Thread by @LettieriDC

For absolutely no reason in particular, let's take a look at the economic well being of congressional districts throughout the United States. How do local distress and prosperity correspond with the party holding the seat, and what does that really tell us?

If we look at the 25 most distressed districts nationwide, it's clear this isn't simply a Democratic or Republican issue. The most distressed district in the country is held by the GOP. In total, the GOP holds a roughly proportional 11 of the 25 most distressed districts.

At the other end of the spectrum, the GOP also holds to most prosperous district in the country. But Democrats control 16 of the 25 most prosperous districts overall, boosted by several pickups of affluent GOP-held districts in the 2018 midterms (Paulsen, Coffman, Comstock, etc).

Indeed, the outcome of the midterms was disproportionately driven by more affluent swing districts, as explained here eig.org/dci/midtermana…, and in this story by @jimtankersley & @bencasselman
nytimes.com/2018/11/09/bus…

If we zoom out to states, which is far more relevant as far as policy is concerned, we see that the highest concentrations of people living in distressed zip codes AND the lowest concentrations in prosperous ones both tend to be in the south.

(The rankings in this thread all come from @InnovateEconomy's Distressed Communities Index (DCI) published in October 2018, which you can find at eig.org/dci)

What does the party affiliation of members representing very prosperous or very distressed districts by itself tell us? Not that much! In the aggregate, it may help us understand who is likely to be most responsive to certain policy concerns. But that's often not the case.

For example, based on these rankings alone, you might assume that whomever represents TX-1 (21st most distressed) would find common cause on economic policy with the member representing MD-7 (41st). But Louie Gohmert and Elijah Cummings couldn't be much farther apart.

Of course, no single metric or ranking comes close to fully explaining the underlying conditions - let alone causes - in an economy. An index at its best is simply a tool to help readers understand how economic well-being maps out across a vast and diverse country.

To truly understand the U.S. economy, we have to look beneath the headline statistics. Because two things can be true at the same time: Our national economy is strong & prosperous; it's also severely divided. Millions of Americans live in communities that have yet to recover.

And while the economy works remarkably well for educated workers & the places where they cluster, divides in well-being by place, race & education attainment are a sobering reminder that, even in a booming economy, there is much work left to do. We can't be complacent.

Unfortunately, complacency is the norm. Even when distressed areas come into focus, it's often in service of scoring cheap political points rather than taking responsibility or acknowledging the difficulty of reversing deep seated malaise. We should demand so much better.

Tl;dr Be careful when attempting to weaponize local economic conditions and party representation. /END