Red vs. Blue: Who's about to be screwed the most by SNAP benefits ending?

Last month I posted an analysis of total enrollment in ACA health insurance exchange coverage nationally which broke the data out by Congressional District partisan lean as well as according to what percent of the vote Donald Trump received a year ago.

My conclusion? Around 20% more QHP/BHP enrollees live in House districts won by Republicans than those won by Democrats last fall…but there’s still an awful lot of blue district residents who are getting hit hard.

Over 26 million Americans in BOTH red and blue districts & states are going to be screwed in the near future if the enhanced tax credits are allowed to expire & the PAPI change is kept in place, and millions of them will lose healthcare coverage completely.

Today, with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits also about to be cut off to over 40 million Americans by Congressional Republicans, I decided to take a similar look at how that breaks out along partisan lines.

For this, I used this breakout by Congressional District from the Food Research & Action Center, which looks SNAP enrollment by U.S. House district, based on the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey using 5-year estimates.

It's important to note that the FRAC analysis data looks at SNAP households, not total recipients. When I break the districts out by party, it comes out like so:

The first thing to note is that there are more people living in GOP-held districts than Dem-held ones, which makes sense since Republicans hold 220 House districts (including the currently vacant seats in TN & TX) vs. 216 for Democrats (when you include DC's non-voting Representative).

Next, note that the average number of people per household is virtually identical between the two: 2.63 in red districts vs. 2.62 in blue ones, so that checks out (also, 2.63 x 15.0 million = ~39.5 million which is pretty close to the actual 41.7 million SNAP recipients nationally according to CBPP.

With that understood, there are around 20% more SNAP households in BLUE districts per capita than in red districts.

In other words, the exact opposite of the breakout of ACA exchange healthcare coverage enrollees. Huh.

As I did with before, I've also broken out all 436 districts into 10 groups along the partisan spectrum based on Trump's 2024 vote percent:

...which looks like this graphically:

I should also note, however, this article by the Pew Research Center, which cites 2020 data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of income and Program Participation:

What do we know about food stamp recipients in the U.S.?

The most comprehensive data source we have is the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, although its most recent data is from 2020. That year, 23.6 million SNAP recipients (63%) were adults, and 13.8 million (36%) were children.

Non-Hispanic White people accounted for 44.6% of adult SNAP recipients and 31.5% of child recipients in 2020. About 27% of both adult and child recipients were Black. Hispanic people, who can be of any race, accounted for 21.9% of adult recipients and 35.8% of child recipients.

The vast majority of both adult and child recipients were born in the United States – 82.3% and 97.1%, respectively.

Among adult recipients, 62.4% had a high school diploma or less education in 2020. And despite the program’s work requirements, 61.6% said they had not been employed at all that year.

The Census Bureau also looked at households where at least one person received SNAP benefits. More than six-in-ten of these households (61.7%) reported having no children in 2020, including 34.4% who were people living alone. More than 40% of SNAP-receiving households were in the South, the highest percentage of any region.

So, while there are definitely more SNAP beneficiaries living in blue districts than red ones, the demographics of those beneficiaries seem somewhat more likely to match up with traits generally associated with Republicans than Democrats.

In the end, the only conclusion I can really draw from this is that, just like with ACA enrollees seeing their health insurance premiums skyrocket, a shitload of Americans across the political spectrum are about to find themselves very hungry.