Skip to Content
  Contact Us

Notes from Regional Strategic, Ltd.

USAID and the Business Implications of Data Disappearance

Yesterday, Regional Strategic, Ltd. was asked to evaluate the effect shutting down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) would have on demand for agricultural commodities in a specific area of the Midwest. We had to decline the project. After looking at available data, we found that, in shutting down the USAID website, the administration had denied citizens and the business community the ability to evaluate what had been lost and plan for the alternatives that remained.

The question is not trivial. It appears that USAID acquired approximately $1.8 billion in U.S. food products to support its activities in 2022. Every $100 million spent on food production and processing in the upper Midwest generates approximately

  • $100 to $120 million in value-added economic activity within the Midwest
  • $55 to $70 million in labor income
  • $30 to $65 million in corporate profits and tax revenue
  • 1,000 jobs

Any of these estimates could be increased 18 times to accommodate the $1.8 billion demand loss from eliminating USAID. All of these totals would go up if the impact was evaluated across the entire United States.

Clearly, local regions that are heavily invested in commodity production and processing would like to evaluate what portion of existing demand is being taken off the table:

  • Every $100 million reduction in 2022 Iowa corn purchases in Iowa would have been equivalent to idling over 75,500 acres of 200-bushel corn
  • A similar reduction for wheat in Kansas would have been equivalent to idling over 310,000 acres of 37-bushel wheat

The sudden lack of data with which to evaluate these impacts on local areas is a business issue. It is a family welfare issue. It is an employment issue. It is a public policy issue.

This is not limited to the situation involving USAID. In the first two weeks of the present administration, data access has been restricted in the areas of health care, climate, and weather forecasting where those data run counter to the administration’s political inclinations. This is bad for business, and it is dangerous.

Health data is being restricted at a time when the United States is experiencing a growing bird flu epidemic, Africa is experiencing renewed Ebola outbreaks, and drug-resistant tuberculosis is becoming more prevalent worldwide. Any one of these situations could rapidly become an international health problem. Any one of these is a personal safety issue. Each of these could rapidly become a workforce issue.

Weather and climate data are critical for construction, shipping, food production, tourism, energy distribution, and many other industries. Data on income, trade, consumption expenditures, and demographics are critical to any business doing market, workforce, or facility siting analysis. In any of these cases, businesses that rely on private vendor subscriptions are not immune, as their private vendors all depend upon public data sources as foundations for their models.

Given the rapidity of data “Disappearances” in the first two weeks of the administration, we don’t expect it to stop. There is plenty of information that contradicts the administrations political proclivities in the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census, the Energy Information Administration, the International Trade Administration, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies. We anticipate that many of these sources will disappear or become restricted in the coming months. Restriction of any one of these would have major implications for significant portions of the economy.

The situation is made more critical by online data access and delivery. Thirty years ago, data histories for all these sources were published and available in libraries across the country. That is no longer the case. Unless restrictions are anticipated and data is downloaded, catalogued, and stored, even data histories will be unavailable. The reduction in publication and distribution costs has resulted in more and better data over the intervening period, but it has also put citizens and business at risk under the current administration.

There has always been public data that made elected officials uncomfortable. The current difference is that the administration is not willing to address and live with its discomforts – opting instead to eliminate the evidence of its contradictions.

THIS IS A BUSINESS ISSUE. It is time for businesses to step up to help resolve it.

Those are my two cents. Spend them as you will.

Demographic Analysis of Votes Cast

We have recently been engaged in some demographic analysis of voter data here at Regional Strategic, Ltd. While a lot of news is made with exit polls on election day, those polls are seldom representative of the population as a whole. News organizations position pollsters at select stations, but they don’t have the resources to cover the gamut of socio-economic areas represented by precincts nationwide. They rely on sampling frames (see our November 24, 2024 blog at www. regionalstrategic.com/wp/the-moveable-middle-statistics-information-progress/ for some thoughts on sampling frames) which rely on expert insights that may have as much to do with news value as with statistical coverage.

After the fact, substantial voter analysis can be done with official statistics. Regional Strategic, Ltd. is supporting some analysis in Iowa utilizing data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office:

  • The January 6, 2025 release of the Iowa Voter Registration Database. This includes all Iowa voter registrations on January 6 and information on their voting history. January 6 is the first release that includes 2024 general election information for all current registrants.
  • The Official Canvass by County, which includes vote totals, undervotes, and overvotes for every state and federal office contested in the election on a county level.
  • Precinct Results by County, which brings vote counts down to a precinct level.

The Iowa Voter Registration Database is the largest of these. It comes in at more than 2.2 million records with 132 fields. It offers information on voter age, sex, location (address, county, precinct) and voting history. It comes in multiple files for each of four congressional districts.

The first step is to combine files by district. The entire state is too big to conveniently handle in Excel. The 3rd Congressional District was consolidated and cleaned up. There are always some broken and/or incomplete files. This isn’t due to malfeasance or incompetence. In a world where taxpayers insist on paring government functions to the bone, there simply is not enough help to adequately process the masses of data and sources of data that must be reconciled. This scarcity of resources is also evident in the period of two months that is necessary to release files after an election.

The 2025 registration file is an improvement over recent periods. Only 10 damaged records were encountered in the 569,000 records for the 3rd Congressional District. These were all successfully reconciled into 4 complete records. As a result, the 3rd Congressional District file for analysis contained 568,994 registration records. The fields were checked to make certain all general 2024 election results were in the proper field (this year they were – another improvement). At this point, we had a data file for analysis.

Original fields allow data to be separated by county and precinct. These generate fields for national and statewide offices, and local election districts. Age, sex, and political affiliation (if any) are also recorded. In areas where political parties organize on the basis of neighborhood groups, a field can be inserted to identify these if they are defined in terms of groups of precincts.

The graph below shows the number of registered voters and the number of votes cast by sex and party as percentages of total registrations and votes for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District.

Similar representations can be made by age group, sex by age group, or age group by sex. Any of these can be done statewide or by

  • Congressional district
  • Any state legislative district
  • County
  • Precinct
  • Any other jurisdiction that can be created with these groups

The graph below represents the same data splits as the graph above. This time, however, the area is Polk County. Polk is by far the most populous of the 21 counties that make up Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. It accounts for approximately 61 percent of registered voters in the district and approximately 61 percent of district votes cast in the 2024 general election.

In both Polk County and the 3rd Congressional District, Democrats are dependent upon female voters and Republicans are dependent upon male voters. Both of these groups are significantly more likely to vote than any other groups depicted in the graphs.

Also apparent is the size of the independent group. In the 3rd Congressional District, Independents are the largest registered voter block. In Polk County, they are the second largest block. Independents do not turn out at the same rates as Republicans and Democrats, but the potential size of the block means it has significant impacts on elections.

We can take the voter results derived from the Iowa Voter Registration Database and blend them with candidate results from the Official Canvass by County and Precinct Results by County to get a pretty good estimate of the number of Independents who voted for candidates of either party. Without accounting for undervotes (registrants that voted in the election but did not vote in this contest) or overvotes (registrants that voted for too many candidates in this contest and, thus, had their votes voided), we can roughly estimate that 47.5% of voting Independents voted for the Democratic candidate for congress and 44.4% voted for the Republican candidate in the race for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District seat. In Polk County, 51.2% voted for the Democratic candidate and 41.8% voted for the Republican candidate in the race. In neither area do the totals sum to 100%. Accounting for overvotes and undervotes (which could be done with available data) would push up all of these percentages. It is also nearly certain that some Independents (as well as some Republicans and Democrats) placed write-in votes for unlisted candidates.

This work is ongoing as inquiries for election analysis come in. Regional Strategic, Ltd. has the data in-house to work on 2024 general election results for Iowa. Data for other states can be obtained. Analysis is possible by age, sex, political affiliation and region to the extent that any individual state’s database will support.

Interested in Learning More About Regional Strategic, Ltd.? Send Us a Message