Skip to content Skip to footer

GOP Paid Millions to Operative Who Pushed Census Question Aimed to Help “Whites”

Thomas Hofeller, who devised the census citizenship question, was on the Republican Party payroll.

Demonstrators rally at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 23, 2019, to protest a proposal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

The gerrymandering expert who was revealed to be behind the push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census — on the premise that it would help Republicans and “non-Hispanic whites” — was paid millions by the Republican National Committee until his death last year.

After Thomas Hofeller passed away last summer, his daughter discovered files on his hard drive revealing that he authored a study showing that a census citizenship question would help Republican gerrymandering. He pushed the Trump administration to add the question to the 2020 census. After Hofeller’s previously unreported role in the census issue was revealed, Mother Jones found Federal Election Commission filings showing that the Republican Party had paid him more than $2 million for his work.

Hofeller, who wrote that adding the question would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” was on the RNC payroll from June 2009 until his death last August. He had previously worked as a redistricting consultant for the RNC between the 1980s and early 2000s.

According to the filings, the RNC continued to pay him for “legal and compliance” work after he left his official position and right up until his death. He earned $422,000 after Trump’s inauguration, receiving regular monthly payments of $22,247.

During that time, Hofeller was paid by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet owned by billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, to study how to implement congressional maps based only on the number of voting-age citizens rather than on a state’s total population.

Hofeller, who was behind numerous controversial gerrymanders like the one struck down in North Carolina because it was based on race, authored a study in 2015 which stated that basing maps only on the number of adult citizens rather than the total population “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” according to court filings.

After crafting the study and while being paid by the RNC, Hofeller lobbied Trump’s transition team to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to last year’s testimony from former transition aide Mark Neuman.

Neuman testified that Hofeller told him that adding the question would be necessary to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act and increase Hispanic turnout, despite writing exactly the opposite in his study months earlier.

Files found on Hofeller’s hard drive showed that he was integral to the Trump administration’s dubious justification for adding the question. After he submitted several memos to the Trump team presenting arguments that could be used to justify implementing the question, an entire paragraph from one of his memos appeared verbatim in a draft letter from the Justice Department urging the Census Bureau to add the question.

The question was ultimately put on hold by federal courts and will now be ruled upon by the Supreme Court. The conservative majority on the high court appeared likely to uphold the question when they heard arguments in April.

The ACLU, the New York Immigration Coalition and other groups seeking to block the question have attempted to enter the files Hofeller’s daughter discovered into evidence in their New York lawsuit. They also requested an expedited discovery process in the case in hopes of finding more evidence that might be used to pause the Supreme Court’s review of the case. Their request was denied by a judge and the Supreme Court is still expected to rule on the case this month, The Daily Beast reported.

It is unclear if the Supreme Court will consider the new evidence found on Hofeller’s hard drive, since it was not available when it first heard arguments in April.

“There are precedents on both sides of the question. Sometimes, the Supreme Court admits new evidence; other times, it doesn’t. Unlike lower courts, the Supreme Court can, more or less, do whatever it wants,” Jay Michaelson wrote at The Daily Beast, adding, “It’s quite possible that a majority of the court will simply decide the case on the evidence in front of it, rendering all of the new discoveries legally irrelevant.”

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.

You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.