Do you know of a good data source for a US demographics data science project?

[Mr. Morden]

I'm in the middle of trying to make a career transition into data science, and as part of the class I'm taking now, I have to do a ~2 or 3 week project on the topic of my choice.  Was thinking about doing something US demographics-related.  Probably not something overtly political, so nothing on US election results.  But maybe something along the lines of predicting population growth by county based on demographic information from each county.  Doesn't have to be that.  That's just an example.  But I don't know where to find a table with demographic info for every county in the country over time.  (Preferably in an easy to read format like a CSV file.)

So wondering if anyone here has insight on this.  Or if not that specifically, then any similar US demographics-based dataset would be of interest.

[Mr. Morden]

Thanks guys.  I appreciate all of your suggestions.  I've been busy this past week, so have not had a lot of time to think about this, and have only just had a chance to browse a couple of the suggestions you've made.  I will need to narrow down my options quite a bit in the next week though.

One thing that I’ll note is that I find webscraping tedious and I’m also not very good at it.  So to the extent that it’s possible, I’m hoping to be able to use datasets that are conveniently already packaged in some readable format, like CSV or just plain text.  E.g., the county_facts.csv file found here:

https://github.com/Viralshah009/INFM600

is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.  Though it would be great to have some of that same info for decades past, and also in an ideal world, from some source other than “some guy on Github”.

[Mr. Morden]

OK, despite the fact that I said I wanted to something more demographics related and not actually political, I have to come up with three different ideas, and one of them will be picked.  So I was thinking maybe for one of my ideas, I could do something with the DW-NOMINATE data on voting similarity between members of Congress.  But I'm not sure if the raw data are available anywhere.  E.g., when I click on the VoteView database link here:

https://voteview.com/about

I get a "404 Not Found" error.  Anyone know if that info is available anywhere these days?