What are President Trump’s strengths and weaknesses? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team plays “FiveThirtyEight Family Feud” — a new game we made up — to try to find an answer. The team also debates the merits of the census’s new citizenship question and discusses its potential effects on political representation in the U.S. You can […]
One way or another, the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the census has the potential to change the math our democracy is built on. That new math could shift political representation towards eligible voters and away from the country’s overall population — even if more non-citizens respond to the census than […]
After a long career as a banker and investor, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is no doubt familiar with cost-benefit analyses. That seems to have carried over to his political work. In a memo declaring that the 2020 census would ask U.S. inhabitants whether they are U.S. citizens, he wrote, “I find that the need for […]
In today’s Washington, even the Census Bureau is a source of drama. The department has no director. Due to funding constraints, it has abandoned pre-census research in West Virginia and Washington state that was meant to check the integrity of parts of its survey process. It is weighing whether to add a question about citizenship […]