Impressive work! the great plains really stand out- the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas only stay in the green because of urban growth.
Two quick questions- what was your source, and do you plan on doing this for previous decades?
US demographic series 2.0
- Thread starter kodak
- Start date
Two quick questions- what was your source, and do you plan on doing this for previous decades?
My source was the growth data on Wikipedia, which was sourced from the census bureau. I do plan on doing the previous decades but it might take a while.
I've started a new project on American population maps- one showing the census year that each county reached its highest population.
Notes
Notes
- This map does not account for county border changes that would drastically change their population. This is why two counties in Maine are orange; it may explain some other outliers.
- Unlike most of the sun belt, Texas' population boom seems to be limited to the urban areas and a slowly expanding ring of rural counties surrounding them as rich folks move out.
- The white borough in Alaska was created after 2000 and has no data available yet.
- It's been unintentionally depressing to come across counties in the Great Plains with a thousand residents tops whose Wikipedia pages show massive courthouses built a century ago for a much larger population.
- It has simultaneously been rather poignant to see how many rural Americans took it upon themselves to photograph empty fields, stretches of road with no cars on them, farm equipment, and local libraries, and uploaded those pictures to Wikimedia, to make sure their local Wikipedia pages have a picture.
Last edited:
I suspect that's the case, but the fact that the urban areas are also plurality-Republican was also strange. And has this northwest/southeast split always existed? If not, why did it form?
It goes as far back as 1924!You can see the split as far back as 1968 and 1976:
I guess it's just how the state was settled- Yankees and Kansans in the north and southern Democrats in the south. And it continues to this day, despite most of the Democrats voting straight-ticket Republican.
I wonder if there are still parts of the south where party registration is overwhelmingly democratic despite voting overwhelmingly Republican.
That's Comal County, one of the areas settled by the Adelsverein.
Gillespie County, the other one that went Progressive, was another one of their settlements.
Thande
Donor
That division still exists on the state legislature level (and it goes back a long way) but over time it's slowly slipped away at the higher levels as eastern Oklahoman registered Democrats stopped voting Democratic first for president, then for Senate, then for federal House (as recently as 2008)...
I wonder if the potential oil boom in North Dakota might end some of the longer streaks of decline up there.
I suspect it will.
One interesting discrepancy is with the Rust Belt- the major urban industrial centers started declining in the 1970's and smaller ones in the 1980's, but the big mining and lumber counties were seeing their populations drop 20 to 50 years earlier.
Other obvious historical effects that show up are the farming crash and Dust Bowl in the 1920's-1930's, a number of mining towns the went bust in the west and never came back, the Great Migration and Second Great Migration in the south (a bit harder to follow since the Great Depression fell in between and also hit a lot of Southern communities hard), suburbanization of northeastern cities in the fifties, the decline of tobacco country in Virginia, but only there for some reason as central Kentucky and North Carolina are going strong; and Hurricane Katrina on coastal Louisiana.