There are many ways that candidates and politicians learn about the electorate. Polling is one important, albeit expensive way to do this. But, there are other tools that candidates can, and should, use. One such tool is the Census data gathered AND distributed by our very own Federal government.

www.census.gov

This is, quite literally, a gold-mine of information. In addition to the formal census taken every 10 years, our government pays for smaller efforts to keep tabs on important demographic shifts and provides ongoing projections on the many diverse faces of America. Changes in demographics will affect elections for the forseeable future in many complex and exciting ways. Traditional heavy-weight, but slowly growing states such as NY will continue to decline (slowly) in electoral importance. At the same time, rapidly growing minority groups such as Latinos will continue to flex their growing electoral strength. In the early stages of a campaign (think 2010, 2012) a smart candidate will look at his or her electoral map and want to know about demographic shifts that may affect the election.

I know that some of you may not want to download huge data sets and dig into this (that will come in a later posting) but there are many tools provided on the website to look at and play with the data.

There's more.

Useful Numbers

The Quick Facts section is the easiest to use. Next week I have to work in Georgia, so I looked up the Quick Facts for Georgia and I can see that the Latino population in Georgia accounted for roughly 7.5% of the population in 2006 (projected). That's interesting, since the US population was nearly 15% Latino in 2006 (projected). I wonder if the Latino vote will play a more important role in future elections in Georgia? To help me understand this dynamic, I can go look at the USA Counties information. When I look up Georgia (the whole state), here, I can see that in the 1980 Census the Hispanic population accounted for only 1.1% of the population. In 1990 it accounted for 1.6% of the population. By 2000, it accounted for 5.3% of the population. This is clearly a rapidly growing minority group. Of course, the Latino population is not evenly spread throughout the state. A local politician should look at the county or counties they represent to better understand how this demographic shift could affect the demographics of their electorate.

Of course, shifts in demographics in the population do not necessarily result in immediate changes in the electorate. That's why polls are important. They help you better understand the electorate. Census data helps you understand who could be in the electorate. Understanding demographic changes can help a smart politician target efforts such as voter recruitment, on key demographic groups.

Homework

Personally, I prefer to not use the web front-ends to the Census Data. Tools such as the Data Ferrett make it easy to access obscene amounts of data quickly and easily. Play around with it and tell me what you think. You could also just download the entire 2000 census, if you wanted to. However you use it, this is quality information on the US population (including those 18 and older). Ignore this information at your own peril. As a nation founded on immigration, the face(s) of American will only continue to change and grow. Future elections will probably be decided on how effectively politicians identify AND address large minority groups. Because these minority groups are often concentrated in specific areas, a thorough analysis of who and where people live is important to any politician that wants to make sure that EVERYONE participates in our Democracy.

Later in the week I will show you how to down load some Census Data and make simple tables with the data using R.