Even Democrats Oppose Letting Foreign Citizens Tilt The House

Americans overwhelmingly believe congressional seats should be distributed solely based on the number of U.S. citizens in each state. They also think there should be a citizenship question on the census.

Those are two of the key findings in a new survey, obtained exclusively by The Federalist, indicating significant public support for policies — long opposed by the left — that the Trump administration is pursuing pertaining to the crucial decennial count.

The survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates on Sept. 23, shows that of 1,000 likely voters, nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, believe the congressional apportionment base should be comprised solely of U.S. citizens.

Strikingly, not only four in five self-identified Republicans, but also 54 percent of Democrats and nearly 60 percent of independents polled also somewhat or strongly agree with a policy that would necessarily exclude illegal aliens and other noncitizens from the count.

The poll also found that 75 percent of likely voters, including nearly two-thirds of Democrats, somewhat or strongly agree that census respondents should disclose whether they are U.S. citizens on the census form. Such a query could be used to facilitate efforts to exclude noncitizens from the apportionment base.

Current Policy Counts Non-Citizens

These findings come days after the Commerce Department, under which the Census Bureau sits, proposed a rule to exclude all but U.S. citizens and green card holders from the population numbers used to distribute congressional seats. That rule would modify the Census Bureau’s “residence criteria,” under which past administrations had distorted the apportionment base by counting “residents” of each state irrespective of their immigration status — thereby including millions of illegal aliens. This has led to the disproportionate allocation of representatives and electoral college votes to states with large non-citizen populations, rewarded sanctuary jurisdictions with undue power, diluted the voting power of Americans, and entrenched foreign influence in our political system.

The proposed rule also indicates that the bureau may add a question to the census to ascertain the “legal status” of respondents to implement the contemplated apportionment policy.

As chronicled in reporting on President Trump’s long-running battle over the census at RealClearInvestigations, the first Trump administration sought but failed to execute both policies. That administration attempted by executive action, rather than regulation, to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base. The effort ran up against left-wing lawfare efforts and delays associated with the coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, the president was unable to implement the policy before the clock ran out on his term.

The first Trump administration also sought to reinstate a census citizenship question — one that had been included frequently prior to 1960 and that the Census Bureau maintains on its “long-form” survey. The left-wing lawfare apparatus challenged that policy up to the Supreme Court. And in an dubious June 2019 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a splintered majority, ruled that while reinstating a citizenship question was constitutional, the process the Trump administration used to do so was legally deficient, invalidating the effort.

While unclear how the second Trump administration’s renewed efforts will fare in the court of law, the polling provides evidence of bipartisan popularity for the initiatives in the court of public opinion.

FAIR Election Fund, a 501(c)(3) led by conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, commissioned the poll. Established in 2023, her organization’s mission is to support election integrity, including that only Americans “are engaged in registration, voting, and representation in our body politic,” Mitchell said.

“FAIR commissioned this poll for the purpose of ascertaining where the American people stand on these important principles,” Mitchell said in a written statement, “and, not surprisingly, the vast majority of Americans agree with those of us in the election integrity movement.”

Confidence in Census

The survey asked other questions relevant to Trump administration efforts to correct problematic aspects of prior decennial counts. One query concerned whether respondents would be confident in the accuracy of the 2030 census, given the fact that the 2020 census used “algorithms and projections” to complete the population count instead of an “actual headcount” and that the Census Bureau admitted to making errors leading to a misallocation of House seats. A majority, 52 percent of respondents, indicated they were “Not Confident” the 2030 count would be accurate. Sixty-four percent said they would have more confidence in the count if it the bureau were “required to simply count the actual U.S. population” this time around.

This question alluded in part to the practice of “differential privacy,” a process used in the 2020 census whereby the bureau introduced “statistical noise to protect confidentiality.” Trey Mayfield, counsel to the director of the Census Bureau at the end of the first Trump administration, testified before a House Judiciary Committee panel last year that under the practice, the bureau “adds fake people where they do not live and subtracts real people from where they do live. Thus, all the reported enumeration census data from 2020 below the state level is false.” He and other authorities argue that the method is both unconstitutional, violating Congress’ duty to conduct an “actual enumeration,” and illegal.

Earlier this summer, the Commerce Department issued an order apparently meant to quell some of these concerns, declaring “noise infusion … inconsistent with the Department’s policies” and directing that it “shall not be used for any statistical product.” But the Center for Renewing America, a key critic of the practice, released a primer indicating that the reform still “leaves the underlying architectural problem unaddressed.”

“We want…the Census Bureau to do what the Constitution requires: conduct an enumeration, an actual count, of the U.S. population,” Mitchell said.

“[T]his data reflects that this is what the American people expect the Census Bureau to do,” she added.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.