I'm not a "racist," scientific or otherwise, I'm a realist.

My biggest issue with Steve's theory is the causality regarding conservatism. A naive genetic-determinist view in which your politics are decided at conception by the shuffle of DNA with life-history having zero-impact would be just as compatible with the evidence he presented as his own theory. The idea that conservatism (or at least religiosity, which is correlated with it) leads to living in less urban/coastal areas, getting married and having more kids is certainly plausible.

Unexamined issues of causality are also relevant to his take on New Orleans. It is the case that N'awlins isn't called the Big Easy for nothing, and is also known for high crime (and corruption). But there's little evidence that the carefree cultural conditioning actually causes the high crime. To take blacks in particular, it could be that more conscientious ones decide to move to Atlanta, "the city too busy to hate". Steve himself has pointed out that Iowa has an above average black incarceration rate while southern blacks are more law-abiding, which surprised me considering that southern whites are more criminal. Has Iowa been having giant drunken Mardis Gras parades that the makers of Girls Gone Wild have yet to uncover? I think Steve's own theory was that Iowa simply attracts different kinds of blacks. In New Orleans though he sees a lack of "ordered liberty" (as David Hackett Fischer might put it) and as a conservative immediately concludes that's a problem. When I was younger and exhibited a pollyannish libertarianism (or what Steve calls in Malcolm Gladwell "neo-liberalism" and admits he once shared) I tended to assume any social problem could be rectified if the government simply stopped doing whatever it was that caused it in the first place. Now I try to keep in mind the alternate possibilities that 1: there is no simple solution or 2: there is but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our ideological assumptions (or even those of our opponents).

"evidence shows [economic policy] is the dominant factor in swinging votes and elections." If so, it's hard to see how Sailer's family-values-based explanation works, and thus hard to understand why Gelman seems to like it so much.
Here are some possible ways to reconcile it.
1: Voters don't actually know what matters to them or aren't particularly forthcoming. Why is there lack of competition in city council elections? Party identification far outweighs the importance of "issues". Phillip Converse famously showed the rampant ignorance of the voting public of what the parties or ideologies were supposed to stand for. Bryan Caplan (and others) have followed him in showing how ignorant they are of what the budget actually is, who is in office and how economies work. Gelman has recently been pointing out how partisanship severely distorts our perception of the economy and how well officials are doing their jobs.
2. Moderates/undecided swing voters decide based on how the economy is doing. Unfortunately they are even more ignorant than average (most people have biases including confirmation biases that cause our opinions to irrationally diverge as we obtain more information, leaving the uninformed in between). However, most people are not undecided and so Steve's ideas why entire states lean different ways.
3. Where and how we live ties into our views on economics. Conservative areas tend to have less zoning and in G. William Domhoff's terms, a strong local landed growth-coalition of real-estaters seeking policy regimes friendly toward business expansion. Coastal urban areas are populated by people more in favor of environmental/zoning laws to restrict sprawl/congestion and don't welcome the addition of big business chains like Wal-Mart. A number of economists have pointed out how high fixed costs present an opening for labor-unions, and the agglomeration in urban areas surely represent a fixed cost. An entrepreneur can't simply strike out and form their own Harvard or Hollywood out in the middle of nowhere (no matter what Thomas Friedman tells you). One complication with this theory is that urban areas are said to experience more of the effects from inflation, but conservatives seem to be more willing to accept higher unemployment to reduce inflation. Bryan Caplan has noted in "Has Leviathan Been Bound?" that Republican state/local governments tend to spend more on highways. Democrats are known for thinking automobiles have harmful emissions and that public transportation is preferable (understandable in urban areas).

Aaron Swartz asks:

"First, why housing price inflation? Wouldn't the housing price level, not rate of change, be the relevant parameter according to your theory?"

The last time I checked, you also get high correlations between "house prices" and Democratic share of the vote in Presidential elections. The correlation wasn't quite as high as with "house price inflation over 1980-2004," but it doesn't make difference which you look at.

On a priori grounds I rather prefer looking at housing inflation since 1980 because, as Dr. Gelman points out, the evolution toward this country's current Red State, Blue State divisions happened largely from 1980 onward. Whereas, rich states and poor states have generally been rich or poor for a long time: in 1900, Connecticut was a rich state and Mississippi was a poor state, just like now. But something has been going on since about 1980, so why not look at a measure of what's been changing since 1980?

"Second, how did you calculate "years married" since observe it's not a published statistic?"

I modeled "Years Married" on how the Total Fertility Rate is calculated. TFR gives you an expected lifetime number of babies born to a woman from age 15 to 44 (assuming current patterns continue) based on how many babies were born to women of each age from 15 to 44. This gives you an easy to understand statistic. For example, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2005 immigrant Latinas were having babies at the rate of 3.7 per woman per lifetime, while American-born Asian women were having babies at the rate of 1.4 per lifetime. See how easy the implications of that statistic are to grasp?

Similarly, I just looked up what percentage of women were married at each age from 18 to 44 for each state in the 2000 Census. This tells you, if patterns remain stable, how many years the average woman would be married between age 18 through 44.

I had earlier thought of looking for age of first marriage, but early marriages can be associated with high divorce rates, and divorced women generally vote Democratic. So I figured that "years married" rather than "age at first marriage" would give a better picture of the conservatizing effects of "being married" rather than the more uncertain effect of "getting married."

The results were interesting although hardly unexpected. For example, among non-Hispanic white women (to make more of an apples to apples comparison between states since there are big racial/ethnic differences in rates of being married), those living in very liberal Washington D.C. can only expect to be married 7 of the 27 years from 18 through 44. In contrast, in very conservative Utah, they average 17 years. (Of course, the DC statistic is extreme because many DC non-Hispanic white women who get married shortly leave DC for the suburbs of Maryland or Virginia.) Blue California is at 12.5 years while Red Texas is at 15.2.

I can email you the data if you are interested in studying it more.

"Third, estimating these things at the state level seems unreliable. There's only fifty states, so there's very little data to analyze. It seems like testing at the county level would be more sensible."

Well, we _are_ here to discuss a book entitled "Red State, Blue State." And Dr. Gelman's book has that title because the state level is what people have been talking about ever since they noticed the Red State, Blue State pattern in November 2000.

Of course, it doesn't much matter whether you analyze at the state or county level. You'll get similar results when you do the analysis at the county level. That's why I included a 2008 red-purple-blue map at the county level in my first post. Republicans dominate low population density counties.

For example, consider Washington D.C. not as a typical state, which it isn't, but as more like a typical big city county. DC has very low Years Married rates and very high Democratic-voting rates.

Indeed, why stop at the county level? You see some of the same patterns _within_ certain counties. Consider Cook County in Illinois. The yuppies who live in the expensive high rises along Lake Michigan are known in Chicago political jargon as "Lakefront Liberals."

Thanks for the questions. Feel free to ask more.

This is not a facetious question - I am honestly curious: What do you folks think the word "racist" means?

I'm looking for a definition - something that you could put in Webster's or the OED - a starting point upon which one could build in understanding how to employ the word correctly within a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph.

Beyond that, I'd be intetested in the following: If a person is to fit the definition of "racist", then how must that person's "racism" necessarily manifest itself in the person's approach to questions of public policy [and beyond policy, the law & even the Constitution]?

I said I was under the weather. I meant to write, "testable theses".

"I merely pointed out that you believe that scientific findings suggest racial differences."

Aaron, actually you called him a racist (albeit a scientific one). A bit different?

Are you aware of the Risch paper (Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.)?

There are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc.

This clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa.

There can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if there is complete allele overlap between two groups - as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to possible group differences.

This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:

Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.

Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.

The predominant view among social scientists is that H1 is obviously correct and H2 obviously false. However, this is mainly wishful thinking. Official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association even endorse the view that race is not a valid biological concept, which is clearly incorrect.

We don't know with high confidence whether H1 or H2 is correct.

It is important to note that any group differences are statistical in nature and do not imply anything about particular individuals. Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that we are all equal, it would be better to emphasize that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic makeup.

Could someone please give me a definition of the word "racist"?

Thank you.

I'll give it a shot.

Racist

1. A person who holds irrational beliefs about other groups solely because of their racial background

2. A person for whom an individual or culture of another race provokes an emotional reaction, usually negative

No, "racist" in actual usage means "a person who believes that racial differences are significant." The other definitions concerning "superiority", "inferiority", "irrational", "hatred", "prejudice" etc. are merely imputations or connotations. These imputations are, in fact, their own form of prejudice.