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Senators and health care; also a discussion of pretty statistical graphics
Nate, Daniel, and I have an op-ed in the Times today, about senators' positions and state-level opinion on health care. We write: Lawmakers' support for or opposition to reform generally has less to do with the views of their constituents...
Tobler's Law, Urbanization, and Electoral Bias: Why Compact, Contiguous Districts are Bad for the Democrats
Jonathan Rodden and Jowei Chen sent me this article: When one of the major parties in the United States wins a substantially larger share of the seats than its vote share would seem to warrant, the conventional explanation lies in...
Culture wars, voting and polarization: my talk at the London School of Economics on Tuesday
Tuesday 3 Nov, 4-5:30pm in Room R505, Department of Government, LSE. Culture wars, voting and polarization: divisions and unities in modern American politics On the night of the 2000 presidential election, Americans sat riveted in front of their televisions as...
Income inequality and partisan voting in the United States
Lane Kenworthy, Yu-Sung Su, and I write: Income inequality in the United States has risen during the past several decades. Has this produced an increase in partisan voting differences between rich and poor? We examine trends from the 1940s through...
Who supports government health care?
Bear with me. I've got a lot of graphs here (made jointly with Daniel Lee). Click on any of them to see the full-size versions. I'll start with our main result. From the 2004 Annenberg surveys: Providing health insurance for...
"In their new book, "Rich States, Poor States . . ."
Christopher Rhoads writes: Interested to know what your comment would be on the following article, which includes the following lines:...
Why are Jews liberals?
I was in the library the other day and saw a new book, Why are Jews Liberals?, by O.G. neoconservative Norman Podhoretz. This is right up my alley, research-wise, and so I took a look. I don't think Podhoretz's book...
How conservative are Michelle Malkin and Michael Moore?
I ran into John Barnard a few hours ago and he told me that he likes the blog but he hates the political stuff. So, John, you can skip this one. Although there is a bit of statistics near the...
Some questions about Red State, Blue State from a student
A student at another university writes in with some questions about Red State, Blue State:...
"A paved United States in our day"
Sometimes you hear discussion of how the red states get more from the government than they pay in taxes while the blue states get less and pay more. This is slightly misleading because the blue states are richer and rich...
Who wants school vouchers? Rich whites and poor nonwhites
As part of our Red State, Blue State research, we developed statistical tools for estimating public opinion among subsets of the population. Recently Yu-Sung Su, Yair Ghitza, and I applied these methods to see where school vouchers are more or...
Gay marriage: a tipping point?
Fancy statistical analysis can indeed lead to better understanding. Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips used the method of multilevel regression and poststratification ("Mister P"; see here and here) to estimate attitudes toward gay rights in the states. They put together...
My talks in Seattle and Vancouver
1. Coalitions, voting power, and political instability. Thurs 4 Jun, 3:30pm, Kane Hall 210 at the University of Washington. Part of the Math Across Campus series. We shall consider two topics involving coalitions and voting. Each topic involves open questions...
Handy statistical lexicon
These are all important methods and concepts related to statistics that are not as well known as they should be. I hope that by giving them names, we will make the ideas more accessible to people: Mister P: Multilevel regression...
Yoo again?
With John Yoo writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, it seems worth recycling these thoughts from last year, on the unfortunate occasion of Yoo writing a botched column about elections of the early 1800s. As I wrote last year:...
Red States, Blue States, and Green States?
My former Columbia colleague Matt Kahn sent me this article by Michael Cragg and himself on the political economy of congressional support for legislation intended to mitigate greenhouse gas production: Stringent regulation for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions will impose different...
Discussion of Red State, Blue State
The political website Talking Points Memo is featuring a discussion of Red State, Blue State this week. The discussants so far have included software developer / political activist Aaron Swartz, historian Eric Rauchway, political scientist Nolan McCarty, journalist Steve Sailer,...
Overly-charitable explanations of biased perceptions
John Sides and I posted something yesterday on the yawning gap between economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans, to which we received some interesting comments (see also here and here) that I'd like to reply to....
My talk at Harvard on Monday
Different Sorts of Political Polarization in the United States Monday, April 6, 2009, 12:00-1:45 p.m. (Buffet lunch available at 12:00 -- Presentation begins at 12:15) Location: Harvard Kennedy School | Allison Dining Room (Taubman 5th floor) I'm not sure exactly...
How did white people vote? Updated maps and discussion
Awhile ago I posted some maps based on the Pew pre-election polls to estimate how Obama and McCain did among different income groups, for all voters and for non-Hispanic whites alone. The next day the blogger and political activist Kos...
Pre-election polls, exit polls, and challenges in estimating voting patterns of subgroups within states
Commenter BorisG asked why I made my pretty maps using pre-election polls rather than exit polls. I responded in the comments but then I did a search and noticed that Kos had a longer discussion of this point on his...
Rich and poor voters in other countries, and data issues
In the context of a discussion of rich and poor voters in the U.S. and other countries, Matthew Yglesias posted this graph from our Red State, Blue State book: The commenters raised several issues that I'd like to clarify here....
Rich and poor still vote differently in red and blue states
In Red State, Blue State, we talked about how, in recent years, the Democrats have been winning the rich states, even while richer voters lean Republican. What happened in 2008? Exit polls were made available immediately--as of election night. The...
Persistence of regional economic disparities
Strange Maps has this cool picture of Polish election results compared to the pre-1914 partition border: I can't tell what the colors represent, but it's striking nonetheless. In linking to it, Matt Yglesias writes, History's impact can often be surprisingly...
State-by-state vote swings are more uniform than they used to be
As I've discussed before, in 2008 the red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing: I also posted some graphs of previous vote swings that were less uniform. But maybe it makes sense to study...
Rich voter, poor voter, white voter, black voter
A couple weeks ago I posted an analysis of rich and poor voters in rich and poor states from exit polls in 2008, and a commenter ("Audacious Epigone") picked up on Larry Bartels's observation that, among whites, the Republican advantage...
Predicting the election outcome months ahead of time: discussion and link to revised paper with Kari Lock
There are two aspects of a presidential election that can be predicted: the national popular vote and the relative positions of the states. The national popular vote can be forecasted months ahead of time given the economy and other predictors....
More on red/blue/rich/poor in 2008
After this, here's more, again from exit poll crosstabs that Jared pulled off the CNN website: Difference in McCain vote share, comparing people in each state with family incomes over and under $50,000 (thus, states that are high on this...
Red/blue/rich/poor: 2008 update
In our book, we discussed how the rich-state, poor-state divide was larger among the rich than the poor--or, to put it another way, how rich people in states such as Mississippi are much more Republican than poor people in Mississippi,...
A question about the youth vote
Shivaji Sondhi writes: I had a question for you about the youth vote. What are its ethnic and red/blue composition? The reason I ask is that I was trying to integrate the apparently growing Democratic dominance in this segment with...
Estimated votes by county among non-blacks
Ben Lauderdale writes: I [Ben] had this map [see below] on my door for the last week. Based on exactly the same calculation using constant 95% black support and census-proportional representation. The white counties are the ones whose census names...
A Democratic swing, not an Obama swing
There's an idea going around that the Democrats turned in a disappointing performance in Congressional races this year. For example, a politically-minded friend of mine of the liberal persuasion wrote: "The election was good news, although the Democrats did not...
Affordable family formation
Steve Sailer writes: Based on the extremely similar results in 2000 and 2004, I [Sailer] had invented a novel and ambitious theory explaining why American states vote in differing proportions for Republican or Democratic candidates. My Affordable Family Formation theory...
What does non-uniform partisan swing look like?
I wrote here here that the red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing. In comment #39 to that entry, Scott de B. wrote: "How else would you define 'redrawing the red/blue map' other than...
Election 2008: what really happened
I was just in Grant Park . . . it was pretty cool but I couldn't actually hear anything. So I went back to my hotel room and crunched some numbers. Here are the take-home points: 1. The election was...
Play the 2008 election in the comfort of your living room
This is sort of silly but I couldn't resist doing a couple hours of programming today. . . . I took Nate Silver's latest simulations and computed the forecast of the national election (popular vote and electoral vote), conditional on...
2000/2004
I realized just realized that our maps of states won by Republicans and Democrats by income group (see here, for example, also recently posted by Matthew Yglesias) are from 2000, not from 2004. We also mislabeled these in Plate 3...
Good Roads Everywhere
"Such a system of National Highways will be paid for out of general taxation. The 9 rich densely populated northeastern States will pay over 50 per cent of the cost. They can afford to, as they will gain the most....
Red State, Blue State at New America Foundation on Monday
The election is coming up so this is our last DC event . . . I'll be speaking on Red State, Blue State this Mon, 27 Oct, at the New America Foundation. The event will be from 12.15-1.45, and there...
A new cost of living index
Boris passed this along. We've struggled with cost of living indexes (see here, here and here), so maybe this will be helpful....
Amazon, U.S.A.
Amazon.com has this cool website showing which sorts of political books people are buying in which states: What struck me was the similarity of this to the "voting patterns of the rich" map from our book: I wonder what data...
The electoral college does not favor large states
Every four years, some hardworking and enterprising journalists do some digging around in the political science literature, talk with some people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and then resurface to tell the world about the counterintuitive...
Do more unequal places tend to vote for Democrats?
Jim Manzi says yes, and he has some data. He says that in 46 out of 48 states, there's a positive correlation between a county's neighborhood-level inequality and its vote for Kerry. P.S. Also see interesting thoughts in the comments...
Frum's facts and fallacies
David Frum, author of “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday that has some interesting insights and but also suffers from some of the usual confusions about rich and poor, Democrats and...
"Red State, Blue State" reviewed in the New York Observer
Robert Sommer is very kind: I realized while reading Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State that I hadn’t seen a book with so many charts and graphs since I struggled though economics and statistics—and that if the textbooks...
More info on the state liberalism/conservatism graph
In response to some of the questions about our graphs on state liberalism/conservatism: - A lot of surveys don't include Alaska and Hawaii. I guess in the days of face-to-face surveys these places were too far to go to, and...
Little blogs and big blogs
In our blog we get useful comments about R programming, data sources, the philosophy of science, and even suggestions for book covers. But every now and then we get mentioned by big blogs, and then I'm reminded what real blog...
Ranking states by the liberalism/conservatism of their voters
Here's a graph of the 50 states (actually, I think Alaska and Hawaii are missing), showing the average economic and social ideology of adults within each state. Each of these is scaled so that negative numbers are liberal and positive...
Obama on rich liberal political donors
Boris forwarded to me this passage from The Audacity of Hope which was noted by Jim Geraghty: Increasingly, I [Obama] found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture...
Teaching Bayesian applied statistics to graduate students in political science, sociology, public health, education, economics, . . .
Here are my thoughts, to appear in the American Statistician: 1. Introduction 2. Teaching Bayesian statistics to social scientists, including a discussion of what is Bayesian about making graphs to get a better understanding of the deterministic part of a...
Voting patterns of Jews and other religious groups
John Sides has a graph showing that, for the past twenty years, Jews have been giving 70-80% of their votes to Democratic presidential candidates. From our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book, here are some data going back to 1968...
Solving the climate change attitude mystery
Brandon Keim writes, Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just...
The opiate of the elites
In case you didn't see our graph-laden Vox EU article, here it is. The Obama reference is already a bit stale but the content is still fresh, I hope . . . Barack Obama attracted attention recently by describing small-town...
Who talks like a "townie"?
I asked, I'm writing a book about rich and poor voters in red and blue states, and one thing we've found is that the political differences between so-called red and blue states are much larger among the rich than the...
Square footage as a predictor of vote and party affiliation?
After reading Steve Sailer's discussion of unmarried Democrats living in crowded cities and Republicans with large families, we decide that the ultimate predictor of political leanings would be . . . square footage of your residence. It has all...
Democrats know Democrats, Republicans know Republicans
From a survey of voters in the 2000 election, the estimated percentage of people they talk politics with who supported Bush for president: Each respondent was asked to name up to four contacts. On average, each respondent discussed politics with...
Rich state vs. poor state, rich voter vs. poor voter, over time
Here's the graph that David made showing the Republican share of the two-party vote for president since 1940, for states in the upper third and lower third of per-capita income: It used to be that rich states voted Republican, now...
Red states, blue states, and affordable family formation
A couple of colleagues sent me a copy of an article by Steve Sailer in The American Conservative called Value Voters and subtitled, "The best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue? The cost of buying a...
Data on religious denominations in the U.S.
Bob Shapiro pointed me to this source of data. From the official announcement: Social Explorer, in association with the Association of Religious Data Archives, releases maps and reports at the county level that provide counts of adherents and congregations of...
Ask me (and the two Bobs) questions about red states and blue states
Here....
Rich state, poor state, red-state, blue-state: it's all about the rich
As we've discussed before, the Republican party gets more support from the rich than from the poor, especially in poor states. (In poor states such as Mississipi, rich people are much more Republican than poor people; in rich states such...
Cool graphs of trends in income inequality within states
Below are 50 little graphs showing the 90th percentile and 10th percentile in income, within each state, for the past forty years. The patterns are pretty striking: the high end has increased pretty consistently in almost all the states, and...
Red State Blue State Article Published
Our (Andrew Gelman, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and David Park) "Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What's the Matter with Connecticut?" paper has finally been published in the November 2007 Quarterly Journal of Political Science. You can access...
Do the Democrats represent the rich?
Boris points to this post by Megan McArdle which discusses some of the political implications of the Democrats doing best among lower-income voters but winning the states and congressional districts where more of the higher-income Americans live. As McArdle puts...
Religiosity and income in the U.S.
David noticed this article by Dan Mitchell reporting the well-known fact that people in richer countries tend to be less religious. What about states in the U.S.? We (that is, David Park, Joe Bafumi, Boris Shor, and I) look at...
Comparing red states and blue states: more pretty graphs
"Like upscale areas everywhere, from Silicon Valley to Chicago's North Shore to suburban Connecticut, Montgomery County [Maryland] supported the Democratic ticket in last year's presidential election, by a margin of 63 percent to 34 percent." -- David Brooks, 2001. Some...
Some cool graphs of rich states and poor states
I'll take advantage of Paul Krugman's recent link to our paper on income and voting by putting up some cool scatterplots that we made recently. It started with our maps of which states Bush and Kerry would've won if only...
Mapping State and Congressional Ideology
Boris points us to this paper (with Christopher Berry and Nolan McCarty): Boris writes:...
Strategic extremism: why Republicans and Democrats divide on religious values
Boris pointed me to this paper by Edward Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Jesse Shapiro. Here's the abstract: Party platforms differ sharply from one another, especially on issues with religious content, such as abortion or gay marriage. Religious extremism in the...
Election & Public Opinion by PIIM
Here is interactive visualization of Election & Public Opinion by PIIM. It's an interactive display of Red / Blue state. Election data goes all the way back to 1789, the first presidential election. This application will familiarize you with the...
Fifty million voters can't be wrong: economic self-Interest and redistributive politics
Ebonya pointed me to this paper by Jacob Vigdor which addresses a similar question to that of Huber and Stanig's paper, "Why do the poor support right-wing parties?". A natural answer to this sort of question is that people have...
State incomes over time: the rich stay richer, the poor stay poorer (but less so than before)
When looking at voting and state income (red states and blue states, etc.), we realized that, although many of the geographic patterns of voting in the U.S. are relatively recent (for example, New England used to be strongly Republican, now...
Income, religious attendance, and voting
We've been extending our work on income and voting to include religion as well. For example: MS, OH, and CT represent poor, middle-income, and rich states, respectively, and the red, blue, and gray lines on each plot represent frequent church...
Voting patterns by state among the poor, middle class, and rich
Playing around a bit with the income-voting data (see here for a couple pictures and links to our paper, or here for an example of journalistic confusion, or here for lots more), we made the following maps, which show our...
Redblue for locals
I'm speaking Monday 11 Dec, 4:30pm at the City University of New York Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street). Location is room 9204, on the 9th floor (not the Kimmel Center, room 907, which is what I'd posted...
Income and voting in 2006
Somebody asked us about our "red-state, blue-state" results (the pattern that we found in the 2000 and 2004 elections, in which income and Republican voting are highly correlated in poor states such as Mississippi, moderately correlated in medium states such...
Blue is the new green?
Peter Yared pointed me to these maps that he made showing various characteristics of U.S. states (from Census data) that have similar patterns to the votes for Democrats and Republicans in recent Presidential elections (that is, comparisons of the coasts...
Sorry, but . . . more on red and blue states
Atiba Pertilla writes, I read your paper "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state" with a great deal of interest. I think it's very important to cut through facile generalizations about income levels and voting behavior. That said, I...
Red/blue and religion
James Stamey writes, I thought about some things I have seen on your blog as I was reading through another website I keep up with, getreligion.org. (The website is run by several media members who happen to be religious with...
E.J. Dionne's column summarizes our red-blue paper
Boris Shor writes: An article by EJ Dionne about our red-blue paper ("Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut?") appeared today in the Washington Post. Dionne had called me on Friday to talk about the paper, and we had a nice conversation -- he's a very sharp guy and really understood what we were trying to explain.
More on redblue
Richard asks if the patterns in our red/blue paper can be explained by different income distributions in different states. In particular, the income quantiles we use (which come from the National Election Study, and which we use so we can...
A surprising quote and a question of demarcation
Dsquared's comment on this entry mentioned the economist Deirdre McCloskey, whom I googled and found this paraphrase of a quote from Don Boudreaux, "that no one was ever convinced by raw data of the truth of a proposition that he...
Income matters a lot in "red states," not so much in "blue states": What's the matter with Connecticut?
There's been some debate in the media and among social scientists about the relation between income and voting. On one hand, the states that support the Democrats--the so-called "blue states"--are richer, on average, than the Republican-leaning "red states." On the...
Red and blue voters: misunderstandings arising from a second-order availability bias
I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anybody who voted for him. -- mistakenly attributed to Pauline Kael, 1972 It evidently irritates many liberals to point out that their party gets heavy support from superaffluent "people of fashion'' and...
Class-participation activities in a regression class
I'm trying to integrate class-participation activities into the Applied Regression and Multilevel Modeling course I'm teaching this semester. We have a whole bunch of these activities for introductory statistics (in my intro class I have at least one demo and...
Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: who's voting for whom in Presidential elections?
Higher-income states support the Democrats, but higher-income voters support the Republicans. This confuses a lot of people (for example, see here and here). Boris presented our paper on the topic at the Midwest Political Science meeting last weekend. Here's the...
The "trustfunder left" and the personification of states and counties
Boris forwarded to me this article by Michael Barone on "the trustfunder left." Some excerpts: Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. ....
Living Poor, Voting Rich
Here's another journalistic account of the Red/Blue divide. It's from today's (11/03/04) NY Times by Nicholas D. Kristof. He asserts that the poor (from America's heartland) vote Republican and the wealthy (from suburban America) vote Democratic. In the aftermath of...
What does the 2004 Election Say About the Red/Blue Paradox?
Do we still see an (income) paradox in 2004? Let's first look at the state level. A quick correlation between median family income and percent Republican vote shows a -0.41 pearson's (and -.46 spearman) correlation. Both are significant. So at...
Red State/Blue State Paradox
Introduction In recent US presidential elections we have observed, at the macro-level, that higher-income states support Democratic presidential candidates (eg, California, New York,) and lower-income states support Republcan presidential candidates (eg, Alabama, Mississippi). However, at the micro-level, we observe that...
Morris Fiorina on C-SPAN
I read that Morris Fiorina will discuss the culture war in America this Sun at 5:15pm on C-SPAN. He may talk about Red/Blue states. Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America by Morris Fiorina Description: Morris Fiorina challenges the...
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