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Video: 220 years of US population changes in one map

As far as Census facts and figures go, the mean center of population one can seem like an odd one to track.

Its calculation rests on a few hypotheticals. If you had a big weightless, flat, rigid map of the US, and if everyone in the US weighed the same, and if you could somehow try to balance that entire map full of identically-weighted people on some sort of fulcrum, the mean center of population is where it would balance.

But that one datapoint says a lot about the US's demographic changes and even its history over 220 years, as our video shows you.

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