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Philip Rocco, "Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census" (UP Kansas, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:03]
Lily Gorn
Hello, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I am joined by my colleague and friend down the street, Phil Rocco, who is on the faculty at the Marquette University. And his new book, published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas, is counting like a Stick. How Intergovernmental partnerships shaped the 2020 U.S. census now, most of us don't really think about the census as a wildly exciting thing to explore and study, but Phil has made it so. So I'm delighted to welcome Phil Rocco to the new Books in Political Science podcast. And I'm gonna ask you, Phil, to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to this project. Hello, Phil.
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Phil Rocco
Well, thanks, Lily, for that generous introduction. I. I am a political scientist and a scholar of federalism by trade, which would make me not a natural candidate for somebody to study the census, a governing task that the Constitution assigns to Congress and is typically thought of as being carried out by the Census Bureau. But the thing that intrigues me, I think in all of my work, and I've done a lot of work on sort of federalism in the implementation of health policy, is the kind of infrastructure of government. And by infrastructure, I just mean it's a sort of a catch all term to refer to the things that we don't think about very much, the stuff that kind of lives under the most visible parts of the political process. And the impetus for me studying the census was I was a graduate student in 2010 when the 2010 census was rolling out. And I remember getting some questions from students about kind of why the census mattered. And they were confused because on university campuses, students who are living in dorms, they don't fill out a census form. Universities do a kind of administrative process for counting people living in group quarters. And so my students were like, well, we're getting all of these messages to, you know, remember to take your census, but we're not getting them. Why is that? And what was fascinating to me was in trying to explain why it mattered and how it worked all the way back then, which was in 2010, was a really relatively calm, not super politicized, not super fractious senses, and a really good one. I think by historical standards. What struck me was in the introductory textbooks I was using, I couldn't really find. There was tons of stuff on elections and the politics of elections, and even an emerging literature on the kind of micropolitics of the administration of elections. But while you have thousands and thousands of articles and books on elections, you can kind of count the number of big, big theoretical or empirical works on the politics of census taking. You know, it's a cottage industry, right? 20 to 30 books like max, like, it's pretty easy to put together a syllabus on. So. But that really fascinated me because here's this action that, you know, we don't think about as being terribly Political. And that might be one of the reasons why political scientists use census data primarily as an input in their work and as opposed to something to study in its own right. But by the time I got to teach at Marquette Starting in 2016, the nature of census politics was becoming, I think, ever more visible, especially with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the sort of subsequent effort to really radically remake the way that census taking works and the political struggle over things like the citizenship question, which we can get into in 2020. And, you know, it occurred to me that the politics of numbers was sort of all over the early days of the Trump administration, right from the first day after the inauguration, the debate over the crowd size. Right? And so, you know, it was just increasingly evident to me that trying to think about how democracies wrestle with these disagreements over numbers and how numbers kind of constitute an infrastructure for democracy, what's really interesting is why I started teaching a class at Marquette. And what led me to this particular book and this strange intersection of federalism in the census was, again, I was searching for material to try to make the census make sense to my students and kind of give them a sense of why it mattered, maybe in their daily lives, which is, you know, can be kind of remote even, even for really curious and smart undergrads. And what I found was a lot of great material, but what struck me was that none of it was written by the Census Bureau. A lot of the best sort of ad copy, and I think translational material was written by state and local governments, by nonprofit organizations. I actually found some really fun commercials that the state of Nevada did back In, I think, 2000, where they portray people, you know, dressed as the caricatures of people from other states, saying, thanks, Nevadans, for, like, not filling out your census, because now, you know, I've got your, your money, and this sort of very zero sum kind of politics. I said, this is really fascinating, and then kind of went down this rabbit hole of thinking about how, despite state and local governments explicitly not having a responsibility, and quite deliberately, in many ways in the Constitution for performing the census, how does federalism, at any rate, shape the way that census taking works? And what I found in the course of my research was actually, despite the absence of a constitutional command for state and local governments to be participating or involved with the census in any way, that their actions, both as combatants in federal courtrooms, which is, I think, the way that we're most used to seeing them, and certainly right now in virtually every domain of the Trump administration's policies, we kind of see state and local governments as litigants, but also at the same time, in the very same moment that they're litigants, they also engage in all of this intergovernmental cooperation to try to make the census work. And it takes a variety of forms and really covers every dimension of the census process. But the gist of what I argue in the book is that in the absence of all of this work that state and local governments do, which is often unsung, much of it is unfunded and is really not formalized in a lot of ways, although it's become more formalized in the last two decades, that the census will look very different than it looks and we would probably have less accurate census counts and fewer people would have trust and an understanding of how the census works. So that's really the focus of the book and how I, as a federalism scholar, came to write about something as.
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Lily Gorn
Remote as the census, which, as you explain it throughout the book, is really is really an interesting case study of federalism in lots and lots of ways. And so I wanted to take you through a couple dimensions of the census. And as you noted that you know in previous census years that there are oftentimes different levels of state engagement in trying to compel citizens to fill out the forms. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking about the 2000 census, and I was teaching in Minnesota, and we had many conversations, my students and I, about the census forms, because there was the long one and there was the short one, and they were asking about the how many toilets your house has and so forth. And my students were very intrigued again, because they're getting a lot of input from local advertisements and local flyers and local conversations. So I wanted to ask you first, because it is a responsibility of the federal government. It is something that's in the Constitution, but it is not the job of the states. And part of what you are arguing in the book is while that is true, the states do have different levels of participation. Can you explain about how that works, particularly in the census in 2020, which is the focus of the book?
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Phil Rocco
Yeah, let me give a little bit of background on it, because that is, I think, the strangest conjuncture. Right. If you look at the founding, there's an explicit suspicion like we don't want the states to be doing the census because there's a concern that because political representation is based on the census, that we want to have somebody other than the people who would benefit stand to benefit from that activity. Doing the work. But the reality is, if you look at the 19th century kind of predicates for this. The federal government's a very small entity in much of the 19th century. It has to rely on capacity wherever it exists, however it exists. And so sort of invariably there are state and local sources of capacity for the federal government throughout the 19th century. And even the unit that we think of as the sort of key analytical unit of the census, the census tract, emerges not from the Census Bureau initially, but from the efforts of a Presbyterian minister in New York City and ultimately with the New York City government in the state of New York as well in the early 20th century. So there's some predicates there. But the thing that really changes the way that state and local governments engage with the census is in the 1960s, you have three really big changes that alter the meaning in a way of census data. So on the one hand, state and local governments become increasingly interested in census data for two reasons. The first reason is that you see an explosion of federal grant and aid dollars to state and local governments. And those grant and aid dollars are based on formulas that use census population data. So now census population data isn't just something that's going to be used to reapportion Congress or state legislatures. It's going to be used to allocate an unprecedented amount of aid. So there's a real skin in the game for state and local governments in a way that there wasn't in the past by the late 1960s. The second thing that happens is in a series of cases known collectively as sort of the reapportionment revolution, the Supreme Court requires state governments to reapportion Congress, congressional seats, and state legislatures by population once a decade after the census. And this had followed on years of malapportionment in which state and local government, state governments did not reapportion seats. And so you saw really massive kind of inequalities in representation. And this is sort of a correction on that. And so that's another reason why reapportionment relies on updated census data. So state local governments are becoming demanders of census data in a way that they weren't in the past. The second thing that happens is that the Census Bureau becomes increasingly interested in what state and local governments can do as partners in communicating about the census. Because what happens is by 1970, the Census Bureau had really changed the way that it counted the population. It used to have a in person enumeration on the first instance. That's why if you look at your ancestry.com census records, you will see a big table that some census enumerator filled out with your ancestors names and imputed races and so forth on it. Now what changed by 1970 the change was really in full effect was that in the first instance, the Census bureau moved to self enumeration. So there were still in person enumerators, but they were only going to enumerate you if you didn't send back a form that you got in the mail in the first instance. And what that did was it required a lot of voluntary compliance from individuals returning their forms. And advertising. Something that happens once every 10 years, you know, from the federal level is pretty hard. And by 1980, it became increasingly apparent that there were huge issues with this. And so the bureau began involving state local governments in partnerships to try to use the reservoir of trust and sort of visibility that they have with residents to remind people to fill out their Census. And by 2010 and 2020, that program, a partnership program with state, local governments and other actors in society, had really grown. You saw an unprecedented level of spending just voluntarily by state and local governments, billions of dollars in spending to do campaigns and so forth. But that really emerges out of this increasing interdependence between the bureau and state and local governments. Now by 2020, you even have states like California that have their own kind of office of the census. It's like a census directorate that manages all of these outreach efforts and coordinates what's going on at the local level, provides funding for these campaigns. And then even in states that don't have that kind of big investment, you still have states kind of using lot of the resources that they kind of have in house to communicate with their populations about the census. So it's a pretty dramatic change in the way that we get information about the census every 10 years.
- [17:15]
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Phil Rocco
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- [17:26]
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- [17:44]
Lily Gorn
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Phil Rocco
That could have a connection you don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault.
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- [18:25]
Lily Gorn
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Lily Gorn
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- [18:44]
Lily Gorn
And so part of what you're talking about is both this historical evolution of the census, because you go back and you're using archival data, but you're also. You're also interviewing people because the centerpiece of the book is the 2020 Census. And you point that out, that while it was involved in a lot of controversy because of a question that the Trump administration wanted to put on the census document itself around questions of citizenship, but that ultimately the census in 2020, which also took place during COVID is probably one of the most accurate census censi that we have had in the United States. Can you talk a little bit about why 2020 in particular sparked your interest in looking at all this stuff?
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Phil Rocco
Sure. So what happened in 2020 was that soon after the inauguration in 2017, there was a pretty concerted effort on the part of the Trump administration to make some big changes in the way that the census was taken. The first one was introducing a citizenship item that everybody would have to respond to. And that would have been the first time that there would be a citizenship item on the actual census, as opposed to the long form which is used was once upon a time used for other purposes and then was replaced by the American Community Survey. Those sort of asked about citizenship in the past, but had never been on the questionnaire for everybody in the census history. And there are a variety of different potential outcomes of that initiative. One of the potential outcomes could have been a sort of an engineered undercount that would have affected both documented and undocumented persons alike and would have had pretty explicit effects on the representation and resources going to communities with, in the words of one of the architects of this plan. He said it would have benefits for Republicans and non Hispanic whites, that it would shift representation of resources to those communities and away from Democratic strongholds, away from cities with large Hispanic populations. The other potential outcome of that introducing that item was revealed kind of after the Trump administration lost its case on the citizenship question itself in 2019. They introduced a plan to remove, to identify and remove undocumented persons from the apportionment counts, used to apportion Congress. And the idea was to do it by other means. If you couldn't use the citizenship question to do it, but to find administrative data and then to remove those persons from the count, which would have had a similar effect to what Republican strategist Tom Hoefler had planned for the citizenship question. Now, the reality is that this creates two pronged challenge for state and local governments that might be affected by this. On the one hand, they have to deal with already extreme gaps in trust in the census and the idea that the census is going to keep the information you provide confidential. That gap in trust is already there before the Trump administration does these things, and then they do them, and it sort of increases that gap in trust. So that's the one thing there's kind of a growing suspicion and distrust and even disinformation that they have to respond to in the 2020 environment. And the second thing, and again, keep in mind, this is all before the pandemic. So, so just leave aside the fact that we were counting people in the midst of the pandemic. The second thing they have to deal with is there are some real legal problems with these maneuvers. In particular, this introduction of the citizenship question happened with really a false administrative record that was kind of manufactured to create reasons that that the administration could use to justify what it was doing. But it was like, really transparent as it came out in the documentation that arose from the court cases, that this was all sort of a ruse. And even the Supreme Court, in the majority opinion in Department of Commerce v. New York in 2019, even the Supreme Court said, like, we are not free from the obligation to just look at the record here, and we don't have to be more naive than the average person. And so state and local governments are kind of dealing with those legal issues that are arising. And so there's a real kind of sense that responding to that is also going to require partnerships among state attorneys general, among cities, and partnerships between governmental actors and nonprofit organizations to respond to all of this.
- [24:48]
Lily Gorn
You've talked now about the sort of legal dimensions that were going on around the 2020 census and the sort of ongoing suspicion and lack of trust in the government. And then we have Covid as an extra fun layer of, you know, sort skepticism about the government and skepticism about who I should talk to if somebody comes to my door or if I should interact with human beings because of COVID 19. So what happened with regard to the pandemic itself that also sort of shaped how the census worked in that particular instance.
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Phil Rocco
So there are a few things to think about that the pandemic meant for the census. So on the one hand, the pandemic just shatters the operational timeline. The census is one of these operations in government that is highly time dependent. There are deadlines for census counts that are written into statute. And because redistricting after the census hinges on when the data comes in, everything happening in a timely way is really crucial. And what the pandemic does is it essentially halts operations or a lot of operations for some time while the bureau is replanning how to carry these things out in a very, really radically new kind of environment. And that just sort of puts a time crutch on how much time the census can be in the field and when the post enumeration operations are going to begin. Because there's a lot of things that happens after the census gets out of the field. There's data processing, there's quality checks, and. And then ultimately there's the delivery of census data in particular forms. Not just the apportionment counts, but all of the data products that state, local governments use when they redistrict. That all has to happen on a very specific timeline. So the pandemic just shatters that. The other thing that it shatters is the outreach efforts that state and local governments and other organizations had planned. Right. You can no longer do in person census events. I mean, a lot of the plans that I was studying leading up to the pandemic and had actually had planned to do some travel to look at how these things kind of worked in practice, which was then canceled as well. Which was just as well because those events too were canceled, were in person events, they were festivals. They were census Sundays in church, where in the pulpit a pastor or preacher would be talking about the census, and then afterwards people would fill out their forms. But all of this was of course, canceled. And it's a very, very fluid timeline, but still there's a demand for information. The census is still going on, but people might not be sure about that. And so really, all of these outreach operations that have been planned had to pivot on a dime. And one of the things that struck me was that in a number of states, all of the investment that states and local governments and nonprofit organizations had done enabled that pivot in a way that I think would have been much harder to do in the absence of those investments. And so you saw states like California or cities like Philadelphia pivot to using virtual events, even going back to old standards of communication, like sort of phone trees, text banking, phone banking, and using informational channels that were already in place. So there were food distributions in those early days, vaccination or testing operations, as it would have been testing operations at that point in 2020. But whatever channels of communication people were using, these outreach efforts would sort of piggyback on those channels, which is a really, really innovative and kind of smart idea. But the fact that you had all of those kind of operations in the field and you where you had people with dedicated resources for thinking about responding to the census, they were actually able to pivot. Now, that wasn't the case everywhere. A lot of the way that census outreach works, especially in places where there's not a lot of resources or personnel to do outreach, is people who have already maybe 10 or 15 other tasks as part of their job. I always think about there are usually departments in cities and states called the Department of Administration. And what that really is is it's a catch all department. It's the department that deals with all the residual parts of government that nobody else is doing. You all think about, and in some cases other departments don't want to do. But these people are amazing because they can do it all. And the reality though, and this is the challenge with using departments of administration to take on responsibilities for the census, is when you have an emergency like a pandemic, that's where resources and energy and attention are pulled quite appropriately. And so if you don't have dedicated full time equivalents or part time equivalents whose task is oriented around the census, then you've got a problem because their resources are going to get pulled away. And that happened as well in some of the places that I studied.
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Lily Gorn
And so I wanted to ask you a little bit about this because the terminology you use in the book for what you were just describing is this idea of vertical partnerships. And this is like, this is a large section of your book where you dive into different forms of this. So for readers who might not be social scientists or study federalism, you've sort of talked about this loosely. But if you could give us a sort of sense of what this means, in context of sort of how the census works. Can you explain that a bit?
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Phil Rocco
Yeah. So the federal government, in many different respects, from social services to health care to regulation of environmental hazards, take your pick, operates through partnerships with state and local governments. And this is why in the present moment, the termination of grants, in addition to layoffs and furloughs for federal employees, the termination of grants to state and local governments, or the delay in aid to those governments is such a significant factor in shaping how policies work. If you look at right now, it's November 3rd, and there's a real question about, you know, when, if at all, are food stamp payments going to be resumed? I mean, that is. The SNAP is a classic intergovernmental partnership. The federal government picks up much of the tab, but it's administered by the states. The census is interesting to me because those partnerships, partnerships of the type that we're used to seeing in the federal system, partnerships that rely on large sums of federal dollars, are not typically the kinds of vertical partnerships that we see. The partnerships between state and local governments and the Census Bureau are largely voluntary. So the Census Bureau will send partnership specialists around to try to get cities or states to invest in creating like a complete count commission around the time of the census. But they don't. You know, the Census is not a Census Bureau, is not a grant making entity. Right. It's a, it's a statistical agency. And so it does, you know, and it doesn't have these massive sources of federal aid to sort of induce those kinds of partnerships. Even where there is a relationship where the Census Bureau is paying state and local governments to do certain tasks. So even where the federal government is paying state or local officials to take on certain tasks, there's something called the federal State Cooperative for Population Estimates that engages with often state demographers to do something called count review in the process of taking the census. These partnerships operate through very, very small payments, not the kind of grants that you see in the rest of the federal system. And I think that's one of the most intriguing aspects of this kind of relationship, is tons of partnerships exist, but in the absence of what we're used to thinking of as the tools to kind of induce those partnerships. And I would also say that a lot of the ways that state governments made investments in outreach for the census was through partnerships with local governments. Often it's not the state doing a lot of the advertisement or promotion. They are setting up grant programs or sending funds to local governments or community based organizations of a variety of kinds. And those Partnerships are also crucial to outreach during the census. So good, so good, so good.
- [35:23]
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- [36:50]
Lily Gorn
What you're looking at in terms of this idea of vertical partnerships is very different than what we usually think about in terms of the relationship between the federal government and states and localities, in part because the census doesn't necessarily have a lot of money that it's giving to states and localities to sort of get them to help with this undertaking. But you do talk about sort of the different nature from state to state and even from locality to locality that happens during the census with regard to how much partnering or to some degree, a little bit, maybe less hands on and maybe a little bit more hands off. Can you, I mean, this is like classic federalism. Can you talk a little bit about some of the examples that you saw with some of these differences? You've mentioned California, which again, you know, is a giant state with lots of people in it, but other states with lots of people in it, like Texas, didn't work the same way that California did.
- [38:01]
Phil Rocco
Right. And so I do think that that's a nice comparison. So California invested $187 million, created its own state census office. I mean, it was on the ground in 2018 building up this really impressive parallel infrastructure. And you know, there were some, there's some very obvious, I think, reasons for this, and there's some patterns that you see around the country, states with large, potentially undercounted populations, states that experienced an undercount in 2010, states that were potentially fearing an undercount of their population in 2020, states that were worried about losing a congressional seat potentially on the basis of an undercount, they were much more likely to invest something. States that had a lot of resources, California would be an example, were likely to invest more than states that were fiscally strapped. But partisanship mattered as well. And Texas is kind of a great example. Texas didn't invest anything at all in the census until mysteriously, kind of halfway into the census year, it chipped in, I think, about a million dollars. But this is one of those instances where it's not how much you spend only that matters, it's when you spend. And in order to make investments in the census work, it's not just that dollars have some sort of magical property that lead to more census participation. They have to be put towards a campaign that's ramping up prior to the census year. And so, you know, that kind of investment didn't matter as much, but it does. It is sort of the case that partisanship beyond just resources or sort of the motivation from potential, you know, potential undercount, it was. Was a factor. Florida would be another example where the state did not invest anything at all in census outreach. And then it did experience a pretty historic undercount that might have led to billions of dollars in foregone federal aid. And in the interviews that I did, partisanship did play a role, but in a couple different ways, and not always in the ways that you expect. So, one, it's certainly the case that the citizenship question and the Trump administration's involvement in the census had a contamination effect on debates over the census that might have otherwise been insulated from partisan politics. Certainly, once that issue's on the agenda, then investing in outreach and so forth becomes polarized. And I did have interviews with people who said, look, I'm in contact with the governor. The governor does actually support investing in outreach, but he's terrified of being primaried. And so much so that it's not just that the state won't invest in census outreach. You can't even get the governor to mention the census in the State of the state speech. But that's not the only, I think, way in which partisanship mattered. There were other stories in other states where there was, I think, a more ideological sense that, in fact, this shouldn't be the state's responsibility. There's a kind of small government mindset that in fact, motivation for census participation should sort of come from the populace, should come through kind of voluntary organization. So there's sort of an ideological story there. And then in some cases, the nature of investment or disinvestment redounded to a pretty normal budget year spat between a Democratic governor typically, and a Republican state legislature. So the governor puts forward their proposal. It's got funding for all of the governor's preferred programs, including census outreach. And then in the process of negotiation, census outreach is often, even in states that are much more supportive of this sort of thing, it's sort of seen as like a why do we have to invest in that? Again, isn't this the federal government's responsibility? And what's the return on investment from that? So it's just something that falls to the bottom, I think, of the negotiating stack, and then is sort of deleted. So that's also a way in which I think partisanship matters. Although I should say the classic partisan pattern is there are deviations. You can look at Alabama as a really interesting deviation. Where it was the state was expecting to see a huge undercount. There were credible concerns that this is going to affect its representation in Congress. And even though you had Republican governor and state legislature, they made investments. Typically, the way that that worked is that they had to use different arguments to justify it. And we saw, I saw that around the country in talking to people is like, you know, you can't use the same argument to justify investing in the census that you would for a Democratic governor on a Republican governor, that they're just not going to be able to justify the decision in the same way, which makes a lot of sense. And I think if you think about the broad, the macro kind of partisan story is there are a lot more different routes to yes for Democrats in a way than there are Republicans. There are a lot more different reasons to say yes when the issue is kind of swept into the partisan battle.
- [44:02]
Lily Gorn
So you have all of these different dimensions going on. And you did sort of want to look at this census in 2020, and you're very interested in also why and the importance of numbers and statistics. And what ultimately you found though, was that the 2020 census, even though it was in a pandemic, even though it's contaminated by these part political dimensions, and you have states battling it out for funds and possibly seats in Congress as well as electoral college numbers, you came to the conclusion that 2020 was a very good census. What brought you there?
- [44:51]
Phil Rocco
So what I argue in the book is that the quality of the Census really hinges on what metric you look at. If you look at the net undercount overall, how did we do? The census compares pretty favorably with past census counts. Our net undercount was not statistically significant from zero. But a lot of the ways that the census matters is not the overall undercount, but the undercount of specific populations, specific states, specific localities. And by those metrics, the census had some real significant issues, had among the highest undercounts of Hispanic Americans, which is the term that the Census Bureau uses in decades. It had very high undercounts of renters, undercounts of black residents, undercounts of young children under the age of five, really high undercounts of American Indians living on tribal reservations. So those subpopulations had some significant undercounts. And then there were a number of states that were undercounted as well. And for individual cities, there were even some lawsuits about the nature of the undercount. Detroit, in particular, saw a particularly high undercount, which it challenged even some of the methodologies that the Census Bureau used to count the city. And so the thing that I think is significant is that the undercount could have been far worse than it was. How much worse is kind of hard to say, in part because it's a bit difficult to evaluate the effects of all of these simultaneous outreach campaigns, especially in the midst of a really complex census environment. But it is really evident that the quality of communication that people received about the census, even in the midst of all of this chaos, was far higher, thanks to the efforts of all of these states, cities, counties, regional governmental organizations, and community based organizations. And so, in the midst of a kind of historic pandemic, but also some real efforts to sow distrust in the census, I think that performance was probably better thanks to those efforts. So, as I said, it's a kind of complicated picture. But I think the one thing that you can conclude from this is that we shouldn't just assume that because the Census Bureau is called the Census Bureau, that it's the only entity that shapes the way that the census rolls out and the only entity that affects census, the quality of the census.
- [48:25]
Lily Gorn
Okay. And so my question for you, thus in wrapping this up, is whether or not you're going to continue to look at the census, or are you looking at something completely different now? Phil?
- [48:40]
Phil Rocco
Well, I think it's sort of irresistible to continue studying the politics not just of the census, but of population data and federal official statistics writ large. We are kind of facing a Fairly significant assault on the civil service in the form of funding cuts and reductions in force that could really alter the quality of federal statistics in the decades to come. And thinking about how we build trust and a political support structure for those data that are the kinds of things that we just take for granted as part of our political institutions and how they function is something that I think is increasingly important. And I think you see a growing number of scholars kind of working on those questions. And certainly in the context of the present conflict over the census, there will be a lot to study going into 2030. And thinking about what we learn from 2020 that's applicable now is something that's really important to me. And so one of the things that's fascinating is that the coalitions that formed around local and state census outreach efforts continue to work together, worked on other things, and have evolved. And so now I think we have a lot of partnerships and linkages between cities and community based organizations and states and local governments around the census that didn't exist the decade leading up to 2020. And so one question is, how do you keep those coalitions going and how do you adapt the strategies that they were using to a new, potentially new census environment? The other thing that I'm really interested in is the census is a really important instrument, but a lot of the politics of the census revolve around very small margins, and that matters, right? The difference between a congressional seat in a state is sometimes as low as a few dozen, whether or not you get that last congressional seat, as Minnesota found out in 2020. Right. It hung on to a congressional seat by a margin of a few dozen, really. But in many ways, the kind of demographic change that matters most now, when you talk to people who work on these things at the state and local level are things that are far more significant and are far harder to have political conflicts over in the context of the census because they're broader demographic shifts. And so there's obviously lots of political controversy emerging on responding to declines in fertility rates both in the United States and throughout rich democracies. And one question is, how do state and local officials in a federal system who don't really have a lot of the resources to affect the policy variables that would change those sorts of patterns, but are on the receiving end and do, as populations shrink, have to make some pretty difficult choices about how many school buildings do we close, or how do we reshape our sort of the footprint of our city services to match a shrinking population, or do we try to attract internal migration in different ways. Even though states and cities don't have access to some of the biggest policy levers that can affect those things, they have to deal with the business end of those macro policy settings. And so what's really interesting to me is the United States isn't the only country, it's certainly not the only federal country that's dealing with these things. And the controversies that we're seeing here over how states and cities should respond to these sorts of dynamics mirror controversy you're seeing elsewhere. So that's the kind of hard demography of this population shift and the nature of the political response is one of the things that I'm looking at working on in the next decade.
- [53:26]
Lily Gorn
Well, whatever materializes into a book, I hope you will join me again and discuss it with me on the new Books in Political Science podcast. I have had the honor of Phil Rocco joining me today to talk about Counting Like a State How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shape the 2020 U.S. census, published by the University Press of Kansas in 2025. This is available at the University Press of Kansas websites. And is there a brick and mortar store with an online presence to which you would like to give a shout out?
- [54:01]
Phil Rocco
Sure. I would say if you are a fan of Milwaukee's great bookstore scene, you can always pick up the book on on order from Boswell Books on Downer Avenue. But nationally, I would say the best place to pick it up would be the University Press of Kansas website. Buy directly from the publisher. Often they have great sales.
- [54:24]
Lily Gorn
Yes, they do.
- [54:24]
Phil Rocco
And there's any number of rabbit holes you can go down on their amazing catalog, so check them out.
- [54:35]
Lily Gorn
Thank you. Thanks, Phil, for joining me today.
- [54:37]
Phil Rocco
Thanks, Louis.