The states that look demographically most similar to America are Illinois and New York, followed by New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia. Iowa and New Hampshire, which vote first in the primary season and therefore have disproportionate influence, rank 37th and 41st, respectively, in their similarity to the U.S. These misconceptions affect our politics: an outdated view of “normal America” is baked into the presidential election process. Looking across all of America, including the rural areas, the regions that today look most demographically similar to 1950 America are the portion of eastern Ohio around the towns of Cambridge and Coshocton and the Cumberland Valley district in southeastern Kentucky. Census Bureauīut the places that look today most like 1950 America are not large metros but rather smaller metros and rural areas. Metros with demographics most like 1950s America But the large metros that today come closest to looking like 1950 America are Lancaster, Pennsylvania Ogden and Provo, in Utah and several in the Midwest and South. today looks more like 2014 America than 1950 America. Of course, nearly every place in the U.S. I used the same method to measure which places in America today are most similar demographically to America in 1950, when the country was much whiter, younger and less-educated than today. If your image of the real America is a small town, you might be thinking of an America that no longer exists. Those notions might be based on our own nostalgia or our hopes for the future. We all, of course, have our own notions of what real America looks like. Metros with demographics most like America today, by size The metros that look least like America are those with fewer than 100,000 people. The similarity index is highest, on average, for metros with between 1 million and 2 million people. Looking across metros of all sizes, the places that look most like America tend to be larger metros, though not the largest ones. Metros with demographics most like America todayĪmong metros with at least 500,000 people maximum similarity score is 100 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD Oshkosh, by the way, clocks in with a score of 71, and Maine’s Penobscot County, where Lincoln is, has a score of 67: both places deserve less of a claim to “normal America” than the majority of large metros do. overall, and Honolulu, where Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders together are the majority. include McAllen-Edinburg-Mission and El Paso, both in Texas, both of which are younger, less educated and more Latino than the U.S. The large metros least demographically similar to the U.S. None is in the West, though Sacramento, California, comes close at No. Two of them - New Haven and Philadelphia - are even on Amtrak’s Acela (that’s “uh-SELL-ah”) line. overall are in the Northeast, Midwest or center of the country, with the exception of Tampa. All of the 10 large metros that are demographically most similar to the U.S. is New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. 2īy this measure, the metropolitan area that looks most like the U.S. 1 The index equals 100 if a metro’s demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity. I calculated how demographically similar each U.S. In fact, it’s not in a small town at all. It’s a familiar accusation in a year in which most presidential candidates are trying to pretend they have nothing to do with the coastal elite, and after one - Ted Cruz - spent weeks attacking “New York values.” Even PBS, a standard-bearer of the media elite, recently featured a quiz designed to assess in-touchness with “mainstream American culture” with questions about fishing, pickup trucks and living in a small town.īut that sense that the normal America is out there somewhere in a hamlet where they can’t pronounce “Acela” is misplaced. “Normal America is right that Establishment America has grown fat, lazy, conventional and deserving of radical disruption,” he wrote, citing his regular visits to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Lincoln, Maine, as his credentials of normality. Earlier this week, Jim VandeHei, a former executive editor of Politico, wrote an op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal accusing the Washington political establishment of being out of touch with “normal America.”
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