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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.”
“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.
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.
But that sense that the normal America is out there somewhere in a hamlet where they can’t pronounce “Acela” is misplaced. In fact, it’s not in a small town at all.
I calculated how demographically similar each U.S. metropolitan area is to the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity.1 The index equals 100 if a metro’s demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall.2
By this measure, the metropolitan area that looks most like the U.S. is New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. All of the 10 large metros that are demographically most similar to the U.S. overall are in the Northeast, Midwest or center of the country, with the exception of Tampa. Two of them — New Haven and Philadelphia — are even on Amtrak’s Acela (that’s “uh-SELL-ah”) line. None is in the West, though Sacramento, California, comes close at No. 12.
The large metros least demographically similar to the U.S. include McAllen-Edinburg-Mission and El Paso, both in Texas, both of which are younger, less educated and more Latino than the U.S. overall, and Honolulu, where Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders together are the majority.
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. 3
METRO SIMILARITY TO U.S. OVERALL
1 New Haven-Milford, CT 93.2
2 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 91.6
3 Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 90.2
4 Oklahoma City, OK 89.4
5 Springfield, MA 89.3
6 Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI 88.2
7 Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI 88.2
8 Wichita, KS 87.6
9 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 87.2
10 Kansas City, MO-KS 86.8
Metros with demographics most like America today
Among metros with at least 500,000 people; maximum similarity score is 100
Source: American Community survey
Looking across metros of all sizes, the places that look most like America tend to be larger metros, though not the largest ones. The similarity index is highest, on average, for metros with between 1 million and 2 million people. The metros that look least like America are those with fewer than 100,000 people.
METRO POPULATION, 2010 SIMILARITY TO U.S. OVERALL
<100k 68.8
100-249k 72.1
250-499k 75.6
500-999k 75.9
1-2m 81.4
2-5m 81.0
5m+ 78.3
Metros with demographics most like America today, by size
Maximum similarity score is 100.
Source: AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
We all, of course, have our own notions of what real America looks like. Those notions might be based on our own nostalgia or our hopes for the future. If your image of the real America is a small town, you might be thinking of an America that no longer exists. 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. Of course, nearly every place in the U.S. today looks more like 2014 America than 1950 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.
METRO SIMILARITY TO U.S. OVERALL IN 1950
1 Ogden-Clearfield, UT 55.5
2 Lancaster, PA 55.2
3 Chattanooga, TN-GA 55.1
4 Knoxville, TN 54.4
5 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 54.2
6 Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN 54.0
7 Provo-Orem, UT 53.4
8 Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA 53.0
9 Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin, SC 52.8
10 Indianapolis-Carmel-Anderson, IN 52.2
Metros with demographics most like 1950s America
Among metros with at least 500,000 people; maximum similarity score is 100
Sources: American community survey, U.S. Census Bureau
But the places that look today most like 1950 America are not large metros but rather smaller metros and rural areas. 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.
These misconceptions affect our politics: an outdated view of “normal America” is baked into the presidential election process. 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. overall. The states that look demographically most similar to America are Illinois and New York, followed by New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia. (Downstate Illinois and upstate New York are worlds apart from Chicago and New York City, as native Rochesterians like me know well.) The states that look least like America are Hawaii, New Mexico, West Virginia, Maine and Vermont, along with the District of Columbia.
STATE SIMILARITY TO U.S. OVERALL
1 Illinois 95.8
2 New York 92.2
3 New Jersey 91.5
4 Connecticut 90.7
5 Virginia 87.6
6 Florida 87.5
7 North Carolina 87.4
8 Delaware 86.7
9 Rhode Island 86.3
10 Massachusetts 85.5
States with demographics most like America today
Maximum similarity score is 100
Source: AMERICAN community survey
Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s places of honor would make more sense if we were electing a president in the 1950s. They rank 11th and 20th, respectively, in how similar their demographics today are to those of 1950 America, though Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana are the states whose demographics today look most like 1950 America.
STATE SIMILARITY TO U.S. OVERALL IN 1950
1 Kentucky 58.7
2 West Virginia 56.8
3 Indiana 54.6
4 Tennessee 54.4
5 Arkansas 54.4
6 Missouri 54.0
7 Ohio 53.5
8 Utah 52.8
9 Idaho 51.8
10 Alabama 51.4
States with demographics most like 1950s America
Maximum similarity score is 100
Sources: AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY, U.S. Census Bureau
There are lots of reasons to care deeply about places that are demographically different from today’s America: Some of those places may turn out to be bellwethers for a future America that will be older, more educated and more racially and ethnically diverse than today; and some of those places are especially deserving of public attention and investment because they worse off than most other places.
But if you’re trying to get outside of your bubble and get in touch with “normal America,” skip the small towns of your actual or imagined past and instead start with New Haven or Tampa.
CORRECTION (7:10 p.m., April 28): An earlier version of this article omitted Tampa when describing the regions of the country containing metro areas demographically similar to the U.S. overall.
Footnotes
One can measure normalness, averageness or realness of a place in other ways, such as income, occupations, household structure, and so on. I selected age, education and race/ethnicity because those are standard individual-level demographic indicators that (1) are personal characteristics that don’t change if you move to another place, unlike income, and (2) have shifted dramatically over time in the country as a whole, as will become relevant below. ^
I used a standard dissimilarity index applied across 90 combinations of five age groups, six racial/ethnic categories, and four levels of educational attainment; some education categories were combined for 18-24 year-olds and omitted for children. ^
Of course, within cities and metros, some neighborhoods look more demographically similar to America overall than others. In New York City, for instance, the neighborhoods that look most like America overall are Staten Island and the Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay sections of Brooklyn. ^
Jed Kolko is an independent economist and a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
White supremacy is a nasty ****stain that we are slowly putting to rest.
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