Minnesota 7th Congressional District Democratic Farmer-Labor Party Outreach Officers update, 8/8/18: Mapping diversity to improve campaign effectiveness
This week I want to share some useful websites for accessing census demographic data. Most of us are familiar with the tried and true tools the census bureau has given us like Quick Facts and American Fact Finder. They work fine, but faster tools are now available that will paint a picture of the diversity of a district and drill right down to the “turf” level in seconds.
The first of these tools I found were pretty geeky, I’ll get to one in a moment. Then I stumbled across https://statisticalatlas.com/about . Click on the menu, the 3 bars in the circle to the left of “Statistical Atlas”, then click on Minnesota in the U.S. map. A Minnesota map will appear and above it you can click on congressional, senate, or house districts as well as other geopolitical options. I clicked on 22A because it’s a competitive district thanks to our candidate Cheniqua Johnson and we share it with CD1. Young voters are most likely to vote democratic, so on the right I click on “age and sex” and OMG, the data overfloweth! We are given bar charts and graphs and down at the bottom of the page maps of the percentage of the population children comprise. I’m interested in finding new voters, so I click on “college” above maps at the bottom, producing this map: https://statisticalatlas.com/state-lower-legislative-district/Minnesota/State-House-District-22B/Age-and-Sex . Statewide, College age (18-21) people are a bit less than 4% of the population, but the top map shows Nobles county has about half again that. The next map sorted by county subdivision doesn’t tell us a lot, there’s a couple townships with over the double the average of college aged but when that “double” is 15 or 25 people the data is statisticly unreliable. Lets look at the next map down, “by tract”- That red area is the west side of Worthington, place your cursor on it and it’ll give you college age population percentages for individual census tracts. I’ll save you the trouble of drilling down to just Worthington, here’s the maps: https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Minnesota/Worthington/Age-and-Sex .The bottom couple maps fillet the data down to about doorknock “turf” size, allowing campaigns to prioritize which blocks to knock. You can use the site to map and chart other data, for example, here’s non hispanic white population in 22A: https://statisticalatlas.com/state-lower-legislative-district/Minnesota/State-House-District-22B/Race-and-Ethnicity . You can click on different groups and the site will map them out for you. I better quit now, or we’ll be at this all night!
And for you serious data geeks, check out http://proximityone.com/ . That’s where I found the stats on CD7 and the individual legislative districts that I’ve used, and I still get lost in that data maze. Data geeks, if you wander in there and we don’t hear from you after a few days we’ll send out a search party, who will probably get lost too!
Respectfully submitted, Dyna Sluyter