At CHN, we know that federal policy makers care about the implications of policy proposals for their own constituents. That means your voices are essential in the  significant political fights we expect this year. So, we want to review for you where on our website you can find some of the important data for your state, Congressional district, or major metropolitan area, and how you may want to use it. We have provided this data so that you can easily find it when you are educating your policy makers about the impact of proposals on their constituents, preparing op-eds or other communications materials, and seeking funding for your work.  

Please consider forwarding this blog to everyone in your organization that might need to use the data, and also to your network.  

On January 7, we held a webinar on the federal fights to come, which illuminated some of the programs threatened with cuts. You can find the recording and slides here.  The state and local data described below can help you make the case for the importance of protecting programs. If the data we have posted  in our libraries doesn’t give you what you need, you may also want to review the webinar held on September 5 which explains how to find data on data.census.gov; the recording and slides are available here.  

Using the Race and Ethnicity Data 

As you work with this data, please keep in mind that for each race, there are two options shown in the American Community Survey: (1) race “alone” or (2) race “alone or in combination with other races.” There is a separate category, “Hispanic or Latino; may be of any race.”  

We recommend wherever possible using racial/ethnic categories to show disparities most clearly.  Therefore, the tables we have created compare White alone/Not Hispanic to other racial categories “alone or in combination,” and to Hispanic/Latinos of any race.  These comparisons show whether there are differences in the experience of poverty, housing cost burdens, and access to health insurance by race or ethnicity. 

The Census Bureau lets people choose to identify with one race (for example, Black), or to identify with more than one race (for example, Black and Asian). People who chose one race are reported in the “[race]alone” category; both people who chose one race and people who chose two or more are reported in the “alone or in combination” category.  The “alone or in combination” numbers are larger than those who identify solely as one race, so we recommend using this category when it is available except for Whites. 

The recommended approach for using race and ethnicity data to show racial and ethnic disparities cfor Whites, is to use White alone, not Latino; for every other racial category it is recommended use the “alone or in combination” data including both Latinos and non-Latinos, and also to report Latinos/Hispanics of all races. This captures whether people may be disadvantaged because of their race or ethnicity. We believe this approach is the right one for measuring access to human services. In other contexts, different racial and ethnic data groupings may be more appropriate. 

Data on Poverty  

In 2025, we expect serious threats to many programs that serve people in or near poverty, including attacks on SNAP and Medicaid. As you fight these threats, you will probably want to share how many people in your community live in poverty. (We recommend that you also explain what income level constitutes the official poverty line because polling shows most people think the poverty line is far higher than the one used in federal data; you can find the poverty levels for 2024 here.) 

Our poverty resource library includes two sets of tables of poverty data from the American Community Survey. Both sets are from the data the Census Bureau released in September, 2024, which covers the year 2023.  

The first set, provided for us by our wonderful allies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is in a downloadable excel file that includes income, poverty, and health insurance trends by state, broken out by race and ethnicity. When you click on the link, you’ll see tabs at the bottom – the first tab is instructions (README) on what the tables provide.  

• This file includes the number of people in poverty, the rate, and the margin of error.  

• It includes the race and ethnicity for all people in poverty, for income, and for health insurance.  Note that these files use the race alone categories, not the race alone or in combination categories. While it includes data on children and families in poverty, it does not include the race and ethnicity breakout for those groups. 

• The read me page also tells you how to determine whether there was a statistically significant change in poverty, income, or health insurance in your state. We encourage you to only use comparisons of data if it is statistically significant. 

The second set of tables give you data on poverty by state, congressional district, and major metropolitan area. It includes the share of voters in poverty, to help convince policy makers that many of their voting constituents care about programs serving poor people.  It also breaks out poverty by age group, poverty by disability, poverty by school enrollment (which should be useful in fights over school funding), and poverty for grandparents raising grandchildren. A few notes: 

• These tables do not show the number of people in poverty—only the rate (percentage). The Center on Budget tables may be more useful if you need the number of people. 

• However, these tables have three geographic levels (state, congressional district, and metropolitan area), while the Center on Budget tables include just state data.  If you want to educate your member of Congress, or local officials who might be persuaded to speak out on these policies, about poverty among their constituents, data on the smaller geographies may be very helpful. 

• These tables use the civil rights race and ethnicity reporting recommendation, since we believe that access to needed services should be considered a civil right. Therefore, these tables use the White alone, not Latino category and for every other category they use the race alone or in combination category including both Hispanic/Latinos and non-Hispanic Latinos; they also provide the Hispanic/Latino data for those of any race. 

Data on poverty, housing, health insurance, and other elements of human needs 

Our state data resource library includes state data and often congressional district and metro data on a wide range of human needs that may be valuable both for policy debates at the federal level and in your community.  

It includes all the data on poverty discussed above. It also includes data on median income for your state and congressional district, broken out by race and ethnicity, which may be useful in a wide range of debates. 

If there are fights over housing benefits such as rental vouchers or investments in affordable housing,  you may find the following data useful in documenting how many people in your community struggle to pay for housing. 

• Data on housing cost burden (that is, people who pay more than 30% of their income on housing) by state, Congressional district and metropolitan area, for owners and for renters, including breakouts by race and ethnicity. 

• Data on severe housing cost burden (people who pay more than 50% of their income on housing), by state and Congressional district, for renters and owners, including breakouts by race and ethnicity;  

• Share of families in poverty for renters and owners, broken out by married families, female headed families, and male headed families, for states and Congressional districts. 

Because we anticipate attacks on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and threats to the premium subsidies for people who buy their insurance in the ACA individual marketplace, we have provided a range of data on health insurance.  

In addition to the data on health insurance provided in the Center on Budget file, we have provided data breaking out the share of people in each state,  congressional district, and many metropolitan areas, by who has public health insurance, private health insurance, or no health insurance, including breakouts by race and ethnicity. We have also included the number of civilian, noninstitutionalized people in these geographies. That’s because that’s the number of people who need health insurance; members of the military and institutionalized people are assured health coverage through the government.  

We have also provided data on access to health insurance and type of health insurance by age group and income level, by state and Congressional district. These can help you show the impact of proposed cuts to Medicaid or ACA.  Threats to the ACA may specifically affect people at certain income levels (between 150% and 200% of poverty for example), and for certain ages (children, working age adults, or seniors).  

These charts should let you determine, for example, how many working age people with incomes between 50% and 100% of poverty in  your community would be affected by a proposal to eliminate Medicaid eligibility for that age group, or to create onerous and unworkable work documentation requirements in order to access Medicaid.  

You can incorporate this state, metro area or congressional district data in fact sheets you create about issues most important to you, or in letters you write to elected officials.  The data you will find in our poverty and state data resource libraries is not as conveniently found elsewhere, so it is likely you will be sharing data not readily available.   

Our toolkit with tips on scheduling meetings and otherwise communicating with representatives and senators incorporates use of these data tables, and we hope you will also find the data helpful in other ways.