Andrew Gelman joins us this week at Book Club for a discussion of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote The Way They Do, a social science analysis that dissects American voting patterns. Gelman and his co-authors - all political scientists, listed below - seek to explain everything from the role of religion in politics to the alleged divide between "red" and "blue" America. The book challenges multiple aspects of conventional political wisdom, including those laid out by Thomas Frank in our first-ever TPMCafe Book Club for What's the Matter with Kansas. Frank argued that poor red-staters vote Republican against their economic interests; Gelman posits that the rich everywhere vote overwhelmingly Republican, and the poor in both red and blue states vote mostly Democratic.

Gelman is a Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University and has won awards from the American Statistical Association and the American Political Science Review. The co-authors for Red State, Blue State are David Park, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; Boris Shor, Assistant Professor at the Harris School for Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago; Joseph Bafumi, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College; and Jeronimo Cortina, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston.

Joining Gelman in the discussion are co-author Jeronimo Cortina; Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; Matt Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress; Will Wilkinson, Research Fellow at the Cato Institute; Aaron Swartz, activist, blogger, and board member of Change Congress; Eric Rauchway, Professor of History at the University of California-Davis; Steve Sailer, journalist and critic at The American Conservative; and Nolan McCarty, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Join us!