{"id":489843,"date":"2010-03-30T14:31:08","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T18:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=80931"},"modified":"2010-03-30T14:31:08","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T18:31:08","slug":"census-returns-way-down-in-republican-parts-of-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/489843","title":{"rendered":"Census Returns Way Down in Republican Parts of Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>File this under &#8220;problems that we really should have seen coming&#8221;: conservatives, egged on by the likes of Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), <a href=\"http:\/\/biggovernment.com\/amarcus\/2010\/03\/30\/video-the-egg-man-of-seachlight-nevada\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29\">declining to return census forms<\/a> and possibly shrinking the political power of states like Texas. The Lone Star State&#8217;s return rate for census forms, so far, is 27 percent. The national average is 34 percent. And the data are worse for Republican areas:<span id=\"more-80931\"><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p id=\"id2442708\">In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state&#8217;s most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent. Most other counties near the bottom of the list are heavily Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The McCain-Palin ticket carried 74.3 percent of the vote in Briscoe, 92.6 percent in King and 65.5 percent in Newton &#8212; although Obama-Biden won tiny Culberson County.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Some friendly folks on Twitter have called this a false meme, so I checked the new data at the Census site. Here are the return rates, so far, for the five most Republican districts in Texas.<\/p>\n<p>King County (92.% for McCain) &#8211; 14% return rate, down from 48% in 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Roberts County (92.1% for McCain) &#8211; 22% return rate, down from 68% in 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Ochiltree County (91.7% for McCain) &#8211; 39% return rate, down from 71% in 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Glasscock County (90.1% for McCain) &#8211; 30% return rate, down from 49% in 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Oldham County (88.4% for McCain) &#8211; 26% return rate, down from 72% in 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, with so much time left to complete the Census, lots of populous and Democratic areas are way off of their 2000 rates so far &#8212; Harris County, for example, is only at 35%, when in 2000 it had a 68% return rate. But these numbers in conservative areas are worth watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>File this under &#8220;problems that we really should have seen coming&#8221;: conservatives, egged on by the likes of Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), declining to return census forms and possibly shrinking the political power of states like Texas. The Lone Star State&#8217;s return rate for census forms, so far, is 27 percent. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}