Errors in the 2020 census benefited Democrats and hurt Republicans, and these inaccuracies could make a difference on Election Day.

In 2022, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that the 2020 census incorrectly counted the American population in at least 14 states, leading some states to lose congressional representation. The report was highlighted at the time by Heritage Foundation scholar Hans von Spakovsky, who told The Daily Wire that the errors could benefit Democrats in November.

“The result of the Census errors in Florida and Texas, two red states, should have three more electoral seats that they never got,” von Spakovsky wrote in an email. “Whereas three blue states, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Colorado, have three congressional seats – and thus three electoral votes – they should not have. In a razor thin election, this could make the difference in victory.”

Another Heritage scholar, Stephen Moore, who is also an author and founder of the Club For Growth, brought the report back into the light over the weekend, noting, “A majority of the overcounted states were blue, while a majority of the undercounted states were red.”

The 2020 Census robbed Red states of electoral seats.

A majority of the overcounted states were blue, while a majority of the undercounted states were red.

According to a @Heritage analysis, the result of these errors shorted red states three seats:https://t.co/QhZcUQUz7b pic.twitter.com/rSVIzMeqUm

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) September 7, 2024

Moore included a chart showing that overcounted states included Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. The error size in New York resulted in a population miscount of +695,422. Minnesota and Rhode Island, whose overcounting resulted in them keeping electoral votes they should have lost, overcounted their populations by 216,971 and 55,457, respectively.

Though Rhode Island overcounted by a smaller amount than the other states (it was still a 5% increase in population, however), it managed to hold onto a congressional seat that it should have lost, the Associated Press reported in 2022.

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If Rhode Island had counted 19,000 fewer residents – as it should have – it would have lost one of its two congressional seats. Had that happened, the AP reported, that congressional seat would have gone to New York.

As for Florida, it undercounted residents by 750,600. It only needed about 171,500 more residents to gain an extra seat. Texas, too, was undercounted by about 560,000 residents when it only needed 189,000 to gain another congressional seat.

In his analysis of the Census Bureau report, von Spakovsky noted:

Under the 2020 Census enumeration released on April 26, 2021, the total apportionment population of the United States was reported as 331,108,434. After application of the “method of equal proportion,” five states each gained one new congressional seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon. Texas gained two new seats. Due to population decreases, seven states each lost one congressional seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

These errors can’t be corrected until the 2030 census, which could bring additional, similar errors.

On Sunday night, Vice President Kamala Harris finally published a policy agenda on her campaign website, nearly two months after she became the de facto Democratic nominee.

The problem, however, is that much of the source code on the page appears to have been lifted from President Joe Biden’s campaign website from when he was still running.

X user Corinne Green, described as a “queer, transfemme activist from New Orleans,” posted that the Harris campaign “copied and pasted the policy page code from biden’s website and couldn’t be a**ed to change it. ‘join our campaign to re-elect joe biden today!’”

they copied and pasted the policy page code from biden’s website and couldn’t be assed to change it. “join our campaign to re-elect joe biden today!” pic.twitter.com/cDlL8xn01Q

— Corinne Green (@gaynarcan) September 9, 2024

“very serious people deeply concerned with the situation we’re in and approaching the campaign with the focus and gravity it deserves,” Green said in a follow-up post.

The text didn’t appear on the website but was visible in its metadata, but that metadata is used by search engines, meaning the “re-elect Joe Biden” phrase was visible in searches for Harris’ policy issues page. It was also visible when links to the page were shared, The New Republic reported.

“All of this creates the impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents,” the outlet noted. “That would be an embarrassing miscue from the Harris campaign, which partly came into being because of a perception that a refresh was needed to garner enthusiasm in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t help that the section on her website about her Israel-Palestine policy seems very similar to what Biden’s campaign was saying.”

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The copy-and-paste job has since been removed.

The website blunder comes as Harris’ initial momentum has evaporated, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows former President Donald Trump with a one-point lead over Harris nationally.

“This is a disaster area poll for Kamala Harris. I’ve been saying for a long time that she had hit her high watermark, that there was only receding to the mean from there, that she had had weeks and weeks and weeks of no serious questions asked of her, and eventually the vibes would run out,” Shapiro wrote.

The lead is with likely voters, a better measure of voting than polls that sample registered voters. But when looking at registered voters nationally, the same poll gave Trump a two-point lead. The poll also found that Trump had a one-point lead in terms of favorability over Harris. Forty-six percent of Americans said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of Trump, while 45% said the same of Harris.

A bigger gap came when voters were asked whether they already knew what they needed to know about the candidate to make a decision. Eighty-seven percent said they already knew what they needed to know about Trump, but only 67% said the same of Harris.

“It turns out the American people really do want Kamala to explicate who she is and what she believes in order for them to make her president of the United States,” Shapiro wrote.