the result could be an undercount of populations that can’t be easily reached online — including low-income households, immigrant and minority communities and homeless individuals.

For cities where hard-to-reach populations are more prevalent, the coronavirus undercount could cost them crucial funding for municipal services and congressional representation. And it could stunt the Democratic Party’s influence in key jurisdictions, as left-leaning cities face an uphill battle in counting less accessible populations.

“We have a large concern that there will be a significant undercount in the census, unless the deadline is pushed further back,” said Matt Liebman, president of the Voter Protection Project, a Democratic-aligned group that seeks to increase access to voting in swing states.

Liebman pointed to newly-displaced college voters and voters of color as two groups that Democrats will need that are facing significant undercounts.

“If the current rate of participation holds, we feel that there will be a negative electoral impact for the Democratic Party heading into redistricting," he said.

The Census Bureau has extended the response deadline to Oct. 31 from August 15 and says it plans to reactivate field offices June 1. It has also requested a delay of delivery of final data figures to the president by four months to April 30, 2021, pushing state redistricting operations into July of next year.

So far, the United States’ response rate sits just above 50 percent. 2000 and 2010 response rates rounded out at 66 percent and 67 percent, respectively. But certain states have notably lagged behind, particularly those in the Southeast, which has the highest concentration of response rates below 50 percent.

Census data from 2010 shows that African Americans, the Democratic Party’s most loyal base, are most highly concentrated across Southern states, comprising over 55 percent of the population there. An inaccurate undercount in this region could deal Democrats a devastating blow in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond, since census data helps draw congressional and legislative district lines for the next decade.

Efforts to ensure that every resident responds have been over a year in the making. In cities across the country, complete-count committees tasked with ensuring those in their community fill out the census began organizing as early as April 2019. However, the onset of the coronavirus has forced many to explore new options to make sure the message of the census’s importance does not get lost in the cycle of news around the coronavirus.

In New York, city officials had to dramatically change their census outreach strategies as it became the epicenter for the public health crisis.

The city pulled back $1.3 million in subway advertisements and instead channeled the funding toward online and TV advertisements. Hundreds of planned pop-up centers that were set to do in-person outreach were transformed into text-a-thon and phone banking efforts.

The city also changed its messaging to reflect the anxiety New Yorkers are facing during the pandemic, focusing on how the census determines funding for public hospitals and medical equipment needs.

“Our messaging has always been about the funding, and Covid is unfortunately a very stark reminder of why the Census matters,” said Julie Menin, director of NYC Census 2020. “If New Yorkers don’t fill the census out, it has a direct impact on the funding our hospitals receive.”

The city’s census response rate is well below the national rate, though, hovering at just 39 percent. Menin noted that areas hard hit from coronavirus have had particularly low response rates, such as the Queens neighborhoods of North Corona and East Elmhurst.

The virus likely exacerbated the difficulty of getting responses from those neighborhoods, which have large immigrant populations. City officials were planning to do extensive outreach with local community groups to convey that the census was safe to fill out after the Trump administration attempted to add a citizenship question, which was dropped after a Supreme Court ruling.

“These kinds of decisions are crystal clear in terms of their intent because you have to remember cities like New York that have over 3.2 million immigrants face more challenges in terms of a proper count,” Menin said. “With the citizenship question … a lot of the damage, quite frankly, had already been done.”

Democrats have also accused the Republican National Committee of trying to deflate response rates after it sent out a questionnaire to people across the country that looked like the census, but was political in nature.

At the same time, some places are making up for previous undercounts.

“This is really our first count since 2000,” said Arthur Walton, director of intergovernmental relations for the city of New Orleans. “In 2010 we were still recovering from Katrina, so our numbers were low.”

Walton said the concern that impoverished communities or those of color would be undercounted is long-standing. New Orleans, like many other cities battling an undercount, has made efforts to include census messaging in the places still widely accessible to their communities like grocery stores, food banks and mobile testing centers. But, he explained, the city hasn’t received much help in ensuring equal access to information about the count itself.

“The census is constitutionally mandated. And I’ve always wondered with this administration, why there hasn’t been more effort to promote that,” Walton said. “The census does a great job with outreach, but it’s really on the individual cities to conduct their outreach and push this out. ... I wish there was more of a presence from the administration.”