The woman I am looking for will visit Daily Kos today. She is probably a lurker as are 60% of the site's visitors. That statistic comes the Daily Kos tracking reports linked in Dear Leader's front page celebration of Daily Kos's 9th Birthday published earlier this week.
Among the internals available in the aforementioned Daily Kos tracking reports, I found breakdowns of the sex, race, income, parental status, education and age of Daily Kos's visitors.
Here is what I saw:
Sex --
64% Male
36% Female
Age --
0% 3-12
4% 13-17
17% 18-34
27% 35-49
52% 50+
Race --
93% Cauc.
4% Afr. Am.
1% Asian
1% Hisp.
1% Other
Parental Status --
90% No Kids 0-17
10% Has Kids 0-17
Income --
10% $0-30k
15% $30-60k
35% $60-100k
40% $100k+
Education --
20% No College
48% College
32% Grad. Sch.
A couple of things jumped out at me when I saw these statistics.
The first thing I noticed was personal. I saw that I fell in the largest part of each demographic category: I am a 50+ Caucasian male with a $100,000+ household income, no kids under 17 and a post-secondary education. That made me think that the biggest part of the folks sharing all of those categories with me would be Republicans, if voting pure self interest, perhaps, but we lack the ruthless and heartlessness and cluelessness required for admission to the GOP tent. Then I thought that the folks with whom I share all of my demographic categories represent a fairly elitist and tiny demographic slice of the American people and do not very well represent the broader masses of our people, yet here we constantly talk sagely about their interests.
So, I started to wonder who was the anti-me identified by these statistics. Obviously, she is a financially struggling, young American mother with kids at home, a Woman of Color with No College. I hope she sees this diary. I hope she speaks up in the comments. I'd like to hear from her about her struggles and about what she thinks of the arguments she sees on Daily Kos. I'm just curious. I'd really like to know.
Disclaimer: I know nothing meaningful about statistics or higher mathematics. Attacks on the methods and reasoning of the following discussion are invited from the knowledgeable in the comments. We now return to the entertainment portion of our program.
I began to wonder how many folks just like me and how many just like her tend to visit Daily Kos on average. Using 125,000 as a average number of daily visitors, I then took the percentages of visitors for my demographic cohorts and multiplied them, obtaining a percentage of all daily visitors who fall into all the categories, call it Group E.
Then I did the same for her, the young mother I would like to hear from, call her cohort Group M. The numbers seemed instructive. Group E = 4003.27. Group M = 11.58.
She may not be easy to find. The previously mentioned 60% figure represents passers-by, according to Quantcast, and to comment, she must register if she hasn't done so and then wait 24 hours before commenting. And there aren't very many of her.
Of course, she is not the only person I hope might comment on how life in their own particular demographic might compare to the lives of my own relatively comfortable cohort, who are also welcome to comment, but, let's face it guys, I probably have a better sense of your views and lives than we do of the lives and views of some in other demographics.