Congressional Districts — a rabbit hole
Last week, I began exploring the popularity of Facebook posts right before the election for various congressional candidates for the 2020 election to decide the 117th Congress. That article is here. As I was exploring this, I became intrigued by how many people in a district vote. According to the Census Bureau brief on Congressional Apportionment, the average size of a congressional district should be 710,767, but that was after the 2010 census. Using census data from 2019, I found the average congressional district was 752,893, with the smallest (Rhode Island 2nd district) having 529,295 people and the largest (Montana at large) having 1,068,778.
Those numbers are larger than when I was last paying attention, but that’s good. Populations should grow. What surprised me was the information collected by APM Research Lab on the districts, which showed the number of voters in each district (defined as those who are citizens over 18 years of age). This varied from 47% of the number of people (California 40th district) or 334,291 potential voters to 82% of the number of people (Florida 11th district) 669,669 potential voters. Montana did have the most absolute potential voters at 831,760 or 78%. My hypothesis was immediately that the number of immigrants and young people in a district would change the number of potential voters. To test this, I looked at the number of white people and the number of people over the age of 65, the opposite of what might drive down the number of potential voters.
The opening graph shows the correlation between the percentage of potential voters in a district and the percentage of white people in the district. To get this graph, I first grouped the percentages of voters in a district, and then averaged the percent of white people in the district for that percentage of voters. I did the same thing for people over the age of 65.
Data are so intriguing. I have been thinking for years that people in Montana are so lucky to have three electoral votes. Indeed they do have fewer potential voters per electoral college vote at 277,253 than most, but they have the most potential voters per electoral college vote for those states with 3 electoral college votes, and more than some of the states with 4 electoral college votes (Rhode Island (200,200), Hawaii (253,509), New Hampshire (267,554), and Maine (269,693)).
I don’t know what all of this means for any given election, although I’m sure campaign managers for all of these districts do. I hope to figure out soon how many people actually voted in each of these districts, and what that might correlate with. Stay tuned.
