As Charlie noted, the latest mea culpa from the Census Bureau’s Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) on the screwed-up 2020 Census is not evenly politically distributed: States undercounted by at least 3 percentage points were Arkansas (5.04 percent), Tennessee (4.78 percent), Mississippi (4.11 percent), and Florida (3.48 percent), while the states overcounted by that much were Hawaii (6.79 percent), Delaware (5.45 percent), Rhode Island (5.05 percent), Minnesota (3.84 percent), and New York (3.44 percent). That is particularly important because Minnesota and New York were just barely at the line: Minnesota narrowly missed losing a House seat, and New York lost one by a margin of 89 votes. The report notes: “There are no plans to use PES results to produce adjusted population estimates for the purposes of apportionment or redistricting, and there will be no such recommendation.”
In an ideal world, given how the pandemic exacerbated problems with the 2020 count, we could have a recount, but as I have discussed at some length, there would be significant legal and political obstacles, and a new Census would be massively expensive and likely to face difficulties of its own in getting citizen compliance. The whole thing was an unforced error by the Trump administration and big-state Republican governors. With population continuing to shift from blue to red parts of the country since the spring of 2020, we are probably going to see a decade of the political system overvaluing the votes of blue states and undervaluing the votes of red states. The lesson for 2030: Get it right the first time.