What is the most ‘Connecticut’ county in the state?

Which county in Connecticut best represents the Nutmeg State's overall demographic makeup?

According to a Hearst Connecticut analysis of 2020 U.S. Census data (the most recent available), it's New Haven County. Hearst Connecticut compared five demographic characteristics (share of adults, white, Black, Asian and Hispanic residents) to the overall makeup of the state to see which county best represented Connecticut as a whole. The analysis revealed that New Haven County's share of adults, white, Black, Asian and Hispanic residents varied no more than 3 percentage points from the state's share, and made it the most “Connecticut” county in the state.

To calculate how similar each county was to Connecticut overall, we calculated a metric called a z-score for each characteristic. Z-scores measure how different a county's statistic is from the state average, and a z-score of 0 indicates that the county statistic is identical to the state average. We then summed the five z-scores to create a “deviation score” for each county. A low deviation scores means the county is more similar to the state, while high scores mean less similarities to the state overall. Below are the deviation scores for each county, measuring how similar it is to the state given the five demographics. Additionally, the characteristics most similar and most different from the state is included for each county.

The county that is the least similar to Connecticut's share of the selected demographics is Litchfield County. In Litchfield County, 91.7 percent of residents identify as white. That's 17.5 percentage points more than the state's overall share 74.2 percent. Additionally, Litchfield County's share of Black and Hispanic residents is 9 percentage points less each in comparison to Connecticut's share.

The particular racial demographics were chosen because the groups make up the greatest share of Connecticut residents as a whole. American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders were not included as together they make up less than 0.3 percent of Connecticut's population.

Connecticut's overall share of non-Hispanic white residents is 74.2 percent. Within the counties, the share of white residents varies between 68.8 percent and 91.7 percent, making it the category with the most variation among Connecticut's eight counties.

The state's share of Hispanic residents is 16.4 percent, but variation within the individual counties ranges from 5.7 percent to 20 percent. Fairfield County has the largest share of Hispanic residents at 20 percent, while Litchfield County has the smallest share at 6.6 percent.

The share of residents that identify of non-Hispanic Asian in Connecticut is 4.6 percent. The counties' variation in their shares of Asian residents were relatively small, only deviating between 0.9 and 3.2 percentage points.

The state's share of Black residents is 10.7 percent, though large variations mean some counties have shares of Black residents as low as 1 or 2 percent. Hartford County has the largest share of Black residents in the state at 13.8 percent.

As the last category, data on age was analyzed. The state's share of residents 18 and older is 79.4 percent, and deviations from the state's share were not very large comparatively, with the largest deviation being 3.3 percentage points. Fairfield County is the county with the smallest share of its residents over 18, at 77.5 percent.