Demographics | featured news

White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2043, according to new census projections, part of a historic shift that is already reshaping the nation's schools, workforce and electorate.

The 2012 elections drove home trends that have been embedded in the fine print of birth and death rates, immigration statistics and census charts for years. America is rapidly getting more diverse, and, more gradually, so is its electorate. Nonwhites made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, compared with 20 percent in 2000. Much of that growth is coming from Hispanics.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Some of the results are predictable: yeah, we know, ladies loooove Pinterest (15.4 million more monthly female visitors!) and Reddit is inundated with sexist dudes. (74% of users are men.) But did you know that 62% of Twitter users are women? Or that a shit ton of men are still refusing to give up on Google+?

The 2008 election was a reminder of the demographic forces that are changing America and potentially the political balance in the country. The most diverse electorate in the nation’s history added to the favorable winds that pushed President Obama to victory. He will need the assistance of those shifts even more in 2012 if he is to avoid defeat.

It took only a dozen years for humanity to add another billion people to the planet, reaching the milestone of 7 billion Monday — give or take a few months. Demographers at the United Nations Population Division set Oct. 31, 2011, as the "symbolic" date for hitting 7 billion, while acknowledging that it's impossible to know for sure the specific time or day. Using slightly different calculations, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the 7-billion threshold will not be reached until March.

Well, now we know that Google+ is the equivalent of Alaska in the social networking world: At least two sites tracking Google+ users say more than 73 percent are male.

U.S. Census Bureau demographic data to be released Thursday are expected to show that the Hispanic population of the United States has reached a new milestone, topping 50 million people, demographers told CNN.

Minorities now make up about 35% of the country's population, and about 57% of the population in California. Meanwhile, the white population continues to decline.

Across the nation, the number of minorities continues to rise and the white population continues to decline, according to U.S.