Stamford has eclipsed Hartford as Connecticut’s third largest city, after growing by more than 2,200 residents between July 2010 and July 2012, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday.

“That’s the direction we want the arrows to go,” Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia said this week, expressing pride in the fact that his hometown was making moves on the rankings.

In total, Connecticut grew by roughly 13,700 residents, holding steady as the nation’s 29th largest state, the bureau reports.

The vast majority of the state’s growth occurred in the Southwestern corner. Fairfield County as a whole increased by slightly more than 15,000 residents, growing more than five times as much as Hartford County, which was the second-fastest growing. At the same time, Litchfield County’s population decreased by 2,211 residents, while Middlesex and Tolland counties decreased by 40 and 1,205 respectively.

Each of Southwestern Connecticut’s five largest cities and towns – Bridgeport, Stamford, Norwalk, Danbury and Greenwich – posted population gains over the two-year period, with the most rapid growth occurring in Danbury, where the population increased by a little more than 2 percent. But among the 25 largest communities in Connecticut, Stamford was the only town or city that shifted its position in the ranking.

“To sum it up in one concise term, I think it’s the ‘value proposition’ that Stamford offers that attracts new residents,” Pavia said. “The jobs that are here, the housing stock that is here and the overall city itself and what we have to offer: Excellent parks; Good traffic flow throughout the city; Infrastructure improvements. There are a number of positive things that people look for when they’re relocating.”

The city has seen a considerable boom in certain areas, including the new Harbor Point development on Stamford’s South End, which is adding thousands of luxury housing units to the existing stock, attracting a younger, more affluent crowd to the formerly working-class section of town. And the development isn’t over yet.

The Census estimates are based on a July 1, 2012 count; at that time roughly 900 of the projected 4,000 Harbor Point units were constructed, meaning most of the area’s growth still lies ahead.

“I think we’re on the lower rung of a ladder that will continue to move upward,” said Pavia, who was a developer and city planner before taking over the reins as Stamford’s mayor in 2009. “I think that yes, what’s taking place right now in Harbor Point and in downtown Stamford, the volume of units being built is probably at the high point, but I think that other development will follow, and that business growth will follow that as well.

“The pace and speed at which the apartment buildings are being built may dip a little bit, though I don’t think it will. But I think you’ll see a second wave,” Pavia continued.

The “first wave” has already taken a toll on the city’s public school system, which has seen an increase of 615 students (8. 6 percent) across 12 elementary schools since the fall of 2009. District officials expect those numbers to increase by another 300 children when the 2013-2014 academic year begins, a reality that caused the school board to add 20 elementary school teachers to the district’s payroll for next year, including seven kindergarten positions. But that’s just the short-term fix.

Five of Stamford’s 12 elementary schools are now brimming over their recommended capacity, and the Board of Education recently commissioned an analysis of the city’s future growth and the physical demands it will place on the district, in an effort to begin planning for the possibility of additional schools.

“We basically have next year to really be in a place where we have to reassess all the information, and the Board is going to have to find a short-term and long-term goal to address where the population spurts are happening,” Schools Superintendent Winifred Hamilton said this week.

Planning for the growth is taxing, but Hamilton remains optimistic.

“It’s an exciting time, I think for the Board, the community and our schools,” said Hamilton.

The Avon Theatre is the center of a vibrant night life area just south of Latham Park on Bedford Street. Trafffic flows by leaving trails of tail lights and patrons of the movies and restaurants hurry along the sidewalks in the cold. by Paul Desmarais/ Staff Photo

Much of the growth in Stamford student population is attributed to the fact that a large share of the city’s new residents are young professionals or young families, drawn to the city for proximity to jobs at the various global businesses, like UBS, RBS and Starwood Hotels & Resorts, that have moved in over the past several years.

As the first Connecticut city on the train route from Manhattan, Stamford’s proximity helps boost its appeal to young New Yorkers ready to begin the next stage of their lives in the suburbs, said Stamford’s director of economic development, Laure Aubuchon.

“There are a lot of shoreline communities, but Stamford is more than that,” she said. “We also have North Stamford, so we have a wide swath of land mass with golf courses, parks and beaches, and compared to other cities in Connecticut, we have restaurants and a night life.”

Just look around, said Pavia.

“If you go downtown, or to Harbor Point or Chelsea Piers, you’ll notice there are a lot of young people, and they visit the restaurants and the stores and they spend, creating jobs wherever they’re spending,” the mayor said.

That comes in two parts.  There’s the single, yuppy invasion, which can be witnessed along Summer and Main Streets on a Saturday night, as the music and laughter permeate the walls of bars and restaurants like bartaco and Tiernan’s. And as indicated by the school burst, there’s also a flood of young families.

“If we’re attracting young people from New York City to come out here and work, then they like Stamford, and when they come to settle down with their families, they think of us,” Aubuchon said.

Both Aubuchon and Pavia said they see this current population growth merely as a predictor of future surges. And Aubuchon said she thinks Stamford could overtake New Haven to claim the No. 2 spot within the next few years.

“If you just do a pure mathematical equation, I would say you can almost take New Haven in five or six years, assuming the same growth rates,” she said.

If all things were equal, and the rates of growth for both cities were to remain steady – with Stamford growing by 1.85 percent every two years, while New Haven grows by 0.76 percent – the two cities would be just about neck-and-neck in 2020, with New Haven up by roughly 100 people. By 2022, Stamford would take the title of Connecticut’s second largest city with a little more than 137,000 residents, about 1,300 more than New Haven would have. And Bridgeport’s crown as the state’s largest municipality would be safe in its hands, with more than 156,000 residents.

But all things aren’t equal in the lifecycle of a city. While Stamford has grown steadily since it sat at the fifth-largest city, just behind Waterbury, in the 1990 decennial census, New Haven’s population dipped by about 7,000 residents between 1990 and 2000, before growing in the following decade.

“Who knows? It makes me feel good that our growth rate is at a faster rate than New Haven,” Aubuchon said.

Regardless of if and when Stamford assumed the role as the state’s second largest city in the coming years, the mayor, who has opted out of running for a second term, said he thinks Stamford could be a city of more than 150,000 people in time.

“I think it has all the components of a great major city,” he said.

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

The U.S. Census Bureau released a report Tuesday that showed the per-pupil expenditure across the nation decreased in 2011, for the first time since the bureau began collecting the data in 1977. On average, districts across the country spent $10,560 per pupil that year, down 0.4 percent from 2010.

We checked out public records of what districts here in Southwestern Connecticut spend per pupil. The most recent data available from the State was from 2010, and it shows that all but one town in our area spent more than $10,560, as well as the roughly $10,600 spent on average in 2010. In fact, the per-pupil spending in several towns wasn’t far off from double that figure.

According to the census, “the top spenders were New York ($19,076), the District of Columbia ($18,475), Alaska ($16,674), New Jersey ($15,968) and Vermont ($15,925).” While Southwestern Connecticut didn’t have any towns with higher rates than New York or D.C., there were several that outspent Alaska. The same wasn’t true on the flip side.

The five states with the lowest per-pupil expenditure were Mississippi (7,928), Arizona ($7,666), Oklahoma ($7,587), Idaho ($6,824) and Utah ($6,212). But the 2010 numbers for Southwestern Connecticut show there isn’t a single district below the $10,000 mark, nor would there be with a 0.4 percent reduction.

A 50-acre estate in Greenwich came on the market this week for $190 million.

When the 50-acre estate with sweeping views of Cos Cob Harbor hit the market with a $190 million price tag Friday, its presence reverberated through the real estate world, taking the title of the nation’s most expensive listing.

“It’s a great property,” said Joseph Barbieri of Sotheby’s International, a real estate firm that had been in the running to represent the estate, which is being listed by David Ogilvy & Associates. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for someone who wants to own acreage. There’s no perfect property in Greenwich, but this is certainly significant.”

Walter Molony, a spokesman at the National Association of Realtors, said 1.8 percent of homes sold across the country in March commanded a final price over the $1 million mark. The association doesn’t even keep track of price clusters any higher than that because “they’re really just outliers,” he said.

But Greenwich real estate is far from a mirror of Anytown, USA.

According to Daisy Kong, a spokeswoman for the real estate website Trulia, eight of the 10 most expensive properties in Connecticut are nestled in Greenwich; the other two are in Old Saybrook and Cornwall.

Currently, 76 percent of the homes listed for sale in Greenwich are asking more than $1 million, and the vast majority are likely to sell over that threshold. According to Trulia, the average sale price of a Greenwich house these days is $1.1 million. Add in 4,000 feet of waterfront, a couple of islands and 12 bedrooms (two of which are oval-shaped), and the ticket price climbs pretty quickly — all the way to a record-shattering $190 million for the property on Indian Field Road, near Greenwich’s Bruce Park.

Before Victorian, French-renaissance mansion, which was built in 1898, made its presence known this week, Greenwich’s most expensive property on the market was actor/director Mel Gibson’s former home, Old Mill Farm. That estate, which boasts more than 15,000 square feet of living space and 75 acres, is listed at $39.5 million, and is represented by Barbieri. Barbieri also holds the title of selling the highest-priced waterfront home in Greenwich: A house on Field Point Road that sold in 2011 for $39.5 million.

But Greenwich’s most expensive sale on the books came in 2004, when an 80-acre mid-century horse farm at 25 Lower Cross Road went for $45 million. While there have been several other eight-figure sales over the years, the nine-digit mark hasn’t yet been hit, despite at least one attempt.

“Take the Helmsley property, which came up on the market for $125 million. That sold for $35 million,” Barbieri said.

The Helmsley estate, a 40-acre property on Round Hill Road, dubbed “Dunnellen Hall,” was once owned by hotel and real estate tycoons Harry and Leona Helmsley, and included an opulent, 28-room mansion. After more than two years on the market, it sold for less than one-third of its asking price in late 2010.

“It’s an honor to sell these kinds of high-priced properties, and the upper end of the market is very saleable, though it does go through cycles. But the one essential thing is the properties have to be reasonably priced. I don’t want to say competitively priced, because some of these properties have no comparable (properties), but they have to be intelligently priced,” Barbieri said.

Even in a town like Greenwich, where median household income is so high that the U.S. Census Bureau can’t quantify it in its typical ranges, listing a property for more than $100 million can be a risk. According to Daisy Kong, a spokeswoman for Trulia, the Greenwich estate joins only four other properties across the nation in that bracket, topping the previous heavyweight title holder, the penthouse at the Pierre Hotel, listed at $125 million and boasting a 360-degree view of Manhattan. Two of the other three nine-figure properties are also in New York, while the fourth is in Miami Beach, Fla.

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying what I think it’s worth. But I think it’s safe to say it’s an ambitious price,” said Barbieri. “It will be interesting to see what happens with that. I’m not quite sure the value is there, but Greenwich is an interesting place.”

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Photo courtesy of Marchex

You’ve gotta be [expletive] kidding me.

A study released this week by the Marchex Institute, a team of analysts and scientists dedicated to analyzing the digital call advertising industry, found that residents of the Nutmeg State spew four-letter words like nobody’s business, landing our state in the top third around the nation for the most likely to swear in a phone call.

The study looked at 600,000 phone calls between residents and businesses over a 12-month period, and analyzed the rate at which people swear during those calls. You name the curse word, and there’s someone in our state who let it loose during this study period.

“When identifying curse words, we were encyclopedic in our search,” said Marchex Vice President John Busby, who performed the analysis. “We tried to find as many as we could, though A, F and S comprised most of what was said.”

But before you get out the bar soap in preparation to sud up the inside of your mouth, you should know that as sailors go, Connecticut’s not all that bad.

“Connecticut was right on the cusp between ‘sailors’ and ‘occasionally profane’. So I’m sorry to say you didn’t rank in the top 10 for that,” Busby said during a phone interview Friday afternoon, noting that in total, Connecticut came in No. 16. And we can be thankful that we’re no Ohio.

On the flip side, Connecticut was also ranked one of the more courteous states in the nation, for the rate at which residents used the words “please” and “thank you” during the phone calls analyzed, but much like our foul-mouth frequency, our sugar and spice wasn’t over the top, according to Busby.

“Connecticut was also toward the bottom of the courteous states, so Connecticut was one of those states where you showed up as being both courteous and predisposed to cursing, which is kind of funny,” Busby said.

Seriously guys. WTF?

A vintage postcard showing Main Street in Derby/File Photo

Back in 1934, before Interstate 95 and other major connectors were built to patch together the disparate corners of Connecticut, the State completed an aerial survey of every inch of the Nutmeg State to document state land. The result is a massive amount of data that other states can only dream of. If you want to see what your neighborhood, block or street looked like 79 years ago, you can.

And now, thanks to a collaborative project between Trinity College and the University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center, how every square foot of this state has changed over the decades. The groups have stitched together the images and now offer a fascinating tool, which allows internet users to view any address in the state back in 1934, next to what it looks like now.

In some of these towns and cities, you’ll see a wholesale change, as farm pastures have been transformed into residential villages. In others, you’ll see the square boxes indicating houses in 1934 transform into a more urban, downtown commercial feel. And yes, the shady dots you see by the thousand in 1934 that have mysteriously disappeared by the 2013 version are trees. Some of the most interesting changes occur in towns where you can say major highways, like Route 8 or Interstate 95 pop up in the time between the two photos.

So without further ado, in honor of #ThrowbackThursday, here’s a peek at what the address of each Southwestern Connecticut town or city’s Town Hall looked like in 1934, and what it looks like these days.

And in case you’re curious, you can look up your own neighborhood (or anyone else’s for that matter) at the MAGIC website here.

Across the nation, renters account for more than one in three residents of occupied housing units, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, the rate is a little bit lower at 28.8 percent.

If we were to compare the national rate of renters with the rate in a local community, Norwalk would be the one town in Southwestern Connecticut that comes closest to sharing the national profile. In Norwalk, 34.9 percent of occupied housing units are home to renters, while 65.1 percent are home to owners, making the city just slightly more renter-heavy than the nation, which hovers at 33.9 percent.

While there’s nothing incredibly out of the ordinary about the number of percentage of renters in Southwestern Connecticut when compared to the national figures, the growing share of renters in towns like Norwalk is climbing at a much faster rate than it is nationally. In 2005, only 38.6 percent of Norwalk’s occupied units were home to renters, but an addition of thousands of units to the rental market between then and 2011 helped push Norwalk ahead of the national average.

Similarly, other local cities have seen their rental rates increase at a faster rate than the rest of the nation between 2005 and 2011, according to census data, including Bridgeport, which has climbed from 51.1 percent to 55.4 percent and Stamford, which inched up a bit more slowly from 42.3 percent to 43.6 percent.

But what is it that keeps the overall share of renters in our area so low when such a large share of residents in the area’s biggest cities are renters? It’s those tiny towns, holding down the fort for owners. Fourteen of the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut have an 85 percent share of owners or greater, including the town of Easton, where only 2.6 percent of residents are renting.

FAIRFIELD – Marisa Torrieri Bloom sat on the kitchen floor of the house she rents in Fairfield, knees crossed and bending over, as she lifted a blue and green spoon to her 10-month-old son’s lips. It was dinner time in the Bloom household, and since her son, Nathan, was feeling under the weather, Bloom took the banana puree to a place he would be more comfortable than his high chair where he usually eats.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom spends some time with her son Nathan, 10 months, after work at their home on Andrassy Avenue in Fairfield, Conn. on Wednesday May 8, 2013. The Bloom family is part of a trend where couples are waiting until later in life to have children.

“I never thought this would be my life,” said Bloom, 37, who is originally from Silver Spring, Md., but spent her late 20s and early 30s living in New York City.

“If you’d told me a few years ago that right now I would be in Fairfield County about to buy a house with a little baby, I would have thought that was the most boring thing ever,” she said.

It doesn’t seem so boring this Mother’s Day. These days, it’s pretty blissful — and a little stressful, when she factors in her full-time writing job and part-time gig as a guitar teacher. And after worrying whether she would be able to have her first child at age 36, Bloom said she is thrilled to have Nathan and her husband Zack by her side.

Here in Southwestern Connecticut, women have children later in their lives than in most other parts of the country.

The Bridgeport-Stamford Metropolitan Statistical Area — which covers the same ground as the footprint of Fairfield County — has the second highest percentage of 35- to 50-year-old mothers in the nation. In total, census data shows that a little more than 36 percent of Fairfield County mothers who gave birth within a recent year were in that age bracket, lagging slightly behind the No. 1 metropolitan area: Boulder, Colo.

Nationally, the figure is much lower, at about 20 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“I’ve been working in the Stamford area since 1995, and we have many women who are 35 to 45 having children — not necessarily their first child — but many women having a child then,” said Dr. Elisabeth Aronow, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Fairfield County OB-Gyn, who spends most of her time practicing in Stamford and Darien.

Darien’s rates of new moms between ages 35 and 50 are even higher than the Fairfield County norm. Of the 25 towns in Southwestern Connecticut with at least 100 births in a recent year, the town had the second highest percentage of moms in that age bracket, at 64 percent. It was barely outranked by New Fairfield, where 66.9 percent of births were to women between ages 35 and 50.

Part of the reason there is such a high percentage of older women having babies is likely because women begin the motherhood process at a much later age in Connecticut. While Aronow noted that not all children delivered to an older mother will be the first child in the birth order, the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics shows Connecticut and New Jersey were tied for having the second-oldest average age of a mother at first birth in 2006, at 27.2 years old, just behind Massachusetts’s 27.7 average age.

That year, the average age across the nation was 25, but while the NCHS said there are no more current figures for state-by-state breakdowns, the national average has continued to creep up slowly in recent years, to 25.4 years old in 2010 — a trend that a NCHS spokesman said is likely to be mirrored in Connecticut.

The reason for older moms in the Nutmeg State is multifaceted, but in a paper published by the Pew Research Center on Friday, Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based “fact tank” wrote that a record share of new moms are now college educated, which can have a significant effect on the age at which mothers give birth.

In 2011, roughly two out of three mothers had at least some college education, up from about one in two in 1990, according to Livington’s report.

“And I would expect that in more affluent areas, where women have more education, it’s not a surprise that they would tend to be older when they have babies,” Livingston said Friday morning.

Fairfield County women, on the whole, are more educated than women across the nation. In this area, 39.7 percent of women who are 18 or older hold at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 25.7 percent nationally.

Not only does earning a four-year or advanced degree often lead to delaying a marriage or the decision to become parents by several years simply to make time for education, there is also a high correlation between well-educated couples and the traditional order of marriage followed by parenthood, Livingston said.

Especially in Southwestern Connecticut.

“A number of people wait,” Aronow said. “Having children is one along the list of things to be ready for. It’s ‘We need our dog. We need our house, and then we can consider having children . . . I think there are many people around here with that Type-A personality, and everything has a time and an order for it to fit in.”

Marisa and Zack Bloom, both of whom hold a master’s degree, followed that order in their relationship, and after beginning to date in May 2008, when Marisa was 32, they found the pressure mounting to kick things into high gear. They were married in August of 2010, and began trying to conceive after about a year.

“I was very tense about the fact that I would be getting married at 34, and 35 was like this number I had in my head: ‘Must start before I turn 35. Must start before I turn 35.’ So I feel like it did start getting more prominent in the back of my head,” Marisa Bloom said.

“I mean, my parents were at my throat. They were like, ‘You know, we had two kids by the time we were 33,’” she said with a laugh.

When Marisa was born in 1976, the average age for a mother to give birth for the first time was 24.6 years old, and her mother was a few years older than that. Nathan is the first grandchild for Marisa’s parents in Maryland, and Zack’s parents who still live in Wilton where he grew up.

The pressure didn’t seem as heavy for Zack, who is seven years younger than his wife, and celebrated his 30th birthday last summer.

“I never had any pressure. I just knew I didn’t want to be an older dad when my kids were in high school and college, and I knew that people around here get married later, so this is more normal,” he said. “I’m a high-energy person, so I wanted to be able to play sports and be an active father with my kids. And in my late 20s and early 30s, I figured then I would be in my late 40s or early 50s when they’re in high school and college, so I could still be cool.”

The timing worked out for the couple, who said they plan to begin trying for a second baby in a few months, when Marisa has finished nursing Nathan.

“It’s funny, like would I space it out if I could?” Marisa asked. “That’s such a hard question to answer, because I don’t have the option of not spacing it out. But it’s good, fortuitous, that I want to try this summer because there really is no other choice.”

It still comes as a shock to Marisa when she examines her life from the outside. After living in the New York City bubble for so many years, where she felt like she was “living in an ageless place,” she still has trouble realizing she is 37 already — and that life is more baby gates and feeding time than Brooklyn bars and concerts.

“Life actually began for me when I was 30,” she said, spooning out another dose of the banana puree, some of which had made its way into her long blonde hair, courtesy of Nathan’s sticky fingers.

“We just had an offer accepted on a house in Fairfield,” she said. “It’s weird because now I feel like I really am a grownup. I have the house, a kid, a husband. It’s like it’s all complete.”

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Mother’s Day is coming on Sunday, and in honor of the holiday, we decided to take a peek at mothers around Southwestern Connecticut to get a sense for how they compare to mothers across the country.

Nationally, about 6 in 10 new mothers are a part of the labor force, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Here in Connecticut the rate is a bit higher, at 66.9 percent. But you’ll find a lot of variation from town to town — some that you would expect, and some that you wouldn’t. For instance, would you have guessed that working moms are actually less common in Stamford than they are in New Canaan?

We picked through census data to compare the rates of working mothers across the 31 towns in Southwestern Connecticut, but there were a few towns we had to leave off the list, due to a low number of births, which could skew the numbers (Easton, Monroe, Redding, Seymour, Sherman and Weston all had fewer than 100 births registered in the newest census data set and were left off the analysis). On the whole, Southwestern Connecticut lined up with the national trends; 14 of the 25 towns had a higher percentage of working moms than the national average.

But there were also some outliers. Across America, there is only one state with fewer than half of new moms in the labor force: Utah, with 49.1 percent. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, there are six towns with figures even lower than Utah’s, including Westport, which had the fewest working new mothers at 34 percent.

Stay tuned for a special Sunday edition of Trending in this week’s paper for more on motherhood in Southwestern Connecticut!

“This is a more diverse electorate than ever before,” said Robert Bernstein, a spokesperson for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Here in Connecticut, black voter turnout has not yet overshadowed white turnout, but the trend is pushing that way. In 1996, only 32.6 percent of black voters made their way to the polls to decide the race between President Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. But in 2012, when President Barack Obama faced off challenger Mitt Romney, that rate was 30 percentage points higher, coming in at a 62.2 percent turnout rate for black voters – only 3.6 percentage points lower than white turnout, closing a gap that had been 30 percentage points wide 16 years earlier.

Voting at Cesar Batalla School, in Bridgeport, Conn. on Election Day, Nov. 6th, 2012.

That rate of shift is much quicker than the national rate, according to a new report, released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, which found that “since 1996, Black voting rates have gone from trailing those of non-Hispanic Whites by about 8 percentage points to surpassing them in 2012.”

It’s difficult to say what this will mean for the American electorate, said Ronal Schurin, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.

“President Obama won this election because he had not just a very high percentage of minority votes, but because the turnout was high, and there are some who speculate the turnout was high among African Americans in particular,” Schurin said Wednesday. And there is one theory about the key factor that tipped the scales in that direction.

“President Obama has a special appeal to African American voters in the same way that President Kennedy did for Roman Catholic voters,” Schurin said. “There was a special dynamic in the 2012 presidential election and I’m going to be very interested to see what happens in the midterm elections in 2014.”

The increasing black turnout is certainly part of an upward trend, but it isn’t easy to predict how that will continue in 2016 if the candidates aren’t black themselves. Though there is one thing that Schurin said is certain: The Republican Party has a choice to make.

“The Republican Party’s percentage among white voters is very high,” said Schurin. “They can try as (President) Bush did in 2004, to increase turnout in white voters by making a really concerted campaign and make up for the discrepancy that way. Or they can try to increase their appeal among minority voters.”

If the demographic shift of the nation is any indicator, the only way to sustain growth over the long term for the Republican Party would be to widen their appeal among black and Hispanic voters.

According to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation will be one of minority majority in 30 years’ time, meaning that by the time 2043 rolls around, there will be fewer white citizens than there will non-white citizens in America.

And while the black population will continue to grow, the growth in Hispanic residents will continue its strong surge in the next few decades. In a research paper published by the Washington, D.C.-based fact tank The Pew Research Center, researchers declared that by 2050, this Hispanic population could account for as much as 29 percent of the nation’s population, up from 17 percent today. At the same time, black population would increase from 12 to 13 percent, as the Asian population climbs from 5 percent to 9 percent. At the same time, the white population’s share of the total nation would fall from 63 percent in 2011 to 47 percent in 2050, according to Pew.

The Hispanic population has been growing more quickly than all other ethnic groups for several years now, and that swing has also been seen at the voting booth.

“Nationally, we found that the voting rates (for the Hispanic population) were much lower than for blacks and non-Hispanic whites,” said Bernstein. “But even if their rates didn’t change, the fact that the Hispanic population is growing does give them a larger share of the electorate.”
At the time of the 1996 election, there were 18.4 million Hispanic Americans living in the country; by last November that number had almost doubled to 35.2 million people, and the number of those Americans casting ballots more than doubled from 4.9 million in 1996 to 11.2 million in 2012.

In Connecticut, the number of Hispanic voters increased from 49,000 in 1996 to 103,000 in 2012, according to the census. Still, the turnout rate among Hispanic voters in Connecticut has only increased by 13.7 percent since 1996, which is significantly lower than the 21.3 percent increase seen nationally.

This means the majority of the increase is due to the larger share of the population held by Hispanic Americans these days, rather than an upswing of voting among members of the Hispanic community. But even with lower turnout rates than white and black voters, the Hispanic population is growing enough to add to the changing landscape of American voters, which will likely spur changes in the way candidates run their campaigns in the near future.

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

APs are challenging exams given to high school students after they’ve completed coursework for what is essentially a college-level class. And if the students pass (with a score of 3, 4 or 5 out of 5), they’re eligible for college credit at most major institutions. But passing an AP exam isn’t always an easy thing to do.

We searched through records from Connecticut’s State Department of Education to see just how well students in the southwestern corner of the state are doing on these tests. It turns out they’re doing better than students across the state, on whole. According to test data from the 2011 academic year, which is the most recent year on file, 18.7 percent of Connecticut 12th graders earned a score of 3 or higher on at least one AP test that year. But here in Southwestern Connecticut, 21 of the 36 high schools had higher percentages than that, including two schools where more than half of the senior class did so. See how your school stacks up here: