andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2255 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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
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1 I notice from your blog as well that one of the stereotypes that you are keen on debunking is this idea that working-class people in America vote conservative. [sent-18, score-0.441]
2 On the left, people think that 100% of working-class people should vote for the left, so anything less than 100% makes them feel that there is something that went wrong. [sent-21, score-0.647]
3 Another way of saying this is that if you compare people’s attitudes from surveys in Republican-leaning states to Democrat-leaning states, low-income people don’t differ much, on average, in their social and economic attitudes. [sent-47, score-0.509]
4 In Republican states they tend to be very conservative on economic issues and moderate on social issues. [sent-50, score-0.52]
5 In Democrat-leaning states, upper-middle-class or rich people tend to be moderately conservative on economics and liberal on social issues. [sent-51, score-0.616]
6 If he’s talking about a place where people vote for Democrats, it always seems to be a declining, rust-belt, corrupt area, and when it’s an area that’s voting for Republicans, it’s always a dynamic, exciting part of the country. [sent-81, score-0.675]
7 OK, I’ll look up the part of New York state I live in, because I’ve always wondered about the political attitudes of the people around me. [sent-102, score-0.574]
8 When they posted the election results after election day, there were a certain number of people who voted for Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat, and a certain number of people who voted for Alf Landon the Republican, and then there was one vote for the Communist. [sent-110, score-0.965]
9 One is people where they know who they’re going to vote for, but they’re not sure that they’re going to vote. [sent-129, score-0.565]
10 If they think you’re already likely to vote for a certain candidate, they’ll try to find somebody to knock on your door and convince you that it’s an important election and it’s worth voting for. [sent-135, score-0.49]
11 Or attitudes about economic issues – Americans are more economically conservative and more socially liberal than they used to be. [sent-166, score-0.49]
12 But on issues that people have thought about, people have fairly sensible views. [sent-174, score-0.499]
13 Even if people get a lot of the facts wrong – and you can certainly do survey after survey, where you see people getting the facts wrong, and misunderstanding things – it is reasonable to say you’re less supportive of the president after some bad economic times. [sent-205, score-0.667]
14 So there’s a lot of evidence that people vote for what they think is good for the country. [sent-210, score-0.534]
15 It would probably be hard to find many people who would argue that the American healthcare system is better than the French healthcare system, or even the Taiwanese healthcare system. [sent-227, score-0.5]
16 The idea is that the richer places within a country – or even within a continent like Europe – tend to be more cosmopolitan, more socially liberal and lower-income places tend to be more traditional. [sent-243, score-0.459]
17 I think a lot of white people feel Democrats are the black party and don’t support them for that reason. [sent-292, score-0.485]
18 It was just assumed that white people weren’t going to vote for this guy. [sent-296, score-0.622]
19 People did some surveys where they claimed that some percentage of white people were less likely to vote for Obama because he was black. [sent-306, score-0.56]
20 Richard Nixon could get political success, basically, by convincing a lot of white people – not the white people who are traditionally in charge of the country but so-called ethnic white people – that the Democrats were not on their side. [sent-324, score-1.298]
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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: 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: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
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Introduction: Shankar Vedantam writes : Americans distrust the GOP. So why are they voting for it? . . . Gallup tells us that 71 percent of all Americans blame Republican policies for the bad economy, while only 48 percent blame the Obama administration. . . . while disapproval of congressional Democrats stands at 61 percent, disapproval of congressional Republicans stands at 67 percent. [But] Republicans are heavily tipped to wrest control of one or both houses of Congress from the Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Hey! I know the answer to that one. As I wrote in early September: Those 10% or so of voters who plan to vote Republican–even while thinking that the Democrats will do a better job–are not necessarily being so unreasonable. The Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress, and so it’s a completely reasonable stance to prefer them to the Republicans yet still think they’ve gone too far and need a check on their power. But Vendatam thinks this expla
Introduction: Conservative data cruncher Charles Murray asks , “Why aren’t Asians Republicans?”: Asians are only half as likely to identify themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” as whites, and less than half as likely to identify themselves as Republicans. . . . 70% of Asians voted for Barack Obama in the last presidential election. Something’s wrong with this picture. . . . Everyday observation of Asians around the world reveal them to be conspicuously entrepreneurial, industrious, family-oriented, and self-reliant. If you’re looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural.” . . . Asian immigrants overwhelmingly succeeded, another experience that tends to produce conservative immigrants. Beyond that, Asian minorities everywhere in the world, including America, tend to be underrepresented in politics—they’re more interested in getting ahead commercially or in non-political professions than in running for office or organizing advocacy groups. La
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