[eschaton]

The 2020 Census results are really, really weird, and suggest the Census fucked up the American Community Survey really badly this decade.

Some people initially suggested that the issue was related to Trump's politicizing of the Census - that Latinos were under-counted in states like TX, FL, and AZ. This seems plausible, though it doesn't explain how New York managed to find 864,000 more people than was modeled. Even good census outreach by the state doesn't explain it, unless you claim all these people were unrecorded in 2010.

It seems like the ACS just modeled the number of people leaving the Northeast/Midwest for the Sun Belt as way, way too high. Interestingly, this almost certainly means that the "decline of cities" that people were suggesting based on ACS data - that big cities in the Northeast/West Coast started to decline in population once Trump effectively ended immigration and birth rates continued to plummet - none of that ever happened.