About a month late, presumably due to last fall’s government shutdown, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for July 1, 2025.  

It provides an interesting picture of what the country is, and is becoming, halfway through the decade of the 2020s and one-quarter of the way through (have we really gotten this far) the 21st century. It also provides some political dynamite, all the more explosive because of Census Bureau statisticians’ deserved reputation for apolitical rigor and willingness to admit mistakes, as it did on the COVID-19-plagued 2020 Census.