Thursday, September 28, 2006

More on election demographics 

A USA Today story says that marital status help determine the fall elections. Let's have a look at the data for Minnesota. By Congressional district, here's the share of adult females married and not separated, and the number of children age 5-20. (Districts have roughly 450,000 voting-age adults,) year 2000, from the Census Bureau.

CD--Married--Schoolage Kids (5-19)
1, 60.2, 149544
2, 63.5, 157267
3, 62.4, 140413
4, 47.4, 144041
5, 43.2, 122614
6, 60.9, 159864
7, 60.0, 151546
8, 59.2, 143080

The most Democratic district, the 5th in Minneapolis, has both low marital rates and a small number of children compare to the others. The 4th and 8th, two other seats normally considered DFL-leaning, are next. (The low birthrate in the 8th surprised me.) The 2nd and the 6th would be predicted to be most likely Republican by both marital status and size of families -- while the 3rd, Jim Ramstad's district, has a high marriage rate but fairly low number of kids. Those are likely to be two-earner families, where the higher opportunity cost of having children keeps family size lower.

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