David H. Montgomery

My COVID-19 data newsletter

2021-05-06T01:00:00-05:00

Right after the 2020 election, I launched COVID in Minnesota TODAY, an MPR News data newsletter about Minnesota’s COVID-19 outbreak. I use graphs and data to explain the trends in cases, hospitalizations, vaccinations and more — including breaking down when the data is misleading, or when we just don’t know what’s going to happen. Unfortunately, there’s no good web archive of each edition, but the May 6, 2021 edition is a good example of what the newsletter is like — I estimate when Minnesota might reach 70 percent vaccinated (a threshold just announced for the governor), explain why the vaccination rate has been slowing and how this decline appears different from past dips, discuss whether Minnesota’s recovery was slowing, and experiment with a new way of visualizing a common metric. (MPR News, 05/06/2021)

Biden won big in Minnesota. Why didn’t legislative Democrats?

2020-11-05T00:00:00-06:00

Despite Donald Trump replicating his unprecedented 2016 dominance in rural Minnesota, Biden racked up even bigger wins in Hennepin County on his way to a 7-point statewide win. But even as Biden won Minnesota comfortably, Republicans maintained control of the Minnesota Senate. It’s a split decision that highlights the electoral power of DFL voters in the Twin Cities metro — and the limits of that power. (MPR News, 11/05/2020)

What election 2016 says about 2020

2020-10-29T01:00:00-05:00

Donald Trump nearly won Minnesota by piling up unprecedented wins in rural areas, which were barely offset by Hillary Clinton’s equally unprecedented strength in the Twin Cities. I break down the numbers to understand Minnesota’s shifting political geography and what it might mean for the 2020 election. (MPR News, 10/29/2020)

How to Tell If You Live in the Suburbs

2020-07-20T01:00:00-05:00

The U.S. hasn’t had a formal definition for what constitutes a suburb. A new data analysis comes closer to defining America’s most popular neighborhood type. (CityLab, 07/20/2020)

The Omnibus’ Funeral

2020-04-30T01:00:00-05:00

Since the 1820s horse-drawn carriages had been the backbone of public transit in Paris and other cities around the world. Today the humble bus is the workhorse of public transit, in the nineteenth century it was a novelty. Literary scholar Masha Belenky dubbed it an “engine of modernity” in her new book of the same name, which chronicles the cultural sensation that the omnibus was for nearly a century after its debut — the star of page and stage, and a symbol of the dramatic social and economic changes transforming Paris and France in the nineteenth century. Read my summary of the fantastic, forgotten life of the Parisian omnibus. (Lapham’s Quarterly, 04/30/2020)

We Mapped the Midwest for You, So Stop Arguing

2019-08-08T01:00:00-05:00

People love to fight about the boundaries of the region known as the Midwest. I went one better: I got data. After surveying more than 12,000 people about whether their homes were or were not in the Midwest, here are the results. (CityLab, 08/08/2019)

It’s been 50 years. Why don’t we have moon cities yet?

2019-07-18T01:00:00-05:00

For the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I spoke to scientists, engineers, science fiction authors and other thinkers about why the midcentury dream of lunar cities hasn’t come to pass — and what the prospects for future moon settlement are. (CityLab, 07/18/2019)

How 300 years of urbanization and farming transformed the planet

2019-01-09T00:00:00-06:00

Long before power plants and cars began spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, humans were having a massive effect on the Earth’s climate. It was farming, not factories, that lay behind this earlier anthropogenic transformation of the planet. I visualized this change over 300 years using estimates from a team of scientists, and added context to the data through science and history. (CityLab, 01/09/2019)

CityLab Congressional Density Index

2018-10-05T01:00:00-05:00

I created the CityLab Congressional Density Index, a novel way to categorize every U.S. Congressional District by how rural, suburban or urban it is. This tool let me — and many other major news outlets who used this same tool — quantify the much-discussed importance of the “suburbs” to the 2018 election, when Democrats ultimately won a House majority based on massive wins in suburban districts. See a host of articles using the CDI, as well as the raw data and the code I used to generate it. (CityLab, 10/05/2018)

Who owns their home and who rents in America?

2018-08-08T01:00:00-05:00

What factors influence who rents or owns a home in the United States? I crunched the numbers from the U.S. Census to identify the interlocking effects of age, race, income, time and more on homeownership. (CityLab, 08/08/2018)