Breaking down SNAP benefits by congressional district

Thanks to the government shutdown, participants in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) are not expected to receive that aid next month. The effects of this could be dire; SNAP, often referred to as food stamps, helps people afford groceries when their incomes are insufficient to do so.

I was curious how the effects of these anticipated cuts would be felt. So I pulled data from the Department of Agriculture (which administers the program) and compared usage to other benchmarks — including electoral data from The Downballot.

There is a very slight correlation between the extent to which a congressional district voted for Kamala Harris last year and the percentage of households in the district that used SNAP in 2024.

(On these charts, the diagonal line shows the trend in the data.)

The stronger correlation, as you would expect, is with poverty levels.

And, inversely, with median incomes.

Perhaps the most useful correlations from a political context, though, are between SNAP usage among particular groups and 2024 voting patterns.

For example, there is a slight correlation between the percentage of disabled residents in a congressional district receiving benefits and the extent to which that district backed Trump. Slight — but stronger than the overall Harris-SNAP correlation.

The same holds for the percentage of kids receiving benefits…

…and the percent of those aged 60 and over who do.

In fact, while the correlation between elderly SNAP recipients and 2024 voting by congressional district is still rather weak, it’s the strongest of those shown above.

In other words, it’s not the case that people in districts that backed Trump will be more affected by SNAP cuts than are those who live in Harris-voting districts. (About 1 percent more households that receive SNAP are in districts that backed the former vice president.) But it is the case that more members of vulnerable populations who receive SNAP benefits (and not just percentages of them) live in districts that also voted for Trump. For example, 8 percent more kids who depend on SNAP live in congressional districts that backed the president.

It is unlikely that this will have much of an effect on the actual political debate.

Photo: A grocery store in Tennessee in 1935. (National Archives)