"essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people.
It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-we...
It's impossible to read a comment about the census without looking at the political affiliation of who makes the comment.
It's also unfortunately that articles like this don't make these affiliations clear. Gives fuel to 'fake news' and 'liberal media' arguments.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-12/news/mn-7095_1_urban-...
However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
Part of the sophistry is pretending that no non-white people are capable of responding to documents mailed to them and as such will be entirely disenfranchised. However, the actual percentage simply cannot be that high as 73 percent of households have satellite or cable TV and thus are at least occasionally responding to mailed documents. 73 percent of the population isn't even white anymore.
I mean, yeah, as a political purity test we can rally around Orange Man Bad and try to one up each other in our two minutes hate to eliminate diversity of opinion while encouraging groupthink, but reality is so far from the politics in this particular situation that its hard to play along. And if an individual can't stomach the extreme virtue signallers, may as well join the reality-based community and just vote Trump. So ironically I don't think this topic is a PRODUCTIVE purity test even from a purely leftist perspective.