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Redistricting Data Expected Next Week

North Carolina's congressional maps used in the 2020 election. New census numbers will lead to changes in how new boundaries will be drawn, including the addition of a new district. Credit: North Carolina General Assembly map.

A new round of census data, destined to shape state politics for the next decade, is scheduled to be released August 12. 

It will be the second major population release from the U.S. Census this year. In April, we learned that North Carolina grew by about 900,000 people, enough to warrant an additional Congress member. A trend toward urban areas continued, as more than 40 predominantly rural counties may have lost population over the last decade.

The new data provides a deeper understanding of the demographic shifts. It includes population figures down to the census block range. The data also has counts broken down by race and ethnicity, and new housing numbers.

The census counts are among the most important data to our democracy. The GOP-led General Assembly will use the numbers to redraw the state's political boundaries covering Congress and both chambers of the legislature.

That process would already be underway in most census cycles. But the pandemic caused a delay in collecting and processing the information.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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