While the Census has been in the rearview mirror for a few years now, the effects of it are still being felt politically. It’s come up again thanks to a piece last week in The Wall Street Journal about the proportional representation of the political parties relative to their vote share — something the Democrats routinely complain about with every election they lose. But as the Journal’s editorial board writes:

Democrats have tried to explain their defeats in the House in recent elections as an injustice because Republicans win more seats than their share of votes. So it’s worth pointing out that this year Democrats won far more House seats than they did votes in many progressive states. Why aren’t former Attorney General Eric Holder and his friends protesting?

Rhetorical question aside, the Journal pointed out that in New York, GOP House candidates secured 44% of the vote but only won seven of the state’s 26 seats, or 27%. (That amounted to a loss of three crucial GOP House seats from the 2022 election, by the way.) It was even worse in California, where the GOP has received 38% of the votes for 19% of the seats. Other states they cited were Illinois, Washington, and Oregon — much of which was the result of “aggressive Democratic gerrymanders” pointed out by our Nate Jackson two years ago. “Both parties want to win,” he wrote, “and they want rules they think favor their party. Democrats just happen to be the more shameless party.”

As an example, this writer’s former home state of Maryland went from a state with an evenly split congressional delegation at the dawn of this century to now having just one congressional Republican out of the eight, who represents the heavily GOP Eastern Shore. Democrats packed as many Republicans as they could into that one Republican district while taking the other GOP stronghold area in western Maryland and cracking it up, dividing it, and blending those smaller areas into two heavily Democrat districts in the Washington, DC, area. Another common trick is to create smaller-than-average districts for the party in charge while saddling the other side with larger districts. Eventually, that can add up to two or three seats changing hands.

But the reason we bring the Census up is that last time around several “blue” states were beneficiaries of overcounting, according to a pre-election summary by Gage Klipper at The Daily Caller. That was more important when the predictions had the 2024 election as too close to call, but once the “Blue Wall” fell down on Kamala Harris, the question became moot.

Or did it? For example, a 3% overcount in the aforementioned New York most likely means they had an “extra” unearned congressional seat (and electoral vote) that may have gone to an undercounted “red” state like Tennessee or Florida — states that may have been shorted by enough to cost them a seat, especially Florida, which now has 28 congressional districts and could have had 29.

Yet the inaccurate count has had other effects as well. With only one congressman, this writer’s home state of Delaware doesn’t have a congressional district to gerrymander, but the reported 5.45% overcount for the state represents about 50,000 people who don’t exist. That’s equivalent to two of our 41 state house districts, which were most likely wrongly placed in the bluest parts of the state.

While President-elect Donald Trump is promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants, the bigger fight will be one both he and Congress tried and failed at during the 2020 Census: counting only citizens for the purposes of congressional representation.

Barring a court case that compels a state to redistrict midstream between censuses, this struggle will not fully play out until the 2032 presidential election. Given that we’re assured of a new president in 2028, time will tell who will run for a second term then. But a fair and proper allocation of electoral votes may mean that what was once a Blue Wall for the Democrats may become more of a speed bump as electoral votes flood to the GOP-friendly South.

Given current party preferences, that proper distribution of congressional seats might also ensure Republicans an advantage in the House for years to come.