MSNBC host Rachel Maddow argued that the White House’s abrupt shift on the census is evidence that they don’t believe President Trump will be reelected.
Maddow, the host of the Rachel Maddow Show, said on Tuesday that the administration’s decision to cut the census data gathering timetable, even after the deadline was pushed back as requested, shows that it wants to get the president the numbers before the next president is sworn in.
She noted that the Census Bureau initially pushed back the deadline for data collection from Dec. 31, the annual deadline that is determined through federal law, back to April to accommodate for the delays from the coronavirus and suggested that the administration’s decision to finish ahead of schedule despite the delayed deadline was a “shocking sign” that they don’t expect Trump to win in 2020.
“But in terms of this decision being made late by the Trump administration, I think they’ve also realized that by wrapping this thing up early, right, rather than taking the extension that they were going to, by wrapping this thing up early, that also means they’re going to be handing over the census data to the president who is in office this term,” she explained. “Not the one who will be in office next spring.”
“So, I mean, what this looks like is that the White House thinks President Trump is going to lose or at least they’re hedging their bets,” Maddow added. “And that means cutting the census short from even what they said they needed, thus making sure that it’s Trump who will get the census data before Biden is sworn in in January, so it will be Trump who can proclaim, ‘Census looks good to me,’ and he can proclaim who has been counted where and which states get additional congressional seats and which states lose them based on who was counted and who was left out.”
Last month, the Census Bureau’s associate director for the 2020 census, Al Fontenot, said during a press conference that they “are past the window of being able to get those counts by” the original deadline.
The House approved the new deadline of April 2021 in May, but the Republican-controlled Senate has not done the same.
