Could Missouri lose a congressional seat? - The thought has leaders worried as census participation lags in parts of state.

Bill Lambrecht
May 13, 2010

WASHINGTON - Missouri's members of Congress warned Wednesday that the state remains in danger of losing one of its nine U.S. House seats if difficulty persists in completing the census count, particularly in the southeast and central parts of the state.

The representatives observed that Missouri is in competition with Minnesota for one of the 435 apportioned seats in Congress, and Missouri's loss could be Minnesota's gain.

"The threat is real, and it will hinge on counting as accurately as possible," said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, who chairs the House subcommittee overseeing the census.

Clay spoke after a meeting of Missourians in Congress to set strategy for the new phase of the population count, in which census-takers are going door-to-door to the roughly 30 percent of households that did not mail back census forms.

Missouri's 72 percent return rate matched that of the nation as a whole, but Missouri's growth rate of about 7 percent since 2000 hasn't kept pace with the country's 9 percent increase, according to estimates last year.

In the city of St. Louis, the 67 percent return rate for census forms was higher than in 2000, as was Kansas City's 72 percent. But the mail-in participation in 24 counties, most of them south of I-70, fell beneath 60 percent. Camden County, in central Missouri, was the lowest with 39 percent.

Eleven of the lowest-return counties are in the district of Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau. Emerson said that her district is historically undercounted, partly because of the difficulty in pinpointing the number of people who live on farms that may be miles apart.

"We've got a lot of work yet to do, obviously," she said. "The number of congressional districts, the number of dollars coming into the state, depends on us getting the highest count possible."

Clay remarked that the lack of participation also might be traced to anti-government sentiments that are especially strong in southern Missouri.

Not until December will the Census Bureau submit its report with a recommendation on how the 435 seats in Congress should be apportioned. State legislatures then will have the task of redrawing district lines, typically a protracted political battle. Missouri had 10 members of Congress until after the 1980 census, when the battle over a new congressional map ended up in the courts.

Kimball Brace, of Election Data Services, a Virginia-based consulting firm specializing in redistricting, agreed that Missouri's hold on its ninth congressional seat is tenuous. Based on Census Bureau population estimates last year, he projected that Missouri would keep the 435th - and last - seat in Congress under a complicated apportionment formula. Missouri could hold that seat, he predicted, with just under 9,300 of the state's nearly 6 million population to spare.

But he noted Wednesday that Minnesota - which recorded an 80 percent census participation rate - could lay claim to Congress's 435th seat by adding 8,200 people to its population.

"If I was somebody in Missouri, I'd be concerned, because you're right at the edge there," Brace said. "There's still time to get things right and still time to get everybody counted. The issue is where are they and how well the Census Bureau can go about finding them."

Clay pointed to one potential outcome of losing a seat: "It may mean that two people in this delegation could wind up running against each other, which we don't want to have happen," he said.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, who was on hand for the meeting, said the potential loss of a congressional seat should be of concern to everybody in Missouri.

"It would impact every single district and the amount of representation we have here in Washington," he said. "We would lose an electoral vote, which would mean we have less impact on presidential elections."