What I Saw as a 2020 Census Worker
In the coming months, after years of ground-laying, controversy, and anticipation, the United States will finally complete an imperfect civic process that, though heavily compromised by geography, logistics, and partisanship, will affect the life of every single American for years to come. Also, the country will inaugurate a new president.
The 2020 census, which ended its data-collecting operations last month, seems destined to become one of the most telling artifacts of this very strange year. As a census taker, I got a front-porch view of what happens when a 230-year-old national rite runs headlong into a country all but at war with itself and its institutions. Throughout six weeks of door-knocking in dense New York neighborhoods and Georgia backwoods, I got a good look at 2020 America—not only its demography, but also its deep mistrust of government and diminishing faith in the common good.
It’s true that each decennial count encounters its own set of challenges. In a letter to fellow Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, President George Washington sighed that he believed the first census, conducted by U.S. Marshals on horseback in 1790, had produced a major undercount that posed a potential threat to national security. Data from the 1880 census took nearly eight years to compile. Congress threw out the results of the 1920 census entirely.
But the obstacles facing the 2020 census were historic. Even before the counting started, the Trump administration demanded that the census include a citizenship question, a controversial move that set off a yearlong legal battle in which even the Census Bureau warned that response rates would likely decline. And although the Supreme Court stymied the White House’s efforts to add the citizenship question, other barriers—including unprecedented politicization, massive natural disasters, widespread civil unrest, funding shortfalls, high employee turnover, ever-shifting deadlines, and nearly ceaseless litigation—undermined the entire census project. A pandemic hit too. But even a messy census reveals a lot about America in ways that reach far beyond the data.
I weeks before COVID-19 and social-distancing mandates interrupted life as
