HARLINGEN — State statistics experts say the Census 2020 response is “trickling in” both nationally and in Texas as many Americans focus instead on urban protests and rioting.
“There has not been a whole lot of movement in the country’s self-response rate or Texas’s self-response rate since last week,” Lila Valencia, senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center, said a week ago in a webinar with Texas Counts.
“As you can imagine, the country has been focused on the national protests and … we anticipate a lot of people, their focus is elsewhere now, understandably so.”
Texas’s response rate to Census 2020 stood at 55.5 percent on June 4, which ranks 41st among U.S. states. The national response rate is 60.7 percent.
“There has not been a whole lot of movement in the country’s self-response rate or Texas’s self-response rate since last week,” Valencia said.
“We’re still following that trajectory of trailing the country by about 5 percentage points and really both the U.S. and Texas are adding a pretty minimal amount per day of .01 percentage point,” she added.
The numbers for Texas counties follow the trend, Valencia said.
“We’re seeing a continuation of the same sort of pattern,” she said. “We have 72 counties that have responses from over 50 percent of more of their households.”
Counties in the Rio Grande Valley, a historically undercounted area of the state, are not among them.
In Cameron County, the self-response rate both by mail and internet is 42.6 percent, significantly below the Texas overall rate.
In Willacy County, the self-response rate stands at 28.0 percent, while Hidalgo County has a rate of 43.6 percent.
Among Valley cities, Harlingen has a self-response rate of 55.5 percent, followed by McAllen (51.6 percent), Brownsville (49.3 percent), Raymondville (42.7 percent) and San Benito (41.4 percent).
