The Vote Machine is already planning for the 2030 Census

Editorial note: this essay is from a forthcoming report on the 2026 mid-term election.

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For months the best show on cable TV news has been the sublime drama of the mid-decade redistricting wars. The blow-for-blow spectacle of Texas, California, Indiana, Virginia, and Florida has dominated the air waves and the internet with both sides boldly asserting that they will win in spectacular fashion and that their side alone holds the moral high ground.

Then, just as the dust seemed to be settling, the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision added an action movie plot twist by ending the longstanding injustice of race-based redistricting and introducing Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi into the fray. The resulting discourse has resembled nothing so much as a debate between fanatical schoolboys on the likely victor of a WWE cage match.

Above the redistricting circus, though, a small, secretive, and well-organized group of left-wing activists and billionaires have already put their heads together to focus on manipulating the 2030 census to influence the outcome of all future redistricting battles in their favor, just as they did in 2020 and 2010.

2010 Census

Led by activist Terri Ann Lowenthal, a veteran census activist and member of the Obama presidential transition team, FCI served as the bridge between activist groups and the Census Bureau to make sure that big philanthropy was able to insert itself into the process as much as possible.

The Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP) is a coalition of self-styled “democracy defending” activists and donors who convene to discuss strategy for using nonprofits to help Democrats win elections (though they would never admit that goal openly.) The FCCP dates back to 1981 and can reasonably be credited as the pioneer of organized nonprofit get-out-the-vote (GOTV) work, which has now become a billion-dollar-per-cycle industry. For each election year they conduct enormous research, outreach, and planning projects to tell the biggest names in left-wing philanthropy how and where to use millions of tax-exempt dollars to increase voter turnout from “underrepresented” demographics that all happen to favor the Democratic party.

Starting in 2008, though, the FCCP expanded its focus from GOTV to GOTC, or get-out-the-count. According to FCCP records, the project, called the Funders Census Initiative (FCI), began in 2008 with a meeting at the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York. It was an elite guest list: “Attendees included representatives of the Ford, Hagedorn, Annie E. Casey, MacArthur, Gates, and Knight foundations, as well as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Open Society Foundations (OSF), Pew Charitable Trusts, and Atlantic Philanthropies.”

GOTC work, and census policy warfare, these well-endowed donors had realized, “could be conceptualized as the third leg of civic engagement, after voting and redistricting.” By January 2009 the FCI was officially formed, and it wasn’t long before some grew skeptical of its motives. By 2010 The New American (a publication from the right-wing John Birch Society) was writing that the FCI clearly intended “to use the Census drive as a huge tax-supported venture in radical political organizing.”

The FCI influenced the 2010 census in several important ways. For example, in a list of the coalition’s 2010 achievements, the FCI takes credit for “[mounting] a substantial campaign to defeat what became known as the Vitter Amendment, which would have added a last-minute question on citizenship and legal status to the Census, for the later purpose of excluding noncitizens from the state population counts used for congressional apportionment.” The FCI boasts that it “activated networks” to convince lawmakers to support the appointment of the Director of the Census Bureau and to prevent budget cuts. They also claim that FCI staff that first “[raised] the idea of developing a federal government funding stream to support community groups to help promote the census in 2020.”

Led by activist Terri Ann Lowenthal, a veteran census activist and member of the Obama presidential transition team, FCI served as the bridge between activist groups and the Census Bureau to make sure that big philanthropy was able to insert itself into the process as much as possible. The FCCP’s report on 2010 brags that FCI created “an unusual, possibly unique, public-private partnership” with the Census Bureau that granted them “unprecedented, close, ongoing contact and collaboration” with Census Bureau staff “at the local, regional, and national levels” thanks to “relationships with Census Bureau staff, in some cases going back decades, which enabled [FCI] to break through bureaucratic barriers and obtain critically important information for nonprofits.” Using this insider information, FCI trained left-leaning nonprofits across the country on the best ways to motivate constituents to take the census, tech tools to improve census turnout, and even “when and how the census bureau would be hiring door-to-door staff,” so that FCI grantees would be able to seed their own operatives into these jobs.

In 2020 the FCI did largely the same things, but at a much, much larger scale.

2020 Census

The results of the 2020 Census were not good. The reasons for this are manifold, but the most important statistic is that, by the Census Bureau’s own admission, there was massive overcounting, mostly in blue states, and massive undercounting, mostly in red states.

The FCI reports that, from 2008 to 2010, big philanthropy spent $38 million on census outreach work, undeniably more than any previous census. The 2020 census put that number to shame. In an all-out effort that Sue Van, president and CEO of the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation called a “philanthropic tour de force,” over 100 donors were recruited to spend more than $118 million on a “coordinated plan of action” for the 2020 census.

To raise that 200 percent increase over the 2010 effort, the FCI and FCCP worked closely with a like-minded new group, the Democracy Funders Collaborative Census Subgroup, a fiscally sponsored project housed at the Arrabella Advisors led New Venture Fund. In a 109-page document titled “Philanthropy and the 2020 Census” the FCCP lays out a detailed history of how planning started as early as 2015, and together, the collaborating networks funded “260 grantee organizations engaged in litigation, advocacy, outreach and other activities.”

Of the $118 million spent, $70.3 million went towards GOTC work while $18.2 million went towards influencing census policy.

As in 2010, with the Vitter Amendment, one of the most notable ways that the FCI and its partners got involved with the census was fighting against the addition of a citizenship question. FCI’s report cites a letter signed by more than 300 nonprofits and FCI funding of litigation groups that submitted more than 50 legal briefs to the Supreme Court which, they contend, may have actually swung Chief Justice Roberts’ decision against the citizenship question.

The GOTC work was largely the same as it was in 2010, but there were some notable changes. First, they shifted away from focusing on a national scale of work and focused more on using local “hubs” that catered to specific demographics and affinity groups to increase turnout from “historically undercounted” people. New digital tactics included “’geofencing’ of cellphone data to target ads at locations with high concentrations of historically undercounted people; using automated chatbots to recruit census workers and answer questions about the census; and collaborating with the hub group State Voices to develop a texting platform for use by state and local census advocates to reach millions of people with census information.” Some consultants even developed a Census Digital Academy that offered training session on developing “hard-to-count (HTC) outreach messaging,” improving “HTC” targeting methods using voter files, and how to convince donors to keep funding GOTC work in the future.

The results of the 2020 Census were not good. The reasons for this are manifold, but the most important statistic is that, by the Census Bureau’s own admission, there was massive overcounting, mostly in blue states, and massive undercounting, mostly in red states. The 2010 Census was reported to have a minuscule error rate of less than 1 percent; states such as Delaware and Arkansas were over and undercounted by more than 5 percent, respectively. As Hans Von Spakovsky explained in 2022, the Census Bureau’s post-census survey data for the 2020 count shows that the over and under counts were so egregious that Minnesota and Rhode Island were apportioned two congressional seats that ought to have rightfully been assigned to Florida.

How’s that for gerrymandering?

It does not seem like a coincidence that the census that big philanthropy meddled in more than any before was also the worst census in recent history. With $118 million worth of thumbs being placed on the scale, how could it not be?

2030 Census

The FCCP and its allies seem to have given themselves a pat on the back from the “tour de force” that produced the worst census in modern American history and are already well into the planning process for 2030. The Funders’ Toolkit for the 2030 Census has already been posted. The toolkit provides prewritten memos for encouraging donors to fund GOTC work, fill-in-the-blank op-eds calling for more census related activism, a “Census 101” one pager template with “What is Census 2030 and why does it matter for [Your State]?” at the top, and even a prewritten job description for a census fund coordinator. There are also links to best practices for GOTC and a list of left-leaning census partners including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Color of Change, Faith in the Public Life, National LGBTQ Task Force, National Urban League, and State Voices.

The toolkit doesn’t shy away from the electioneering impacts of census work either. One of the first paragraphs states, rather bluntly, that “Our state and local voting districts are drawn using census data, which directly correlates to who is elected to lead our communities.” One might reasonably ask whether “who is elected” should be a concern of, much less primary motivating considerations for, a “nonpartisan” GOTC group, but FCCP advertises that the census is important because of the “4 D’s … Data, dollars, districts, and decisions.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-vote-machine-is-already-planning-for-the-2030-census/