- The high-stakes post-2020
redistricting cycle is finally kicking off in earnest on Thursday. - The
Census Bureau released a trove of data that will allow states to go ahead and draw new lines. - States are now on a time crunch to draw new maps and field lawsuits before the 2022 midterms.
The post-2020 redistricting cycle kicked off in earnest on Thursday with the Census Bureau's release of long-awaited data that will allow states to begin redrawing congressional and state legislative boundaries that will define the US's balance of power for the next decade.
The Trump administration's legal efforts to get undocumented immigrants excluded from the apportionment numbers, the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather events, and civil unrest during summer 2020 led to delays in conducting the count itself. The Census Bureau also had to resolve data errors and anomalies in the count, which are routine in every census but were compounded by the pandemic.
In late April, the Census Bureau released topline apportionment numbers that determined which states will gain and lose House seats. Texas came away as the biggest winner, gaining two seats, while several states in the Midwest and Northeast lost seats.
The trove of data the Census unveiled on Thursday, known as the PL 94-171, shows population and demographic figures down to the county, city, town, and neighborhood levels. It's normally required to be released by March 30, but was held up until mid-August because of coronavirus-related delays.
The Census data showed that while US population growth has slowed in the past decade at the slowest pace since the 1930s, the US now has the most racially diverse populace captured since the start of the decennial Census.
Some states, like Illinois, began the redistricting process for legislative districts with non-Census data. But mapmakers require those more granular Census figures that show both where people live and where they've moved around within states in order to satisfy the constitutional mandate of "one person, one vote" in congressional districts.
The numbers to be released Thursday will come in a "legacy" format with completely raw and untabulated data. Many states will hire private firms and vendors to tabulate the data and make it more digestible. The Census Bureau itself is expected to release the data in a more user-friendly format to the general public by the end of September.
A Republican redistricting expert predicted that "five to seven states" would produce their new maps by late next month but that half of the US's states would need until the end of the year to finish redistricting. In others, the vast majority of this activity will take place between Labor Day and Easter, they said.
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But delays in drawing new congressional and legislative districts have already resulted in candidate filing deadlines and primary dates being pushed back in many states, inserting more COVID-19-induced uncertainty into the 2022 election cycle.
The start of redistricting is also expected to kick off multiple rounds of high-stakes, expensive litigation on a truncated timeline. Some stakeholders are already teeing up lawsuits in states likely to see partisan deadlock over new maps.
"The election officials are working under a really compressed timeframe, and the courts are basically operating under the same timeframe because no court can move the federal election day in November," a GOP election and redistricting lawyer told reporters. "So everything works backwards from that."
This cycle, the GOP controls the redistricting process in most states, including Texas, Florida, and North Carolina.
According to analyses by the Cook Political Report and the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans have the final say over the redrawing of 188 House seats in 2021, down from 219 in post-2010 redistricting. Democrats, by contrast, have the last word on 73 House seats this year, up from 44 in 2011.
The number of seats that will be redrawn entirely by independent commissions has also increased from 88 in 2011 to 122 in 2021.
-Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 12, 2021
But while Republicans control the process in most states, the Census data show promising structural signs for Democrats between the marked population decline in rural areas, robust population growth in cities and suburbs, and the racial demographic data coming in line with the Bureau's previous population estimates.
-Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 12, 2021
"Districts are for people, they are for voters," Fred McBride, a redistricting and voting rights expert at the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, told reporters in a recent briefing. "All of the interest and all the activity on partisanship takes redistricting somewhere else, and it takes it off the focus of where districts should be - on people."