Poles (and others) at the polls in Pennsylvania

Hi there, it’s Rose! I write for Datawrapper’s blog. Read on in this Weekly Chart if you’ve ever doubted the importance of the Finnish-American vote.

We expect a politician to have certain numbers at her fingertips. Interest rates, unemployment, the number of voters of Polish ancestry in key swing states, the price of gas. You know.

Ok, one of those is a pretty deep cut — so it amused me, listening to last week’s presidential debate, to hear Kamala Harris shout out “the 800,000 Polish-Americans right here in Pennsylvania” as if they were common knowledge. That doesn’t mean it was bad strategy! Playing to ethnic blocs is a time-honored move in U.S. politics, and the issues can be very real. (In this case, Harris was arguing that her opponent would not defend allies in Europe against future Russian invasions.)

But the real appeal of those 800,000 voters isn’t their Polish heritage; it’s the fact that they live in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state whose vote may decide the presidential election. How far could we take that logic?

Historical settlement patterns mean that people with a certain background are often concentrated in one part of the country. Campaigning to those groups is like promising tax breaks to a regional industry or getting your picture taken with a weird local food — it makes the voters that count feel like you're speaking personally to them.

To take this strategy to its limit, we could figure out which national heritage is most overrepresented in each swing state compared to the U.S. at large. Targeting Nebraska's second district? It's pretty much the Czech capital of the North America. Looking for another angle on Michigan's Upper Peninsula? You could speak to the concerns of Finnish-Americans. (I admit I'm not sure what they are.)

These aren't necessarily immigrants; the most overrepresented national origin in almost every state is a Native nation whose land it surrounds. Since we're taking the mindset of an (unorthodox) political operative, I limited us to groups with at least 50,000 members in the swing state — in most cases, several times more than the margin of the 2020 race.

Is this good advice? Politicians do court voters on the Navajo Nation, and the African-American vote is crucial to any Georgia campaign. The Amish platform for Pennsylvania, meanwhile, is probably not a winner (but you can't say no one's tried!)

Creating the maps

These numbers come from the 2020 Census, which prompted respondents to write in a description of their ancestry under the "race" question. The groups, which are a mix of national, ethnic, and other designations, are based purely on self-report (not, for example, on tribal enrollment); people who list multiple heritages are counted multiple times. If you think you have a better idea, rest assured that you haven't even begun to wrestle with the insane complexity of collecting this data.

These aren't real small multiples, but just several choropleth maps embedded side by side. I took advantage of Datawrapper's API to create them all quickly in the same style.

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