It’s late. It’s likely to be questioned for the next 9.5 years but – finally – the 2020 U.S. Census data is getting kicked out for review and analysis.
The re-allocation of Congressional districts got the headline but lots of folks are digging around on more granular data. The results are interesting.
The tables and charts filed on the Census website under the very sexy title “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2020” were the first to get this treatment by the Washington Post which summarized the findings for us English majors. Here are some highlights:
- Under 30’s voted in larger numbers than ever. Participation in the 18-29 cohort is up to 2008 (Obama) levels. This is looking like a trend.
- Asian Americans turned out big-time. This was a spike, hard to know if it’s a trend.
- African-American turn-out was highest in ‘swing’ states and up overall from 2016.
- Women voted more than men – no real change here.
The census can’t tell if the increase in polling hours, use of mail-in ballots or drop-boxes helped with turn-out; those drill-downs will come in time as results are compared between locations and years. But given the increasingly colorful data landscape, it’s likely that info will be available soon – and not from your paid pollster.
We may be at the start of an interesting trend: The widespread use of data – real data – about voters, location and behavior in new and more public places. There is a ton of good statistical analysis going on. And it’s made a lot more accessible with a host of computerized graphing and illustration tools.
What used to be the purview of pollsters and modelers and the occasional nerdy reporter is getting more and more public and a lot less geeky. Have a look at Github, a code repository where a lot of open source projects are housed by civic-minded nerds and you’ll see a long and varied list of projects related to the U.S. elections.
The NYTimes Upshot has done some great work along these lines looking at the 2016 and 2020 elections with some pretty colorful maps and very nicely done interactive websites graphics and displays. It’s also highlighted a project studying partisan segmentation within Congressional Districts. That analysis is going to crop up again as the arguments over redistricting are taken up in the fall and winter.
Spot-On has always suggested that campaigns “roll their own” data and increasingly the tools to do so are easy to find and deploy. That’s why our new Pinpoint Placement ad buying platform will let our users keep and record their activity, privately and securely. Your info won’t get dumped into a pile so other can paw through it; it’s yours and yours alone.
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