The far-right has been spreading a lot of nutty conspiracy theories about the Census lately which, as Dave Weigel notes, seems to be leading to below-average return rates in heavily conservative parts of the country. It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
What’s more, the black fly in your chardonnay here is that well-documented census under-responses could be easily compensated for if the Census Bureau did the sensible thing and attempted to create a statistically accurate model of the American population. But instead — at the insistence of the American right — it’s legally required to just count up the forms, and undercount populations that don’t like to mail forms in.
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