On Friday afternoon I asked Wonkblog readers to identify a mystery dataset that I'd mapped at the county level. Boy, did you deliver: I received a ton of responses via tweet and comment. Plus like, 37 guesses from The Switch's Brian Fung, all of which were wrong.
@_cingraham Non-white population. The clue that stood out to me was the "black belt" running from NC to MS. #NameThatData
— Hari Nair (@SaintCopious) July 18, 2014
@_cingraham Population that has now been driven completely nuts by this question.
— The Political Game (@politicgame) July 18, 2014
Others went political:
@_cingraham #Namethatdata Population who is not afraid to admit voting for Sarah Palin? — Barbara Zumwalt (@bzedits) July 18, 2014
Others tried to brute-force the problem:
@_cingraham @politicgame Definitely didn't spend the last 15 minutes CTRL+F'ing through Census datasets for random counties.
— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) July 18, 2014
Still others weren't having it at all:
— Alexander Furnas (@zfurnas) July 18, 2014
In the end, roughly 10 percent of you got it right. The data in question is the share of people in each county who have never been married.
This explains the high concentrations in certain Southern counties. These counties have large African-American populations, who have a significantly lower marriage rate than whites or Hispanics. On the other hand, people in Northeastern states like Massachusetts and New York tend to marry later in their lives than elsewhere, while people in the Midwest tend to marry younger.
Commenter Deweena was the first person to submit a correct answer, at 3:12 PM on Friday. I hereby award Deweena the Early Bird Prize for Prompt and Expeditious Accuracy.
But this wasn't the most precise answer. The good folks behind the Twitter account at Policy Map nailed it down to the data source and year, an impressive feat no matter how they pulled it off. For this, I grant them the title of Data Wizards/Ninjas/Unicorns/Whatevs, and hereby certify that, at least last Friday, they were Right on the Internet when so many others were wrong.
This was fun, wasn't it? Come back this Friday afternoon and we'll do another one.