Count everybody

Danny Vinik and Andrew Restuccia of Politio report that the nasty guy is leaning towards naming Thomas Brunell to the top operational job at the US Census Bureau, which is gearing up for 2020, where it will try to count everyone living in America.

Vinik and Restucca will guide us in listing why Brunell at Census is a really bad idea.

* He is a political science professor with no government or administrative experience.

* He is (as we’ll see) a very partisan choice (did we expect anything different from the nasty guy and his vice?) for a job where his predecessors have been a carefully nonpolitical choice, a career civil servant with a background in statistics. The nasty guy intends to politicize the census.

* The GOP has long sought to add a question to the census asking: Are you a citizen? The census is supposed to count *everybody*. Such a question will drive down minority response rates. Putting Brunell in the job makes Dems fearful the question might actually make it in.

* In Brunell’s 2008 book “Redistricting and Representation,”

he argued that partisan districts packed with like-minded voters actually lead to better representation than ones more evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, because fewer voters in partisan districts cast a vote for a losing candidate. He has also argued that ideologically packed districts should be called “fair districts” and admits that his stance on competitive elections makes him something of an outlier among political scientists, who largely support competitive elections.

Even though he criticized partisan gerrymandering (he did?) the GOP had repeatedly used his research in their geerrymandering efforts.

From my own work in attempting to get rid of partisan gerrymandering I know that districts with like-minded voters tend to elect more extreme candidates who might share views with perhaps as little as a quarter of the voters.

* Brunell, with oversight of the agency’s budget, could decide where and how little to advertise the census, so that minorities don’t know it is coming.

* Brunell has no experience with the richness of the data the Census collects (used by a wide variety of researchers) and with what data the agency collects between its 10 year events.

Other Census concerns:
* The whole operation is being underfunded – fewer people to go to addresses to track down people who didn’t mail in their questionnaire.

* A partisan census (one that decides not to count those people) would have an astounding ripple effect on Congressional reapportionment and on how funds for government programs are distributed.

* A partisan census would cause public and Congressional confidence and integrity of the census to plummet.

This job does not require Senate confirmation, so Congress can’t block the hire.