andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-125 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: 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, t
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 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. [sent-6, score-0.526]
2 ” Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. [sent-7, score-0.215]
3 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. [sent-12, score-0.785]
4 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? [sent-15, score-0.389]
5 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. [sent-20, score-0.299]
6 I have a feeling that Gelman makes the common mistake of disconnected analysts of assuming that all poor people are the same. [sent-35, score-0.414]
7 Black poor people have vastly different political beliefs than poor white people. [sent-37, score-0.887]
8 I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. [sent-39, score-0.329]
9 ) 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. [sent-42, score-0.267]
10 Sure, if all the black people in the country moved to a state and everyone else left, it’d be 95% Democrat. [sent-46, score-0.491]
11 But if you moved all the poor white people to a state, it’d be 70% Republican. [sent-47, score-0.644]
12 Of course we break down our analysis by black and white voters. [sent-56, score-0.427]
13 Rich whites are much more likely than poor whites to vote Republican. [sent-58, score-0.73]
14 It’s not at all “contra Gelman” that Oklahoma is poor and votes Republican. [sent-62, score-0.369]
15 Within Oklahoma, though, richer people vote more Republican and richer counties are more likely to support Republicans as well. [sent-64, score-0.474]
16 ) 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. [sent-68, score-0.725]
17 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. [sent-70, score-0.409]
18 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). [sent-77, score-0.875]
19 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! [sent-90, score-0.536]
20 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. [sent-91, score-0.397]
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Introduction: 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, t
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. I have the feeling that most readers of this blog are less fascinated than I am by U.S. politics, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor: Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.” Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here: Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party–much less a leader–who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basi
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Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
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Introduction: From Anthony Burgess’s review of “The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature,” by Victor Neuberg: Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was no gentleman. During the 1930s, when he would sometimes have nearly two million words in current publication, he aimed at producing 18,000 words a day. Editors would call me up and ask me to do a novelette by the next afternoon, and I would, but it nearly killed me. . . . I once appeared on the covers of eleven magazines the same month, and then almost killed myself for years trying to make it twelve. I never did. [Masanao: I think you know where I'm heading with that story.] Ursula Bloom, born 1985 and still with us [this was written sometime between 1978 and 1985], is clearly no lady. Writing also under the pseudonyms of Lozania Prole (there’s an honest name for you), Sheila Burnes and Mary Essex, she has produced 486 boooks, beginning with Tiger at the age of seven. . . . Was Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) a gentleman? .
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