Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday he won’t appeal the official census numbers for Arizona despite the financial hit they will mean to the state.
The official tally showed Arizona with the widest negative disparity of any state between the estimates put out by the Census Bureau and what was actually counted. Those official numbers fell nearly 270,000 below what the bureau had predicted would be the final number.
That means Arizona won’t add a 10th congressional seat in the 2022 election as had been projected.
Moreover, Ducey’s own census team had said that each 1% difference in the official count from the actual population translated to $62 million in lost federal aid. And with a 3.8% difference, that comes out to more than $235 million a year — or $2.35 billion over the course of a decade until the next official count.
The final census numbers also fell 143,085 short of the estimates drawn up by the state’s demographer.
Accepting the census numbers as accurate runs contrary to a key Ducey talking point for years — that Arizona was growing faster than pretty much anywhere else in the nation. He credited the growth to what he said have been the state’s pro-business and anti-regulatory policies.
And now?
“Arizona continues to grow,” he said Thursday. “Some other states grew faster. You’ve got to have the numbers.”
In declaring the official results accurate, Ducey avoids questions about whether more people would have been counted had the state done more.
Ducey committed $1.8 million to get people to respond to the questionnaire. By contrast, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported early last year that the budgets for the task were $84.5 million in Illinois, $15.5 million in Washington state and $20 million in New York, not counting another $40 million committed by New York City on census preparations.
“Spending doesn’t produce people,” Ducey said.
Anyway, he said, the percentage of Arizonans who responded even before the federal bureau sent out people to follow up was “the best in two decades.”
Ducey also sidestepped questions of whether another of his actions may have affected the final numbers.
Last year, the governor added his support to a proposal by then-President Donald Trump to include a citizenship question on the official census.
“There’s a number of different questions the federal government chooses to ask,” he told Capitol Media Services at the time. “I think to get a handle on who’s here, who’s a citizen and who’s not, is a fair question.”
As it turned out, the bureau never got to ask. But critics questioned whether the publicity about the issue, both nationally and statewide, depressed census response rates among some families.
Any hesitancy would have made a significant dent, given that some estimates put the number of undocumented residents in Arizona at about 235,000 — close to the difference between unofficial estimates and the final count.
Arizona would have picked up that 10th congressional seat had its official count been about 80,000 higher.
