Last summer, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose job it was to reach the people who did not complete the mail-in Census return. Most of us did the best that we could despite an orange CEO who disrupted our activity at every turn, COVID and the 4-6 months between the Census date and the interviews during which people moved around the country.
That White people are now below 60% of the population, that the proportion of African-Americans ticked down 0.1 percentage points and the Latino and AAPI population proportions rose has made the news. Democrats may want to think twice before predicting their future from this, since the data is not consistent from decade to decade and neither are voting patterns.
For starters, people got to choose their own races, as many as they wanted, whether or not they were on the list. If the legendary Cherokee Princess whose image gets pasted onto inconvenient branches of the family tree made an appearance, “Native American” got added on the list whether or not the respondent knew anything else about her. The cruel choice once forced on people with loving parents of different races was ended — it is too much to ask a person to cancel their parents because that changes their Census category. People whose ancestry includes Spaniards and either Native Americans or Africans have been identifying their race as “Latino”, no matter what Trump’s bureaucratic minions said.
Toward the end, hostility toward the Census, in my experience, increased among White people. We were under strict orders not to risk out lives. This would lead to an undercount. Meanwhile African-American, Native American and Latino organizers carried out mobilizations to make sure they were counted, despite the Maladministration.
In what should be unrelated news, the shift of Latinos and African-Americans to the Republican Party, while small enough to be overwhelmed by the shifts of Asian-Americans to the Democratic Party, took place during an Administration that nurtured and relished its severe messaging (and legislating) problems with both groups. Hopefully the xenophobe wing of the Republican Party will collapse, but that will free the Evangelical wing remaining to continue its recruitment of African-Americans and the increasing number of Evangelical Latinos.