https://www.dailykos.com/tags/TheMostDistrict News Community Action Copyright - Kos Media, LLC Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:28:47 +0000 Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:28:47 +0000 rsshelp@dailykos.helpscoutapp.com rsshelp@dailykos.helpscoutapp.com https://www.dailykos.com/story/2019/1/1/1820382/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-U-S-born-residents-Kentucky-s-5th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Despite being centrally located between a number of major metropolitan areas, eastern Kentucky—the part of the state covered by the sprawling 5th congressional district—is, functionally, a pretty isolated part of the nation, without major cities, navigable rivers, and mostly without even interstate highways. It’s located in the Appalachian uplands, a plateau that’s nearly 500 million years old, thrust up by colliding plates and then scoured by glaciers as well as gradual erosion by streams. What’s left is a maze of ridgelines and valleys, usually running parallel to each other but often snaking around in squiggles or loops. The Appalachians were, in the country’s early years, a major barrier to east-west travel, and even today are more of a place that you go around, not through.</p> <p>The lack of large, flat areas of farmable land and the lack of transportation infrastructure (which limited the development of heavy industry, which in turn discouraged the development of larger cities) meant there was never much of a population boom here. Some Eastern and Southern European immigrants did move to the parts of Appalachia where there were large coal-mining operations, but for the most part, the residents of Appalachia were the descendants of the original Scots-Irish settlers there during colonial times (who couldn’t afford to purchase enough land to farm successfully in the southern lowlands, and many of whom preferred the relative solitude of the hills anyway). And today, with the coal-mining sector having mostly dried up, and with not much else in the area’s small towns beyond service sector jobs, there isn’t much impetus left for migration there.</p> <p>And that leaves Kentucky’s 5th as the congressional district with the highest percentage of people who were born in the United States: <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/17_1YR/DP02/5001500US2105" target="_blank">99.1 percent</a>. (0.7 percent of its population is foreign-born, and 0.2 percent was born in Puerto Rico, U.S. island areas, or abroad to American parents.) That also means that, without much in-migration, and with deaths outstripping births, Kentucky’s 5th is one of the few congressional districts in the country that <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z2mPUyhpkZrUt2jpfZ-N4QmvWnn7_n8B2p7lDHAKd7o/edit#gid=0" target="_blank">lost population</a> between 2010 and 2017 (losing nearly 27,000 residents).</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) HalRogers KY05 TheMostDistrict _1820382 Tue, 01 Jan 2019 20:24:06 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2019/1/1/1820353/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-foreign-born-residents-Florida-s-25th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>South Florida is one of the most diverse places in the United States; Miami and its immediate suburbs, in particular, function just as much as the northernmost part of Latin America as they do the southernmost part of the United States. Miami is often considered to be one of the centers of South America’s financial and media sectors, despite, of course, not actually being in South America.</p> <p>In addition to being a crossroads for Latin American and Caribbean capital and culture, the Miami area is also a crossroads for generations of immigrants and part-time foreign residents. That extends well beyond Miami’s city limits to its suburbs, and really the entirety of Miami-Dade County; there are four congressional districts that are found entirely or mostly in Miami-Dade County, three of which are Latino-majority (all with a Cuban plurality) and one of which is black-majority (with a large Haitian population). Many of the suburban towns, in fact, have an even higher Latino percentage than Miami proper. </p> <p>Of those three Latino-majority congressional districts in the Miami area, the one with the highest Cuban percentage—43.3 percent of its total population—is Florida’s 25th district, located mostly in the suburbs to the northwest of Miami. Unsurprisingly, since the large majority of America’s Cuban population lives in Florida, that also makes it the most Cuban district in the entire country. That may seem surprising, since Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, the cultural nexus of the Cuban-American community, isn’t in the 25th; it’s nearby in the 27th. However, just as with pretty much every immigrant group that came before them that spilled out of their first traditional neighborhood as they became more integrated into the broader culture, the bulk of the Miami area’s Cuban population has moved out to the suburbs.</p> <p>The other characteristic that distinguishes the 25th is that it has the highest percentage of residents who are foreign-born: 56.3 percent were born outside of the U.S. and its possessions. (That number includes naturalized citizens as well as non-citizens.) Many of those 56.3 percent were born in Cuba, of course, consisting of both senior citizens who’ve been in Florida since the Cuban Revolution, and more recent waves of immigrants. However, as we’ll discuss next, a wide variety of other Latino immigrants are still arriving, many of whom are making the suburbs of the 25th district their first destination.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) FL25 FL26 fl27 MarioDiaz-Balart marybarzeeflores TheMostDistrict _1820353 Wed, 02 Jan 2019 01:54:14 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2018/5/28/1766747/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-residents-of-two-or-more-races-Hawaii-s-2nd?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>One of the most overlooked demographic categories in America is multiracial people—or in the U.S. Census’ parlance, people claiming “two or more” races. They represent around <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_1YR/DP05/0100000US%7C0400000US15.50000.115" target="_blank" title="">3 percent</a> of the nation’s population according to Census estimates, though Pew Research estimates this number could be more like <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/" target="_blank">7 percent</a> based on their own surveys. Moreover, multiracial Americans are one of the fastest-growing demographic segments: Pew reports that they’re growing at three times the rate of the general population. Multiracial babies, for instance, went from 1 percent of births in 1970 to 10 percent of births in 2013.</p> <p>They’re also, it seems, a potentially-important Democratic constituency: they’re disproportionately young, and also very tolerant. A majority of them, according to Pew, say that they’re proud of their mixed race background, with 59 percent saying that their heritage has made them <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/" target="_blank">more open</a> to other cultures.</p> <p>On the other hand, “multiracial” is a complex identity, and, like being Hispanic or Latino, many people who fit in that demographic box don’t necessarily find that central to how they think of themselves. One of Pew’s findings is that many people of mixed backgrounds simply don’t think of themselves as “multiracial” (they say 61 percent do not), and that many people have changed the way they think of or describe their race over the years. Among people who are both white and Asian, or white and Native American, often the default is to think of oneself primarily as “white” (for instance, of people who are white and Native American, only 22 percent they have a lot in common with people who are Native American).</p> <p>The state with the highest percentage of multiracial people is, by far, Hawaii. That may not be surprising, since it’s a state without any clear racial majority (Hawaii as a whole breaks down as around 38 percent Asian, 23 percent non-Hispanic white, 10 percent Native Hawaiian, 9 percent Hispanic, and 24 percent from two or more races) and where there isn’t a lot of geographic segregation.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) Hawaii HI02 SherryCampagna TheMostDistrict TulsiGabbard _1766747 Tue, 29 May 2018 00:09:05 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2018/5/28/1766716/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-Native-Americans-Arizona-s-1st?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>One thing you might not know about the U.S.’s Native American population is how widely distributed it is. Less than one-quarter of Native Americans (or, more specifically, members of the Census’s “American Indian and Alaska Native” category), for instance, live on tribal reservations, and the rest are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Americanindiansmapcensusbureau.gif" target="_blank">distributed</a> throughout both urban and rural parts of all 50 states, though more disproportionately in the West. If you count both people who are Native American alone, as well as Native American plus another race, the state with the largest number is, in fact, California (at <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_1YR/DP05/0400000US02%7C0400000US04%7C0400000US06%7C0400000US35%7C0400000US40" target="_blank">747,000</a>)—though maybe that’s not that surprising since California has just about the most of everyone in every category. Only one state—Alaska—has an AIAN population of more than 10 percent, though, currently around 15 percent.</p> <p>That same broad distribution applies to the nation’s congressional districts. There are only four CDs with a Native American population over 10 percent: one of them, of course, is Alaska, which has only one district for the entire state. The others are New Mexico’s 3rd district, Oklahoma’s 2nd district, and, at the top of the list, Arizona’s 1st congressional district, where <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_1YR/DP05/5001500US0200%7C5001500US0401%7C5001500US3503%7C5001500US4002%7C5001500US4600" target="_blank">23 percent</a> of the residents are Native American only.</p> <p>Interestingly, you get a slightly different result if you include residents who are two or more races: Native American plus an additional race. In that case, Oklahoma’s 2nd narrowly edges out Arizona’s 1st, 26.7 percent to 25.3 percent. Oklahoma’s 2nd is only 17 percent, when you stick with residents who are Native American only.</p> <p>But that represents a key historical difference between the Navajo and the Cherokee, who are America’s two most numerous tribes. The Navajo are the <a title="" href="http://navajotimes.com/news/2012/0112/012612census.php" target="_blank">most numerous</a> tribe if you count only members who consider themselves full-blooded (286,000 in 2010), but the Cherokee are the most numerous if you count all enrolled members. The large majority of Navajos live on the Navajo Nation, the nation’s largest (27,000 square miles) and most populous reservation, which is located primarily in Arizona’s 1st and New Mexico’s 3rd districts. However, very few Cherokees live on a reservation (only one of the three recognized Cherokee tribes has a reservation, which is located in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee#Modern_Cherokee_tribes" target="_blank">North Carolina</a>); most were forcibly relocated to the Indian Territory’s northeast portion (what is today Oklahoma’s 2nd district) but many dispersed from there after it became Oklahoma, many of them intermarrying members of other races.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) AnnKirkpatrick Arizona AZ01 TheMostDistrict TomOHalleran _1766716 Tue, 29 May 2018 01:29:03 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2018/1/1/1725137/-The-Most-District-Which-district-is-the-most-German-Wisconsin-s-6th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>You might be surprised to find out that German-American is the most common ancestry in the United States, at least according to the Census Bureau; <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_1YR/DP02/0100000US" target="_blank">13.9 percent</a> of Americans claim German ancestry, compared with 10.0 for Irish ancestry and 7.4 percent for English ancestry. (One theory is that many people who do have primarily English ancestry are from families that have been in the U.S. for so long that there’s no remaining sense of distinct roots, and some of them may end up claiming <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/4/1676715/-The-Most-District-Which-district-is-the-most-American-Virginia-s-9th" target="_blank">"American" ancestry</a> instead.)</p> <p>But German ancestry is, despite how common it is, a fairly regionally-specific ancestry; there’s very little of it in the South, and while it’s more common in the Northeast, it’s by far most heavily concentrated in the Midwest, especially the Upper Midwest: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas. The largest flow of German immigrants in the 19th century was to the rapidly-growing cities of the Midwest like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Omaha, and St. Louis. While these cities have lost much of their initial German identity thanks to subsequent waves of immigration and mostly ordinary domestic migration, German ancestry is still predominant in the rural areas of the Midwest where there hasn’t been much subsequent population growth. So grab a brat and a beer, and let’s take a closer look at where German ancestry is most common.</p> <p>The district with the highest percentage of German ancestry is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin%27s_6th_congressional_district" target="_blank">Wisconsin's 6th Congressional District</a>, where 49.2 percent of residents claim German ancestry. It’s followed closely by the more suburban Wisconsin’s 5th district (centered on crucial Waukesha County), and others in the top 10 include the more rural WI-03 and WI-07, MN-07, IA-01, and the at-large seats in the Dakotas. In fact, you have to head all the way down to the 20th most German district to find one that isn’t in the Upper Midwest (which is Pennsylvania’s 4th district).</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) DanKohl GlennGrothman TheMostDistrict WI06 Wisconsin _1725137 Tue, 02 Jan 2018 02:30:02 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/11/22/1717431/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-largest-households-California-s-40th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>One of the stereotypical images of Thanksgiving is the large extended family gathered around the dining room table. If you wanted every day to be like Thanksgiving—at least to the extent that you can find lots of people gathered around the table to eat together—where in America should you look? One likely avenue would be to find the congressional district with the largest average household size, and that’s California’s 40th district, in the close-in suburbs of Los Angeles.</p> <p>California’s 40th district has <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/16_1YR/DP02/0100000US%7C5001500US0640%7C5001500US3612" target="_blank">3.93 people</a> per household, which may not seem like that much at first glance but is significantly larger than the national average of 2.65, and way more than the lowest CD, New York’s 12th district on Manhattan, which has only 1.92 people per household. The “household” that you’re envisioning might be two parents and the proverbial 2.3 kids, but keep in mind all the other different living arrangements someone passes through over their life; it also includes, for instance, young professionals living by themselves in their 20s, senior citizens living in one- or two-person households, or families with children but only one parent present. That variety of households brings the average down to between 2 and 3 overall, and below 2 in Manhattan, where there are a lot of small apartments, a lot of 20- and 30-somethings, and not a lot of kids.</p> <p>If you scanned down the list of districts with the largest average households, you’d notice one major commonality: they’re predominantly districts with a large Hispanic majority. In fact, the top eight districts in terms of largest household size are Latino-majority seats in southern California; you have to drop down to the ninth spot before you find one that isn’t in California and isn’t mostly Latino (it’s <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/4/1694872/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-longest-commutes-New-York-s-5th" target="_blank">New York's 5th</a>, a black-plurality CD in Queens).</p> <p>What’s behind that phenomenon is simply that Hispanic families are likelier to have more children; a Pew study from 2015 found that <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/05/07/family-size-among-mothers/" target="_blank">51 percent</a> of Hispanic mothers have three or more children (compared with 34 percent for white mothers). That’s already changing, though; the birth rate among Hispanics is <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/11/29/u-s-birth-rate-falls-to-a-record-low-decline-is-greatest-among-immigrants/" target="_blank">declining faster</a> than among other ethnicities, mirroring what has happened with many other immigrant groups; their first generations in America start out with high birth rates, and that rate gradually falls in line with the rest of the country as they integrate.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) CA-40 KevinDeLeon LucilleRoybal-Allard TheMostDistrict _1717431 Thu, 23 Nov 2017 03:26:24 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/9/4/1694872/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-longest-commutes-New-York-s-5th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>On this Labor Day, let’s talk about one of the most aggravating aspects of many people’s jobs: the business of getting to and from work. Earlier, as part of Daily Kos Elections' ongoing "Most District” series, we talked about the congressional district with the <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/08/31/1694825/-" target="_blank" title="">shortest average commute</a>: the largely-rural 1st district in Kansas. That may leave you wondering what the flip side is. In other words, which district’s unfortunate residents must wile away the most time on the nation’s worst commutes?</p> <p>Much as it may have surprised you to find out that the far-flung 1st boasts the nation’s easiest commutes, you may also be surprised to find out that the longest commute is in one of the nation’s densest, most heavily-urbanized districts: New York’s 5th congressional district, located primarily in the southeastern quarter of Queens (and also a fraction of the southwest corner of Nassau County in suburban Long Island). The mean travel time to work in the 5th is an arduous <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/DP03/0100000US%7C5001400US2001%7C5001400US3605" target="_blank">48.3 minutes</a>, nearly twice the national average of 26.4 minutes.</p> <p>The problem for the residents of the 5th is sort of the reverse of what works well in Kansas’s 1st. In KS-01, the small towns are very far apart from each other, but assuming your job is in the same small town as your house, it doesn’t take very long to get from one to the other. In NY-05, on the other hand, very few of the jobs that residents have are located in the district; many of the district’s residents work in lower or midtown Manhattan, which isn’t physically that far away but requires a slow journey by subway, train, or bus that has a lot of stops and starts. And even the main hub of employment found within the district—John F. Kennedy Airport—is, as many travelers know, a rather isolated and impenetrable fortress, ringed by freeways and only disjointedly plugged into the public transit system.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) FloydFlake GregoryMeeks NY05 TheMostDistrict _1694872 Tue, 05 Sep 2017 01:56:09 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/9/2/1694825/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-shortest-commutes-Kansas-s-1st?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Work theoretically occupies one-third of our lives, but it feels even longer when you factor in the time we spend getting there and returning home. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the average American commute is up to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-american-commute-is-worse-today-than-its-ever-been/?utm_term=.bc1ee688deaf" target="_blank" title="">26.4 minutes</a> each way, up from less than 22 minutes back in 1980. Even worse, the number of “extreme commutes” of 90 minutes or more is the fastest-growing segment of commuters; the number of extreme commuters went up by 8 percent just over the period from 2014 to 2015.</p> <p>What’s to blame? Partly, it’s our own behavior, with the move toward more solo driving. There’s actually less carpooling than there was in the 1980s (perhaps thanks to gas prices, currently low when taking inflation into account).</p> <p>But more importantly, it’s thanks to increasing growth in housing supply in the outer suburbs and exurbs. With housing in major cities becoming increasingly more expensive, more and more people have little choice but to live somewhere far from their jobs. (And on top of that, jobs are increasingly found in suburbs rather than the cities themselves; that sounds like it might work well with the increasing suburban population, but the real effect is that many people now find themselves commuting from one suburb to another one, often at a completely different end of the metropolitan area.)</p> <p>So, if you’re looking to minimize the amount of time you spend behind the wheel, what part of the country has, on average, the most mercifully short commutes? The answer will probably surprise you: it’s Kansas’s 1st congressional district, the sprawling, heavily rural CD that occupies nearly two-thirds of the state. The mean travel time to work for residents of the 1st is a relatively short and sweet <a href="https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/DP03/0100000US%7C5001400US2001%7C5001400US3605" target="_blank" title="">15.7 minutes</a>.</p> <p>This may seem counter-intuitive to you. Everything in this district is far from everywhere else! You might be envisioning people commuting across multiple counties on two-lane roads to get from their small towns where there are few employment options, to the district’s population centers. There is, of course, some of that happening in the 1st district, but as large and far-flung as the district is, the reality is that many of the district’s residents still actually live in those population centers, putting them relatively close to their jobs. On top of that, the 1st has a higher-than-average rate of people who simply work at home (4.6 percent) and have a commute of zero minutes, though here that’s probably not so much remote tech-industry workers but rather people who both live and work on farms.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) BobDole JerryMoran KS01 RogerMarshall TheMostDistrict TimHuelskamp _1694825 Sun, 03 Sep 2017 01:56:18 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/7/4/1676715/-The-Most-District-Which-district-is-the-most-American-Virginia-s-9th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Way back during the 2008 presidential race, a John McCain campaign surrogate (people tend to think the quote came from Sarah Palin, but it actually came from somebody named Nancy Pfotenhauer) raised a lot of hackles by saying that northern Virginia was a lost cause because of all the Democrats moving in from elsewhere, but that “<a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/18/mccain-aide-defines-real-virginia/" target="_blank">real Virginia</a>” would still be receptive to the Republican message. She meant the southern and western parts of the state, which indeed were more receptive to McCain. But in the end the fake parts of Virginia overpowered the rest of the state and it went Democratic for the first time in a presidential election in decades.</p> <p>Here is some good, if belated, news for Ms. Pfotenhauer: The western-most part of Virginia (the pointy part that pokes like an arrow into the Appalachians) that makes up the 9th Congressional District is, it turns out, the most “American” part of not just Virginia, but the entire United States. And here’s the Census data to prove it!</p> <p>Well … it's not really the most "American" in the sense of being the part of the country that's most patriotic, or flies the most flags, or hates the right people the most, or drives the most full-size pickup trucks. What that means is it has the highest percentage of people claiming “American ancestry,” at 25.7 percent of the population, according to the 2015 American Community Survey.</p> <p>You’re most likely familiar with using Census data for simple population information, and maybe for race or economic information, but there’s a wealth of other information under “social characteristics” if you dig a little deeper: information on education, marriage, mobility, place of birth, and, interestingly, ancestry.</p> <p>The other categories in “ancestry” aren’t that surprising. Some of the most commonly selected ones are German, Irish, English, and Italian, along with a variety of other less common options like Arab, Czech, Danish, or Lithuanian (and respondents can choose more than one). But for many decades, the Census has also allowed the possibility of simply choosing “American” as your ancestry.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) MorganGriffith RickBoucher TheMostDistrict VA09 _1676715 Tue, 04 Jul 2017 23:14:56 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/5/29/1665831/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-unmarried-women-Pennsylvania-s-2nd?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>If you stop and visualize Philadelphia, what first comes to mind might be some stereotypically masculine imagery: Rocky running up the steps of the art museum, burly guys tearing into cheesesteaks, Eagles fans booing Santa Claus. So it may come as something of a surprise to you that one thing Philadelphia—or more precisely, Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district, which takes up about half of the City of Brotherly Love—leads the way in is unmarried women.</p> <p>That’s actually important, from a political standpoint: unmarried women are a key Democratic constituency. In 2016 exit polling actually found a larger “<a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/marriage-single-parenthood-and-the-2016-vote/" target="_blank">marriage gap</a>” than the gender gap (Hillary Clinton won unmarried voters 55-44 while Donald Trump won married voters 52-37). And one striking item that I found while looking at 2016 election results at the county level and comparing them to demographic data is that the percentage of unmarried women in a county is in fact the <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1664796/66589893#comment_66589893" target="_blank">strongest predictor</a> of Democratic vote share, stronger even than race, education, or density; there’s a 0.72 correlation between Hillary Clinton’s percentage of the vote in 2016 and the percentage of the women in a county age 15 or older who have never married (compared with, say, an -0.59 correlation with a county’s white population percentage).</p> <p>I’m hardly the first person to observe this; many social scientists have focused on the concept of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition" target="_blank">second demographic transition</a>, which can be summarized as what happens to birth rates in advanced societies (i.e. they decline, to sub-replacement levels). This happens through delayed marriage and delayed childbirth, increased cohabitation without marriage and without children, and increased levels of women working; it’s associated with a lot of positive outcomes, including less poverty and longer life expectancies. It’s also strongly associated, at least when you compare different states, with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/opinion/president-trump-is-the-enemy-of-their-enemies.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2FThomas" target="_blank">voting Democratic</a>. (If you look at the chart below, you can see just how strong the relationship is between how states voted in 2016 and a combined “demographic transition” number based on factors like unmarried-ness and birth rates.)</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) ChakaFattah Demographics DwightEvans PA-02 Philadelphia TheMostDistrict _1665831 Tue, 30 May 2017 01:39:45 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/5/29/1665810/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-veterans-Florida-s-1st?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Daily Kos Elections’ “Most District” series flies over to Florida’s 1st congressional district for Memorial Day weekend: it’s the district that has the highest percentage of veterans. Eighteen percent of the civilian residents (18 years old or older) of this district, centered on Pensacola, are former service members.</p> <p>You might think that veterans are pretty equally distributed around the country; for instance, they might go back to where they lived before they served, after they get out of the military. However, that’s not the case: a lot of veterans simply stay where they are once they’re discharged, so they’re disproportionately located <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/5/26/1301691/-Where-our-nation-s-veterans-are" target="_blank">around military bases</a> anyway. The advantages of doing so are easy to understand; their friends and social networks are still there, and they retain some benefits, like using Tricare at VA hospitals and shopping at the deeply discounted PX, that are much easier to use if you stay near a base. And Florida’s 1st has not one but two large military facilities: the Naval Air Station Pensacola, which is the primary training center for naval aviators, and Eglin Air Force Base, a test and evaluation center.</p> <p>On top of that, veterans tend to have better employment opportunities around bases. A lot of ex-military people proceed straight to working as a civilian employee of the military or for companies that contract with the military, so they wind up working on a base anyway. Even if they move to the private sector, in a field that’s related to skills they learned in the military, their professional networks are likely to keep them in a place that’s in close proximity to a military installation. For instance, following Florida’s 1st as the next most veteran-filled districts are Virginia’s 2nd in Virginia Beach, which has a large Navy presence (at 17 percent veterans) and Colorado’s 5th in Colorado Springs, which has a large Air Force presence (and 16.6 percent veterans).</p> <p>The other place where you tend to find a lot of veterans is retirement destinations. After all, our nation’s veterans are disproportionately senior citizens. There aren’t a lot of World War II veterans left, but that was one of the largest mobilizations this country has ever seen. And even the youngest Vietnam era veterans have mostly reached retirement age now, as the Baby Boomers are in their 60s and 70s.</p> <p>Florida, of course, is a prime retirement destination; if you separate out the top 10 congressional districts for highest median age or for highest percentage of senior citizens, most of them are found in Florida. The 1st, for instance, is 16.4 percent residents who are 65 or older, a higher percentage than the national average. (Also, Florida’s 11th congressional district, north of Tampa, has by far the highest percentage of seniors of any district in the nation: 33.8 percent of its population. It also has one of the highest rates of veterans—14.4 percent—even though there’s no military base there, only a vast array of planned retirement communities, most notably the sprawling hellscape of <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/1/1461768/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-oldest-congressional-district-Florida-s-11th" target="_blank">The Villages</a>.)</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) FL-01 JoeScarborough MattGaetz TheMostDistrict _1665810 Mon, 29 May 2017 20:59:59 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/27/1613098/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-people-born-in-a-different-state-Arizona-s-4th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Earlier, in the ongoing Daily Kos Elections “Most District” series, we wrote about the congressional district with the highest rate of people born in the same state as where they now live: New York’s 27th district, a district in Upstate New York that’s about as prototypically Rust Belt as they come, and one that swung sharply in the GOP direction in 2016. For counterpoint, let’s look at the opposite, the district with the highest rate of people born in a <em>different </em>state.</p> <p>You might think that, by some rule of basic mathematics, this district must necessarily be one that was great for the Democrats in 2016, an extravaganza of non-white and/or college-educated voters, whose extensive travels have made them tolerant and inquisitive. Well … no, that’s not the case at all. The district with the highest level of people born in a different state is Arizona’s 4th congressional district, which spans much of the western portion of the state. About 64.4 percent of the district’s population was born in another state, much higher than the national average of 26.5 percent. It’s also Arizona’s reddest district, and one of only two districts in Arizona that moved in the Republican direction from 2012 to 2016, even while the state as a whole moved closer to becoming a swing state.</p> <p>There are a couple factors that explain that: one is that the districts that have the highest levels of people born in different states tend to be the ones in states where the population has grown dramatically in the last few decades. In other words, it’s found in <em>all </em>parts (both the urban and cosmopolitan parts, and the rural or exurban parts) of states where there simply weren’t a lot of people living there a generation or two ago. Nevada and Florida lead the way, but Arizona’s not far behind on that category. And two, by definition the category “born in a different state” necessarily excludes “born in a different <em>country</em>,” so it’s not going to be a place with a lot of immigrants, either highly educated immigrants (like New York City or the Bay Area) or poorly educated immigrants (like California’s Central Valley or Texas’s Rio Grande Valley). It’s going to be, instead, a place with a lot of people who’ve moved from a different part of the country.</p> <p>College and the post-collegiate search for work are two main times in people’s lives when they tend to pick up and move, but there’s one other time when people get mobile, and that’s retirement. It can be motivated by better weather, readily available golf, or just the search for cheaper real estate where one can sell a house in a major metro area, buy a replacement with only part of the proceeds, and then live comfortably off the rest of the equity. And Arizona’s 4th has all of those things in spades (at least if you call 120-degree days in the summer “better” weather).</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) AnnKirkpatrick AZ-04 PaulGosar PopeFrancis TheMostDistrict _1613098 Wed, 28 Dec 2016 02:55:23 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/26/1613072/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-people-born-in-the-same-state-New-York-s-27th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>In the weeks before the election, one of the most interesting (if underreported) poll findings came from​ <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/26/1602564/-Have-you-moved-away-from-your-home-state-It-may-make-a-big-difference-in-how-you-vote" target="_blank">Public Religion Research Institute</a>; at the time, it seemed like just a neat bit of trivia, but in retrospect, it wound up having a lot of explanatory power.</p> <blockquote> <p>White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).</p> </blockquote> <p>When you looked at a map of which places swung the hardest from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, it was most heavily concentrated in the so-called “Rust Belt,” the non-urban parts of the Midwest where you have a stagnant or falling population, and an almost entirely white electorate with lower levels of college education than the national average. But if you also looked at which parts of the country had the highest level of people who are still living near where they grew up, it would also focus on those same states. The Census Bureau doesn’t collect data on whether people still live in the community where they were raised, but they do ask if people still live in the state where they were born; four of the six states with the highest rates of living-in-the-state-you-were-born are the ones that most notoriously tipped the election (Michigan in 2nd place, Ohio in 3rd, Pennsylvania in 4th, and Wisconsin in 6th).</p> <p>It’s not a clearly causal relationship; it might be that the rate of white voters without college educations is the most relevant piece of data in terms of what drove the swing, and that staying in place just correlates strongly with being white and not college-educated. (In other words, these parts of the country don’t have a lot of immigrants, and they don’t even have a lot of people who’ve moved there from elsewhere in the country to pursue educational or work opportunities … and the people who’ve left for educational opportunities, by and large, haven’t moved back.)</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) ChrisCollins KathyHochul MI-04 NY-27 TheMostDistrict _1613072 Tue, 27 Dec 2016 03:59:16 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/4/1531866/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-most-manufacturing-based-congressional-district-Indiana-s-2nd?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District has seen more than its fair share of economic ups and downs. If you go back to 2009 Census economic data, at the peak of the recession, and zoom in on Elkhart County, one of the population centers of the 2nd, you would have seen a catastrophically high unemployment rate of 16.1 percent, well over the national average that year of 9.9 percent. If you look at 2014 data (the most recent that the Census has reported), Elkhart County’s unemployment is down to 4.6 percent, considerably lower than that year’s national average of 7.2 percent. It’s such a turnaround success story that Barack Obama, who made Elkhart one of his first stops after being inaugurated to sell the stimulus package, took a victory lap, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/05/24/obama-returning-elkhart-ind-town-hall-meeting-next-week/84878292/" target="_blank">returning</a> to Elkhart in June to tout its recovery.</p> <p>So what’s going on in Elkhart that caused it to fall so far and bounce so high again? It’s something of a company town, heavily reliant on one unusual industry: The manufacture of recreational vehicles, as well as modular and mobile homes. RV purchases were already troubled in the 2000s because of spiraling gas prices, and then once the financial crisis unfolded, luxury purchases like RVs became the last thing on anyone’s mind (and the housing supply overhang certainly cut into demand for new mobile homes). But with income bouncing back and gasoline at historically low prices, guess what people are buying again? (Elkhart is also known, to a lesser extent, for the manufacture of brass — not just industrial equipment, but also band instruments, another item that got quickly pitched over the side of the lifeboat in a time of crisis.)</p> <p>While Elkhart is especially known for its mobile home industry, there are specialized manufacturers all over the 2nd district, including in South Bend, the other major city in the district. While most of the district’s population is concentrated in these two cities near the Michigan border, there are also a lot of small towns in the more sparsely-populated southern part of the 2nd with their own specialties. Your water meter, for instance, was, in all likelihood, manufactured here, in the town of Wabash. Add that all up, and you have the district with the highest percentage of people working in manufacturing jobs: 26 percent of the civilian work force in 2014, more than double the national average of 10.3 percent.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) IN-02 Indiana JackieWalorski JoeDonnelly LynnColeman TheMostDistrict _1531866 Tue, 05 Jul 2016 01:59:58 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/4/1531839/-The-Most-District-What-district-has-the-most-20-to-24-year-olds-Texas-s-17th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>“Millennial” has become a bit of a <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/05/26/this_chrome_extension_replaces_the_word_millennials_with_snake_people.html" target="_blank">pejorative</a> in popular media, often deployed as shorthand for a smug hipster who’s a harbinger of neighborhood-destroying regentrification, a self-absorbed entry-level employee who expects a constant stream of participation trophies, or just a clueless naïf who can’t put down the smartphone. Look beyond the stereotypes, though, and you'll see a generation that’s doing a lot of good in the world. For starters, they’re the most liberal generation we’ve seen, identifying with the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/" target="_blank">Democratic Party</a> by a 51-35 ratio (if you include independent leaners), a much wider gap than any other generation. (That’s largely related, though, to the millennials also being, by far, the least-white generation we’ve seen.)</p> <p>If you were simply going by those media-fed images, you’d probably assume that the most millennial-filled congressional district in the country would be one that includes one of those urban neighborhoods (Williamsburg in New York, Silver Lake in Los Angeles, and so on) that were considered dangerous and dilapidated 20 years ago but where now the main danger is getting run over by some beardo on a fixed-gear bike. That assumption would be wrong: If you want to find the most millennials, you’d look to rural Texas, and its 17th congressional district.</p> <p>Or … that’s only partly true—there’s no uniform definition for “millennial,” but Pew Research defines it as the generation of adults born <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/demographic-research/definitions/" target="_blank" title="">after 1980</a>, which means people in the 20-35 age range. The Census Bureau, of course, refuses to call anybody a “millennial,” but, helpfully, reports demographic data using a 20-24 bucket and the 25-34 bucket, which neatly covers those same years. The district with the most 25-34 year olds (according to 2014 data) is <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/01/03/1461787/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-most-educated-congressional-district-New-York-s-12th" target="_blank">New York's 12th</a>, which contains a lot of people crowded into the city to get started on their careers and which we’ve already discussed as the nation's most college-educated district (note, though, that the 12th is the Upper East Side and Astoria, not the stereotypical hipster wards of Williamsburg and Bushwick). If you narrow it down to the 20 to 24-year-old cohort, the top district is Texas’s 17th; 11.6 of the district’s population falls in that cohort, compared with the national average of 7.1 percent.</p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) BillFlores ChetEdwards Texas TheMostDistrict TX-17 _1531839 Mon, 04 Jul 2016 23:59:57 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/5/28/1531241/-The-Most-District-What-district-has-the-most-never-married-men-Massachusetts-7th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, none have a greater proportion of never-married men than Massachusetts’ 7th. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, 59 percent of males over the age of 15 in the district have never been wed; nationally, the number is 36.5 percent.</p> <p>The 7th is centered around the Boston area. The district contains all or part of several colleges including Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston College, Boston University, and Northeastern, which helps explain why there are so many unmarried young people in the area. About three-quarters of the city of Boston is in the 7th. While downtown is mostly located in the nearby 8th District, the 7th contains some famous landmarks like Fenway Park, the <em>USS Constitution</em>, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The seat also contains all of Somerville, about half of Cambridge, and a few other suburban communities.</p> <figure class="image-captioned width-sm align-right"><img alt="Screen_Shot_2016-05-26_at_12.28.47_PM.png" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/255925/large/Screen_Shot_2016-05-26_at_12.28.47_PM.png?1464280165" title="Screen_Shot_2016-05-26_at_12.28.47_PM.png"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> <p>The 7th is a direct descendent of the seats that were once represented by John F. Kennedy and Tip O'Neill. Obama carried the district 83-16, making it blue even by Massachusetts standards.</p> <p>Since 1999, Democratic Rep. Mike Capuano has represented the area. While two-thirds of the district lives in Boston, Capuano is actually a politician from suburban Somerville. Capuano was Somerville’s mayor when Rep. Joe Kennedy II (the father of current 4th District Rep. Joe Kennedy III) announced his retirement, and he faced nine opponents in the primary. </p> <p>Capuano’s main foe was ex-Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, who had recently served as the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the Vatican. Capuano benefited from high-turnout in his home base, and Flynn’s inability to consolidate the Boston vote in such a crowded field.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) MA-07 Massachusetts MikeCapuano TheMostDistrict _1531241 Sat, 28 May 2016 20:00:52 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/16/1461798/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-least-educated-congressional-district-California-s-21st?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="California's 21st Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187108/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.44.40_AM.png?1450370712" title="California's 21st Congressional District"> <figcaption>California’s 21st congressional district</figcaption> </figure> <p>The nation’s least-educated congressional district is California’s 21st Congressional District. This district covers most of the southern part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the nation’s most productive agricultural areas, though given its hot, dry weather, one that's heavily dependent on irrigation and complex water-allocation schemes. The 21st stretches from Fresno in the north to Bakersfield in the south, taking in the mostly Hispanic areas in and around these cities, but much of the district’s population lives in dusty towns like Hanford and Wasco that exist mostly to provide services to the ag industry. (The district is also dotted with a number of outposts of California’s sprawling prison system.)</p> <p>The 21st has the lowest percentage of persons 25 or older who are college graduates or more: only 7.1 percent of the population. (There are various other ways to determine “least educated;” for instance, California’s 40th district, in the Los Angeles area, edges out the 21st if you switch over to lowest percentage of persons 25 or older who are high school graduates or more.) While the 21st isn’t the most Hispanic district in the country (that, again, is California’s 40th), or the district with the most persons of Mexican ancestry (that’s Texas’s 34th district), it is a district with a high percentage of people who’ve come here from Mexico to work in its fields; given the manual nature of the work, it’s easy to see why there aren’t a lot of college grads here.</p> <p>The 21st also tops several other “Most District” categories that are closely related: it’s the district with the highest percentage of workers employed in agriculture (28.5 percent of workers). It’s also the most male district, with 52.5 percent of the population being male. That may not seem like a big disparity, but most places hew much more closely to 50-50; the most male districts tend to be ones that have a large resource-extraction industry or large military presence (like Alaska’s at-large district, in both instances), but the 21st still edges out Alaska based on how many men have ventured here from Mexico, either who didn’t have families or who left their families behind.</p> <p>There are still, however, many Hispanic families in the 21st as well; given that the Hispanic population tends to be younger and have a higher birth rate, it’s also the nation’s district with the highest percentage of families with children (in other words, 46 percent of all family households, i.e. households with more than one person living there, have children living in them).</p> <p>Politically, the 21st is swingy terrain, but in a way that’s very frustrating for Democrats. Given the district’s large <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank" title=""><u>Hispanic population</u></a> (72 percent overall)​​, it seems like it should be a naturally strongly Democratic district. However, many of its residents aren’t citizens, many of the ones who are citizens are too young to vote, and many who are eligible to vote don’t bother to turn out anyway, while the district’s small white population is pretty conservative. While the district does put up tolerable presidential numbers … Barack Obama won here by a 55 to 44 margin in 2012, and a 52 to 46 margin in 2008 … that doesn’t translate into success downballot, especially during midterm years.</p> <p>The representative in the 21st, since redistricting in 2012, has been Republican David Valadao. Valadao, previously a state assemblyman, benefited from a recruitment failure by the Democrats in 2012 (slothful Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, who previously represented most of this district in the ‘00s, decided to run in a safer district further north, and the nominee they accidentally wound up with, John Hernandez, ran a disorganized, shoestring campaign), and then poor midterm turnout when the Democrats got a better candidate (Amanda Renteria) in 2014. While several more poorly funded candidates have checked into (and out of) the race for 2016, local Dems are hoping that attorney <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/11/1459027/-Morning-Digest-National-Republicans-hope-this-Iraq-War-vet-will-take-down-Michael-Bennet#4" target="_blank" title=""><u>Emilio Huerta</u></a>​, the son of United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, may work out for them this time.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank" title=""><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) AmandaRenteria CA-21 California DavidValadao EmilioHuerta JohnHernandez TheMostDistrict _1461798 Sun, 17 Jan 2016 02:59:14 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/2/1461787/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-most-educated-congressional-district-New-York-s-12th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <figure class="image-captioned width-lg align-right"><img alt="New York's 12th Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187115/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.48.44_AM.png?1450370943" title="New York's 12th Congressional District"> <figcaption>New York's 12th congressional district</figcaption> </figure> <p>New York, New York; if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Of course, to make it in New York, you probably need a college education, and possibly more than that; that’s about the only way you’re going to be able to get a job that pays well enough to be able to live comfortably in the city. The nation’s most-educated congressional district is New York’s 12th Congressional District, which covers some of the most expensive parts of the city: the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as Midtown and the East Village. It also reaches across the East River into Brooklyn and Queens, but only to pick up some rapidly gentrifying areas like Greenpoint and Long Island City. It’s not just New York City’s most affluent district but also its <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank" title=""><u>whitest</u></a>: at 65 percent non-Hispanic white, it just edges out both lower Manhattan’s 10th district and Staten Island’s 11th district.</p> <p>There’s a variety of ways to ask the “most-educated” question, but if you look at the percentage of residents 25 years or older who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the 12th is tops in the nation, at 71.8 percent of the population. (If you look at percentage of residents 25 or older with a high school diploma or better, the 12th falls to second place; it slots in behind Colorado’s 2nd district, which is the college town of Boulder, plus some of Denver’s affluent suburbs.)</p> <p>The 12th also tops a number of other “Most District” categories, some of which are interrelated. It has the highest per capita income of any district ($78,605) … though, interestingly, it doesn’t have the highest median household income. That distinction goes to Virginia’s 10th district, a suburban district with considerably more two-income households (you can see that household size is the key factor distinguishing the two main ways of looking at affluence, per capita income vs. median household income).</p> <p>And although Wall Street isn’t located in this district, it’s only a subway ride away, and the 12th has the highest percentage of FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) workers of any district: 18.9 percent of workers. Finally, it’s not a district with a lot of children (it has the highest percentage of persons over 18: 87.6 percent), but is a district with a lot of unmarried millennials (the highest percentage of persons 25-34: 28.1 percent).</p> <p>What’s currently the 12th has always traditionally been known as New York’s “Silk Stocking” district, given its wealth, and held onto its Rockefeller Republican ways for a long time; you may be surprised to find out that the area's previous representative before current Rep. Carolyn Maloney was, in fact, a Republican! Maloney first took office in 1992, beating Republican incumbent Bill Green. Green was, unsurprisingly, one of the House’s most liberal Republicans, and even then, it was a strongly Democratic district at the presidential level. In 2012, the 12th went for Barack Obama by a 77 to 22 margin, while Obama won 80 to 19 in 2008.</p> <p>Maloney, who’s a member of the Progressive Caucus, has been a reliable liberal vote for many years, and at age 69, will probably still be serving here for a while longer. She has been re-elected easily over the years, with her most noteworthy primary challenge in recent years, in 2010 against Wall Streeter Reshma Saujani, turning into an 81-19 rout.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank"><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) CarolynMaloney NewYork NY-12 reshmasaujani TheMostDistrict _1461787 Sun, 03 Jan 2016 02:56:13 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/1/1461778/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-youngest-congressional-district-Utah-s-3rd?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="Utah's 3rd Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187117/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.51.26_AM.png?1450371106" title="Utah's 3rd Congressional District"> <figcaption>Utah’s 3rd congressional district</figcaption> </figure> <p>The ​nation’s youngest congressional district is Utah’s 3rd Congressional District. The 3rd starts in the southern suburbs of Salt Lake City, where almost all of its population lives, but then zigzags down through the dry, sandblasted terrain of the state’s southeastern quarter. Parts of the district … Monument Valley, as well as Arches and Canyonlands National Parks … with their buttes and tall cliffs, are the visual embodiment of the desert Southwest, forming the backdrop for everything from John Ford’s westerns to Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.</p> <p>The place that really typifies day-to-day life in the 3rd district isn’t the desert, though, but rather the city of Provo. At the center of Provo is Brigham Young University, the main university associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. BYU, in fact, is the largest religious university in the United States, with nearly 30,000 students, almost all of whom are Mormon. While Provo (which is 40 miles south of Salt Lake City) is large enough to stand on its own as a city, it’s close enough to SLC that it also serves as something of an exurb, with many people not associated with the university commuting northward. The vast majority of the “townies,” as well, are Mormon; while the Census Bureau doesn’t ask about religion, the Association of Religion Data Archives, which keeps track of congregation data, puts the total Mormon population of Utah County (the county where Provo is located) at 457,999, or <a href="http://www.thearda.com/rcms2010/r/c/49/rcms2010_49049_county_name_2010.asp" target="_blank" title=""><u>89 percent</u></a>​ of the population.</p> <p>Studies have shown that Mormons are likelier to marry and have children than members of other faiths; a 2015 Pew Research study indicates that the average number of children born to Mormons is <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/mormons-more-likely-to-marry-have-more-children-than-other-u-s-religious-groups/" target="_blank" title=""><u>3.4</u></a>​, compared with 2.2 for all American adults. When you combine that higher birth rate (meaning more children as a percentage of the overall population) with the presence of a large university, you have all the ingredients for the nation’s youngest district. Utah’s 3rd has the lowest median age of any district: 28.4 years.</p> <p>Interestingly, the 3rd also tops two other “Most District” categories, ones you probably wouldn’t have thought of: it’s the district with the highest percentage of persons with Danish ancestry (5.8 percent), and of persons with English ancestry (27.5 percent). Again, that’s largely a factor of this being the nation’s most Mormon district: the English and Danes were the two groups of foreigners most heavily recruited by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Americans#Religious_life" target="_blank" title=""><u>the LDS</u></a>​ to come to Utah in the 19th century. (In addition, many Mormons can trace their roots back to the nation’s first waves of Yankee settlers in the colonial era. For instance, prominent 17th-century pastor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leavitt" target="_blank" title=""><u>John Leavitt</u></a> is the ancestor of two different recent Utah governors, Mike Leavitt and Jon Huntsman.)</p> <p>The 3rd’s heavily Mormon heritage manifests itself in one other way: it’s one of the nation’s most heavily Republican districts. Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by a 78 to 20 margin in 2012; while John McCain didn’t have Romney’s favorite son status, he still won 68 to 30 in 2008. The 3rd has been represented since 2008 by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, an up-and-comer who’s often talked about as a Senate replacement when Orrin Hatch retires, but who is currently the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. If and when Chaffetz seeks a promotion, given how the red the district is, it’ll probably remain in Republican hands.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank"><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) JasonChaffetz TheMostDistrict UT-03 Utah _1461778 Sat, 02 Jan 2016 01:55:16 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/1/1461768/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-oldest-congressional-district-Florida-s-11th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="Florida's 11th District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187110/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.46.14_AM.png?1450370794" title="Florida's 11th District"> <figcaption>Florida’s 11th congressional district</figcaption> </figure> <p>The nation’s oldest congressional district is Florida’s 11th Congressional District. The 11th district covers a wide swath of central Florida, facing the Gulf Coast in places but mostly covering the state’s interior north of Tampa and west of Orlando. It’s an area of mostly nondescript suburbs, many of which are planned retirement communities, and much of this district was simply empty several decades ago. Case in point, the largest town in the district is a place you’ve probably never heard of: Spring Hill, Florida. Spring Hill had a population of 98,621 in 2010 … and a population of 6,468 in 1980.</p> <p>The best-known place in the district isn’t really a town at all: it’s <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/18/1121337/-Paul-Ryan-hunts-for-votes-in-Republican-utopia-or-dystopia" target="_blank" title=""><u>The Villages</u></a>​, a sprawling retirement community of around 50,000 people, which isn’t incorporated. Instead, it’s a “community development district,” which is basically a fiefdom where the developers have all responsibility for the local infrastructure, where the residents don’t have a voting interest in what happens and where all public space is essentially privatized. But, on the plus side: endless free golf for the residents! The Villages is also known as one of the epicenters of the conservative movement in Florida, and Republican candidates, both at the presidential and state level, regularly trek to the Villages to make appearances before legions of fans.</p> <p>When one of the nation’s largest retirement communities is the heart and soul of a district, it’s a pretty good bet that that district is going to be the oldest in the nation. There are several different ways to approach the question: does “oldest” mean the highest median age among all residents, or does it mean the highest percentage of senior citizens? Well, either way, the 11th takes the honors. It has the highest median age (52.8 years), and it also has the highest percentage of persons over 65 years old (32.8 percent). (The 11th doesn’t, however, have the highest percentage of persons 85 years or older; that honor goes to Florida’s 21st district (4.2 percent), further south in Palm Beach County, which was already a retirement destination back when the 11th was mostly just orange groves.)</p> <p>And when one of the nation’s most notorious Republican strongholds is the anchor of a district, it’s likely that the district will be dark red. Under the slightly rejiggered lines resulting from the court-ordered re-map of Florida that'll take effect in 2016, Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama 59 to 40 in this district in 2012, while John McCain won it 56 to 43 in 2008. It’s also likely that the district would elect a Nugent to the House, although in this case, it’s Rich Nugent, previously the sheriff of Hernando County, not Ted Nugent.</p> <p>Nugent, a social-conservative Republican backbencher who has attracted little attention, has represented this area since 2010. However, Nugent is <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/09/1458295/-Morning-Digest-The-Club-for-Growth-wants-to-help-tea-partiers-devour-one-of-their-own#6" target="_blank" title=""><u>retiring</u></a>​ in 2016, meaning an open seat, though given the district's lean he’s almost certainly going to be replaced by another Republican. Nugent is trying to hand the seat off to his former chief of staff, Justin Grabelle, but he’ll be joined in the primary by well-connected rancher Kelly Rice, who has the endorsement of Nugent’s predecessor, ex-Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite. What could really shake things up here, though, would be if Republican Rep. Dan Webster, who currently represents the next-door 10th district, decides to move over here. Webster’s 10th district just got radically remade in the 2016 re-map, moving from a mostly suburban district to one that takes in central Orlando, becoming a 60 percent Obama district with a large African-American population. If Webster wants to stay in the House, carpetbagging next-door into the 11th may be his only hope.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank" title=""><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) DanWebster FL-11 Florida GinnyBrown-Waite JustinGrabelle KellyRice RichNugent TheMostDistrict TheVillages _1461768 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 15:25:20 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/30/1461752/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-smallest-congressional-district-New-York-s-13th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>The nation's smallest, and most dense, congressional district, is New York’s 13th Congressional District. The tiny 13th occupies only 10.25 square miles of land area (or 12.98 square miles of total area, including water, if you prefer); according to the 2010 Census, that’s 69,994 people per square mile. There are only four other congressional districts that are smaller than 20 square miles; unsurprisingly, they’re also all in New York City, but the 13th edges out the others as the smallest.</p> <figure class="image-captioned width-lg align-right"><img alt="New York's 13th District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187116/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.50.14_AM.png?1450371030" title="New York's 13th District"> <figcaption>New York’s 13th district</figcaption> </figure> <p>The 13th’s ancestor districts (for instance, it was the 15th, in the 2000s) were limited only to the northernmost parts of Manhattan, especially Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights. Due to 2012 redistricting, however, saw it expand into the Bronx. Traditionally, this was an African-American district, with Harlem's main corridor, 125th Street, and attractions like the Apollo Theater, at its core. However, at this point, the district has a Hispanic majority, with a large Dominican population in Washington Heights and Inwood, and Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem. And <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank" title=""><u>55 percent</u></a>​ of its residents are Hispanic in 2014, but thanks to gentrification, the fastest-growing demographic in this district may actually be whites, currently at 14 percent of the district.</p> <p>While the 13th defeats its next-door neighbor, the entirely Bronx-based <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/28/1450721/-The-Most-District-The-bluest-congressional-district-in-America-New-York-s-15th-in-the-South-Bronx" target="_blank" title=""><u>15th</u></a>​, for the honors of smallest-district, the 15th edges out the 13th for the title of bluest district. The 15th gave 95 percent of its vote to Barack Obama in 2008 and 96.7 percent in 2012, while the 13th lagged behind at only 93 percent Obama in 2008 and 94.6 percent in 2012. The 13th also earns “Most District” honors in several other categories that you’d associate with big-city living: highest percentage of people living in buildings with 20 or more units (77.3 percent), highest percentage of workers who commute by public transportation (71.5 percent), and highest percentage of households that have no access to a vehicle (75.8 percent).</p> <p>Given those presidential numbers, you’d expect the 13th to elect a Democratic House member, and in fact it’s elected one of the most long-serving members for many decades. Since 1971, this area has been held by Charlie Rangel (though he’s also represented the 18th, 19th, 16th, and 15th, as the district’s numbers change over the years). With that seniority, Rangel has been a powerful member of the House’s liberal flank for a long time, and during the Democratic Party’s brief return to power in the late ‘00s, he was chair of the Ways and Means Committee. Rangel was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus; Rangel has a Puerto Rican father, but isn’t also a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.</p> <p>Rangel stepped aside in March 2010 as Ways and Means chair, though, in the face of an Ethics investigation; he was then censured by the Ethics Committee. Between that, his advanced age (he’s currently 85), and the changing demographics of his district, that looked like it would spell the end to Rangel’s career. However, he stuck around for the 2012 and 2014 elections, narrowly winning primaries against Dominican state Senator Adriano Espaillat both times. Rangel has finally thrown in the towel for 2016, and the race to replace him will be <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/13/1431290/-Morning-Digest-RGA-boot-camp-weigh-in-Matt-Bevin-almost-misses-his-own-fundraiser#16" target="_blank" title=""><u>intense</u></a>​: Espaillat is back for another try, but so is fellow Dominican state Asm. Guillermo Linares. The district still has a large black electorate, so former DNC political director Clyde Williams, state Sen. Bill Perkins, state Asm. Keith Wright, and ex-state Asm. Adam Clayton Powell IV are all in the hunt too. (Powell is the son of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Rep. that Rangel defeated in the Democratic primary in 1970 to first win office.)</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank"><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) AdamClaytonPowellIV AdrianoEspaillat BillPerkins CharlieRangel ClydeWilliams GuillermoLinares KeithWright NewYork NY-13 TheMostDistrict _1461752 Thu, 31 Dec 2015 03:26:17 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/1/1461120/-The-Most-District-What-s-the-most-French-district-in-the-country-Mais-oui-Louisiana-s-1st?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of all the nation’s 435 congressional districts, it’s no surprise that the one with the largest French population is located in Louisiana. Eighteen percent of the population of Louisiana’s 1st District identifies its ancestry as French, and the seats with the second and third-largest French populations are also in Louisiana.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="Louisiana's 1st Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187144/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_11.42.57_AM.png?1450374209" title="Louisiana's 1st Congressional District"> <figcaption>Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>Louisiana’s 1st District is centered around New Orleans’ conservative suburbs. The seat includes all of St. Tammany Parish north of Lake Pontchartrain, as well as most of Jefferson Parish south of the lake. Jefferson includes Metairie, a large unincorporated suburb where former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke won a 1989 special election to the legislature. The seat also includes some smaller parishes south of New Orleans. Most of the city of New Orleans is located in the nearby 2nd District, but the 1st is home to Audubon Park, City Park, Tulane University, and Loyola University.</p> <p>The 1st is safely Republican, backing Romney 71-27. The seat’s last few Republican congressmen all achieved prominence, though not always in a good way. Bob Livingston was selected to be speaker of the House in 1998 after Newt Gingrich resigned. However, Livingston resigned from the House before he could take the gavel after he admitted to having an affair. Republicans were impeaching President Bill Clinton at the time and Livingston encouraged Clinton to follow his example and resign as well: The president did not take him up on it.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) LA-01 Louisiana SteveScalise TheMostDistrict _1461120 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 13:55:16 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/26/1461109/-The-Most-District-What-s-America-s-largest-congressional-district-New-Mexico-s-sprawling-2nd?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>The nation’s largest, and least dense, congressional district is New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District. Covering the southernmost two-thirds of what’s already a very large state, the 2nd sprawls over 71,739 square miles of land; according to the 2010 Census, it has only 9.6 people per square mile. It stretches from Albuquerque’s southern suburbs down to Las Cruces near the Texas border. There are mountains and farmland, but much of it is barren wastes, none more barren than White Sands National Monument, shown above.</p> <p>Two noteworthy things happened (or may not have happened) in the vast expanses of the 2nd during the 1940s. One was the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1945, at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)" target="_blank" title="">Trinity Site</a>, located in the Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, close to the state’s geographic center. The other was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident" target="_blank" title="">Roswell UFO incident</a> in 1947, which is today the main claim to fame for Roswell, the second-largest city in the district.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/187112/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-17_at_10.47.30_AM.png?1450370868" title="New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District"> <figcaption>New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The title of “largest congressional district” may be a little more controversial than you’d think, though: Alaska could well lay claim to the title, seeing as how the entire state gets one at-large seat in the House. If you accept at-large districts, Montana and South Dakota would also slot in ahead of New Mexico’s 2nd, but Alaska would be the biggest of all, with a land area of 570,641 square miles, and only 1.2 people per square mile. But for the sake of our “Most District” series, we’re focusing on congressional districts that are in states with multiple districts, whose size is the result of the districting process.</p> <p>Like many districts in the most rural parts of the Mountain West, the 2nd is a Republican-leaning district, though much less so than most places in, say, Utah and Idaho; the 2nd gave 45 percent of its vote to Barack Obama in 2012 and 52 to Mitt Romney. It’s one of only a handful of districts nationwide that has a <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank" title="">Hispanic majority</a> (53 percent in 2010, versus 38 percent non-Hispanic white and 5 percent Native American), and yet voted for Romney in 2012 and elect a Republican House member.</p> <p>That Republican House member is Steve Pearce, the owner of an oil-field services company who represented the 2nd from 2002 until 2008, and again from 2010 until now. Pearce gave up his seat to run for Senate in 2008, then narrowly defeated fellow Republican Rep. Heather Wilson in the GOP primary only to lose by a wide margin (61-39) to Tom Udall in the general election. Democrat Harry Teague picked up the open 2nd in 2008, but Pearce decided to try for his old seat in 2010, and won convincingly, 55-45, aided by that year’s Republican wave. Teague’s two-year term was the only time since 1980 that a Democrat has held the 2nd.</p> <p>Pearce is very conservative even by Republican standards, and he’s one of the few members of the House Freedom Caucus who's situated in an anywhere-near-competitive district. He’s also had a few minor controversies. Most memorably, his 2013 book <em>Just Fly the Plane, Stupid! </em>(released only <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/01/22/gop-congressmans-book-the-wife-is-to-voluntarily-submit-to-her-husband/" target="_blank" title="">months after</a> clumsy comments about women potentially cost Republicans two Senate seats in 2012)<em> </em>contained a memorable passage where he stated, “The wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice.” But the book didn’t seem to harm Pearce’s 2014 prospects (he won that race 64-36), and it may take another combination of an open seat and a strong blue wave for the Democrats to get a foot back in the door in the 2nd.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. </em><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank" title=""><u><em>Click here</em></u></a><em> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (David Jarman) HarryTeague NewMexico NM-02 StevePearce TheMostDistrict _1461109 Sat, 26 Dec 2015 21:55:14 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/15/1459316/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-country-s-largest-Vietnamese-population-California-s-19th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, none have a greater proportion of Vietnamese residents than California’s 19th. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, 10 percent of this San Jose-based district is Vietnamese-American. Though Orange County’s <span>Vietnamese</span> community is larger than San Jose’s, the <span>Vietnamese population is spread between several different districts in Southern California while they’re more concentrated here.</span> While the <span>Vietnamese population is large, Hispanics <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=1711853669" target="_blank" title="">make up 42 percent of the seat’s population</a>.</span></p> <p><span>The 19th is centered around San Jose, the third-largest city in California and the 10th largest nationwide. Because San Jose’s airport was built so close to downtown, San Jose has a <a href="http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/10/23/downtown-san-jose-skyline-high-rise-projects-airport/" target="_blank" title="">very modest skyline</a> compared to other big cities. Still, downtown San Jose, which is contained within the 19th, includes notable landmarks like the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Children’s Discovery Museum, and the </span>SAP Center at San Jose, the home of the hockey team the San Jose Sharks. The Sharks are San Jose’s only major league baseball, basketball, football, or hockey team (though the San Fransisco 49ers now play nearby in Santa Clara). The district also contains Morgan Hill and part of Gilroy, nicknamed the “Garlic Capital of the World.”</p> <p>The district also contains San Jose’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which was the center of a major controversy in 2007 and 2008. The city councilor, including Vietnamese immigrant Madison Nguyen, originally voted to call the area the “Saigon Business District.” The move infuriated many local Vietnamese activists, who viewed the name Little Saigon as a <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_7471458?source=rss" target="_blank" title="">symbol of their opposition</a> to Vietnam’s communist government. The debate took on a new urgency when prominent activist Ly Tong undertook a month-long hunger strike. The council ended up backing down and named the area Little Saigon. Angry activists tried to recall Nguyen the next year, but she survived and won re-election.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="California" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/185467/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-11_at_1.53.46_PM.png?1449863665"> <figcaption>California’s 19th Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The 19th, like most Bay Area seats, is heavily Democratic: Obama <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/19/1163009/-Daily-Kos-Elections-presidential-results-by-congressional-district-for-the-2012-2008-elections?detail=hide" target="_blank" title="">won 71-27 here</a>. Since 1995, the district has been represented by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren. Lofgren got her political start working for San Jose Congressman Don Edwards, who was a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal. Lofgren served on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors until Edwards retired in 1994, and she ran to succeed him.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) CA-19 California TheMostDistrict ZoeLofgren _1459316 Sat, 16 Jan 2016 03:20:14 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/2/1459290/-The-Most-District-Which-district-has-the-most-households-earning-over-200-000-California-s-18th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, no seat has a greater proportion of households earning over $200,000 than California’s 18th. According to the Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey, 24.7 percent of the district’s households make more than $200,000 mark, far greater than the 5.3 percent of households who do so nationwide. The district also has the second-highest median income in the country at $105,872 per household, compared to the national average of $53,657; only Virginia’s 10th is greater.</p> <p>California’s 18th is centered around Silicon Valley. It contains Palo Alto, the home of Hewlett-Packard, Tesla, Skype, and numerous other companies. Nearby is Mountain View, which houses the headquarters of Google and Mozilla. To the north is Menlo Park, where Facebook’s new office is headquartered. To the south is Los Gatos, which headquarters Netflix, the suburbs of Campbell and Saratoga, as well as a few communities in Santa Cruz County. The seat is home to Stanford University as well.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="California" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/185440/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-11_at_12.53.52_PM.png?1449860069"> <figcaption>California’s 18th Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The district contains a large portion of San Jose, including the Winchester Mystery House. The house was owned by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester believed that she had been visited by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles, who told her that she would die if she stopped building her mansion. The home was constructed from 1884 until her death in 1922. There was no central plan to the mansion and it contains plenty of passages that go nowhere to ensure that the house would never be completed. Today, the Winchester Mystery House is one of the 18th’s best known attractions.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) AnnaEshoo CA-18 California TheMostDistrict _1459290 Sat, 02 Jan 2016 14:55:16 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/31/1459242/-The-Most-District-What-s-the-most-Asian-district-in-America-Welcome-to-California-s-17th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, no seat has a higher proportion of Asian-American residents than California’s 17th District. According to the Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey, 52 percent of the district is non-Hispanic Asian, compared to 5 percent nationwide. CA-17 narrowly edges Hawaii’s 1st District, located in Honolulu, for the title.</p> <p>The 17th takes up a big share of Silicon Valley. It includes a large portion of San Jose but is mainly concentrated in its suburbs and smaller nearby cities. The district contains Cupertino, the headquarters of Apple Inc. and the location of plenty of other tech companies. Another district landmark is the San Fransisco 49ers new Levi’s Stadium, which is located in Santa Clara.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="California" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/185405/large/Screen_Shot_2015-12-11_at_11.23.10_AM.png?1449854660"> <figcaption>California’s 17th Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The 17th also contains the cities of Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Fremont, and Newark. Most of the district is <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kF_c5DeXHaYMR1ct1e8yb9MwvM3qRm8us2NzCeZav3A/edit#gid=4" target="_blank" title="">concentrated in Santa Clara County</a>, with about a quarter of the population living in Alameda County to the north. Like most districts in the Bay Area, the 17th is safely Democratic: Barack Obama carried it 72-26.</p> <p>The 17th has a few other distinctions. Eighteen percent of the population is of Asian Indian descent, making this the most Indian-American district in the nation. The district is very affluent, with a median household income of $103,316, the fourth-highest in the nation. However, it costs more to rent here than in any seat in the nation, so plenty of newcomers won’t have an easy time getting settled.</p> <p>This area has been represented by Democrat Mike Honda since 2001. Honda was born just before the Unites States entered World War II, and he spent much of his childhood in a Japanese American internment camp in Colorado. Honda worked as a teacher and principal and became active in local politics. Honda served on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and in the state Assembly before he sought a previous version of this seat in 2000 when Republican Rep. Tom Campbell left to unsuccessfully run for the Senate.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) CA-17 California MikeHonda TheMostDistrict _1459242 Thu, 31 Dec 2015 13:56:15 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/28/1450721/-The-Most-District-The-bluest-congressional-district-in-America-New-York-s-15th-in-the-South-Bronx?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, none favored Barack Obama more than New York’s 15th Congressional District. This seat supported the president by a extraordinary 97-3 margin, and interestingly, Obama’s second-best district in the country also happens to be right next door (New York’s 13th, which backed him 95-5).</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="New York's 15th Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/178169/large/Screen_Shot_2015-11-16_at_2.33.33_PM.png?1447706041" title="New York's 15th Congressional District"> <figcaption>New York’s 15th Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The 15th covers a little more than <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kF_c5DeXHaYMR1ct1e8yb9MwvM3qRm8us2NzCeZav3A/edit#gid=33" target="_blank">half of the Bronx</a> and includes two of the borough’s most famous landmarks: Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo. This area also includes the public housing complex where Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up; in 2010, the building was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/nyregion/22sotomayor.html?_r=0" target="_blank">renamed the Sotomayor Houses</a>.</p> <p><span>The district has the lowest median household income of any congressional district in the country at $25,801. </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank">Sixty-five percent of the residents here Hispanic</a><span>, while 29 percent are black and just 3 percent are white. This area has long been the center of New York’s Puerto Rican population, though today, Dominicans <a href="http://grab.by/M4K4" target="_blank">make up a plurality</a> of the district’s Latinos. However, in part because Puerto Ricans are automatically granted the right to vote if they move to the mainland, Puerto Rican office-holders still dominate local politics.</span></p> <p><span>Among them is Democratic Rep. José E. Serrano, who has represented NY-15 since winning a 1990 special election. </span>Serrano had served in the state Assembly when this district opened up, following Rep. Robert Garcia resignation after he was convicted of corruption. (Garcia served three months in jail, but his conviction was later reversed.) Under New York law, no primary was held: Instead, the county Democratic Party selected a nominee, and they chose Serrano. He easily won the general election that year, and he’s <a href="http://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=2014" target="_blank">never faced serious opposition</a> in either the primary or the general since.</p> <p>Serrano has been a solid liberal in the House, and he’s been very active on issues related to Puerto Rico. However, he hasn’t enjoyed a particularly good relationship with the Bronx Democratic establishment in recent years. In 2014, City Councilor Annabel Palma <a href="http://observer.com/2015/02/adolfo-carrion-mulling-congressional-challenge-against-jose-serrano-sources/" target="_blank">considered challenging him</a> in the primary, and local leaders made it clear that they weren’t interested in helping the incumbent. However, no one has launched a credible campaign against him, and Serrano is probably safe for a while longer. <span>Serrano’s son, state Sen. José M. </span>Serrano, may run when the 72 year-old congressman decides to retire, though a stadium full of other Bronx Democrats would eye this seat.</p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) JoseSerrano NewYork NY-15 TheMostDistrict _1450721 Sat, 28 Nov 2015 15:55:06 +0000 https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/28/1450682/-The-Most-District-What-s-the-reddest-congressional-district-in-America-Come-visit-Texas-13th?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source= <p>Of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, no seat backed Mitt Romney by a greater margin than Texas’ 13th. This seat <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/19/1163009/-Daily-Kos-Elections-presidential-results-by-congressional-district-for-the-2012-2008-elections?detail=hide" target="_blank">supported 2012's GOP presidential nominee 80-19</a>; Romney’s second-best seat, the nearby 11th District, voted for him by a similar 79-20 margin.</p> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img alt="Texas' 13th Congressional District" src="http://images.dailykos.com/images/178154/large/Screen_Shot_2015-11-16_at_1.19.58_PM.png?1447701710" title="Texas' 13th Congressional District"> <figcaption>Texas’ 13th Congressional District</figcaption> </figure> <p>The 13th is based in the Texas Panhandle and is dominated by Amarillo and Wichita Falls. About a quarter of the population lives in Amarillo, which once called itself the “Helium Capital of the World” because <a href="http://www.wired.com/2000/08/helium/" target="_blank">most of the world’s helium supply</a> was located in the area. Meanwhile, Wichita Falls is home to the four-story Newby-McMahon Building, known as the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_littlest_skyscraper" target="_blank">world's littlest skyscraper</a>," the results of a con by an oilman named J.D. McMahon.</p> <p>In 1912 the city was growing fast and dreamed of adding a major building to its skyline and turned to McMahon, who dr<span>ew up plans for a grand building that was mostly on property he didn’t have permission to build on. According to legend, </span>McMahon’s blueprints were drafted in inches instead of feet, but supposedly no one realized until it was too late. Investors sued in 1919 once they saw the finals results, but the judge told them that since they’d reviewed the architectural drawings, they should have known what they were getting—which, in the end, turned out to be the world's littlest skyscraper.</p> <p>While Democrats hope that Texas will become more competitive once Latinos begin to register and vote in larger numbers, this part of the state is likely to stay red for a very long time. Non-Hispanic whites <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L0xEuvQ0wrFnZ2qhU4PnGOFQXrf2w0eMnYod4QFkJhY/edit#gid=2" target="_blank">make up 65 percent of the population</a>, and in rural Texas, these white voters are extremely reliable Republicans.</p> <p>GOP Rep. Mac Thornberry has represented this area since his win in the 1994 “Gingrich revolution.” Thornberry, a former congressional staffer and attorney, challenged three-term Rep. Bill Sarpalius that year. Sarpalius faced a challenging environment running as a Democrat in a conservative seat at a time when President Bill Clinton was unpopular. It also didn’t help that Sarpalius earned some unfavorable news stories for speaking at a company’s convention after the firm helped him move to Washington. Thornberry won his primary with little opposition and <a href="http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=29118" target="_blank">unseated Sarpalius 55-45</a>. </p> <p>Thornberry hasn’t faced any serious opposition in either the primary or the general since 1994. The congressman has been a pretty low-key House member, though he heads the influential House Armed Services committee. This seat is likely his until he retires … when it’ll be taken over by another Republican.</p> <p><em>“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/tag/TheMostDistrict" target="_blank">Click here</a> for all posts in this series.</em></p> rss@dailykos.com (Jeff Singer) Amarillo MacThornberry Texas TheMostDistrict TX-13 wichitafalls _1450682 Sat, 28 Nov 2015 22:55:08 +0000