Unmarried votes should be prized in redistricting
Yesterday the Census Bureau announced it had beaten the deadline to provide redistricting data to all 50 states. Politicians around the country will soon be looking at new district boundaries. Marital status is recognized as a very strong predictor of voting patterns, so legislators facing redistricting should be very interested in how many unmarried people they represent, and what those people think. The 2010 Census information about marital status and household composition has not yet been released (though data about race and ethnicity are available now). However, we can use other recent data to estimate where unmarried potential voters might have the biggest impact.
First, what is redistricting? In a nutshell, the population both grows and moves around, but there are only 435 seats in the House of Representative. So state officials use Census redistricting data to draw new borders for Congressional (and other legislative) districts so that each district contains roughly the same number of people. (Since every state must have at least one district, the districts do not have exactly the same number of people (calling that whole one-person-one-vote thing into question, but that’s for someone else’s blog)). Typically, party loyalists try to draw boundaries that encircle constituencies most likely to vote for their party. That often means creating districts with very strange shapes.
The four states that will gain or lose the most seats are New York (loses 2), Ohio (loses 2), Florida (gains 2), and Texas (gains 4). If you love demographics, politics and technology, check out this awesome map (click the tab called ‘apportionment’).
Second, where might unmarried constituents get the most attention? There are lots of ways to come up with estimates – here’s one:
I used the 2009 American Community Survey to look up the number of unmarried individuals and unmarried partner households in every Congressional district in NY, OH, FL and TX. The data on individuals includes all people age 15 and over – this is always a source of controversy and frustration. Obviously, most 15-18 year olds are unmarried; more importantly, they can’t vote. It would take a couple hours to extract them; I’d love to coach a volunteer on how to do that.
The following districts are in the top quartile on both measures – i.e., they have more unmarried individuals as a percentage of all individuals, and more unmarried partner households as a percentage of all households, than the remaining three-quarters of all districts in all four states. (One could use other criteria to pick key districts; I’m happy to share the data with anyone who wants to do more analysis.) Click the district name to see its current map and who represents it.
Florida 3 6.7% of households are headed by unmarried partners, 60.7% of individuals are unmarried
Florida 11 7.5% - 59.1%
Florida 23 6.5% - 60.0%
New York 12 6.7% - 57.6%
New York 16 7.0% - 68.0%
New York 21 8.2% – 53.3%
New York 28 6.6% - 60.3%
Ohio 10 7.2% - 54.3%
Texas 18 6.7% - 55.9%
Texas 25 6.7% - 53.2%
Texas 30 6.9% - 57.9%
Do you live in one of these districts? Is your Representative sensitive to the concerns of unmarried voters? How can we help you get their attention?
