It may seem odd that one of the most contentious issues in Judd Gregg's nomination and withdrawal was mastery over the 2010 Census. "Next on Inside Politics: How Tom Daschle's nomination was scuttled by a disagreement over who would order office supplies." But as Amy Sullivan explains, control of the Census is a legitimately electric question. Head counting a country of 300 million is a tough job. There are a lot of people. And some of them -- mainly immigrants and the urban poor -- don't come to the door when an unknown government bureaucrat knocks for an impromptu question-and-answer session (this instinctive mistrust of unfamiliar federal employees is the sort of thing you'd think conservatives would be sympathetic to). This has, for Republicans, the happy outcome of undercounting minorities and immigrants, which in turn underestimates the population of dense, urban states that tend to trend blue. And since the census numbers decide how many seats a state gets in Congress, this gives the Republicans an advantage. It's the equivalent of inventing more Republicans, or at least hiding a lot of Democrats. Democrats, for their part, want to buttress the Census count with statistical modeling in order to ensure a more accurate result. Republicans don't want that, and thus, we have a vicious fight over the legitimacy of statistical modeling. Isn't government grand?
