The fun part of this entry comes near the end.

Amanda Marcotte has some nice things to say about Red State, Blue State and connects our findings with some current political conflicts. She picks up on our theme of perception and reality, that national journalists live in a different world and can have difficulty grasping national voting patterns:

The book definitively answers the perplexing question of our time, which is, “Why do poor people in red states vote against their economic interests?” The answer is, quite simply, they don’t. There is no paradox. To quote Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.”

Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. But I do think there’s a supposition that they’re lower or middle middle class, and not well-educated. That’s based on the illiterate signage, the bad clothes, the obnoxious pride in having bad taste, and of course the mind-bendingly stupid shit they believe. And that’s not just regarding the paranoid fantasies about Obama, but more straightforwardly asinine stuff, like that Medicare isn’t government health care. It’s easy to assume that these folks are just uneducated, and that they’d wise up if they got educated. And of course, the assumption that lack of education correlates with lower income is something that comes from demonstrable facts, so it’s easy to leap to thinking the tea baggers are less wealthy than the liberal elite they carp about.

But wait!, you may say, look, I hate that “liberal elite” shit as much as you do, but they have a point. I mean, are you going to tell me the East Coast isn’t thick with white liberals who dress nicely, have strong opinions on coffee drinks and wine, and all have fancy college degrees and most likely graduate degrees?

Well, of course. Gelman actually talks about that in the book, and how that impacts the image of the “liberal elite”. The data does show that a lot of the professional class leans towards the Democrats. Lawyers, educators, journalists, high level bureaucrats, those sort of people. But those people are far from the majority of college-educated people, and a lot of the time, their salaries are actually lower than the average for people of their education levels, because they swapped out money-making for meaningfulness in their careers. And they cluster where the jobs are. And they socialize with each other. And they begin to think their circle is bigger and more meaningful than it is. Since journalists come from this group of people, they have a megaphone to perpetuate their own stereotypes. . . .

I only regret that we didn’t include all the authors’ names on the front cover of the book, which leads reviewers to forget to credit my collaborators: David Park, Boris Shor, and Jeronimo Cortina.

P.S. I came across Marcotte’s comments by way of this blog:

I haven’t read Andrew Gelman’s book, but I think his conclusions are almost certainly wrong. . . . I have a feeling that Gelman makes the common mistake of disconnected analysts of assuming that all poor people are the same. But they aren’t. Black poor people have vastly different political beliefs than poor white people. This is kind of assholish to do without having read his book, but I have a sense that Gelman is more interested in appealing to misguided liberal, egalitarian notions than examining real data.

I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either. (Jimmy the Greek’s autobiography is great, though–that’s another story.)

What’s sad, though, is that he gets our book completely backwards, writing:

Contra Gelman, for instance, Oklahoma is one of the poorest states in the country, is also one of the whitest, and is the most conservative. . . . Sure, if all the black people in the country moved to a state and everyone else left, it’d be 95% Democrat. But if you moved all the poor white people to a state, it’d be 70% Republican. . . . Gelman’s conclusions are correct for a subset of voters, but for the superset, they are way off. Why he appears to have made such an obvious mistake and misinterpretation, I have no idea.

No! He’s got it all wrong. Here’s what’s really going on:

1. Of course we break down our analysis by black and white voters. See here, for example. Rich whites are much more likely than poor whites to vote Republican.

2. We know that poorer states vote Republican. That’s a key theme of our book, which we get to around page 2 or so of the book. It’s not at all “contra Gelman” that Oklahoma is poor and votes Republican. Not one bit! Within Oklahoma, though, richer people vote more Republican and richer counties are more likely to support Republicans as well.

3. Poor whites vote mostly for Democrats. (It’s about 55/45.) So, no, if you move all the poor white people to a state, it wouldn’t be 70% Republican–unless they were to drastically change their voting patterns.

Why do I bring this up? My point is not to get into a dispute with this guy I’ve never met, but rather to report (sadly) the continuing presence of the confusion about income, geography, and voting that motivated us to write the book in the first place. The funny thing is that this guy, who is so sure we’re wrong, is the sort of person who would most gain form reading our book!

P.P.S. I again violated the principle indicated by the title of this blog entry and found some more blogging on Red State, Blue State. Again, a bit of frustration (but, again, it’s my fault for googling on my name). The blogger (who goes by “Assistant Village Idiot”):

[Red State, Blue State] does not break down the voting patterns of the poor into black and nonblack (or white and nonwhite, if you prefer).

Hey! What about Figures 10.1 and 10.2, and Plates 12 and 13 in the second edition? I agree that we don’t talk a lot about ethnicity–we cover a lot in the book’s 200 pages–but we do a little!

I [“Assistant Village Idiot”] believe the numbers he puts before us, showing that Democrats do not dominate among the wealthy, are true. But the Pew research category of liberals, which makes up 19% of the US (and therefore well more than a third of the Democratic Party) are indeed much wealthier than the other groups.

No! Liberal Democrats are not particularly rich. They actually have an income distribution comparable to the general population. See here. Conservative Republicans, those are the group that’s most likely to be rich.

It’s so frustrating to have written this whole book to clarify who votes for which parties, and then see that someone went to the trouble of reading the whole book and still missed the point! I’m sure this anonymous blogger means well, and he actually has some interesting things to say about voting and ethnicity, but, as a statistician, I find it sooooo frustrating to see people get the basic numbers wrong.