I led off this week's discussion with a quick review of our main findings along with a plea to discuss some open questions about the sources of some of the changes in American politics in the past few decades.

In response, Nolan McCarty referred to evidence that the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress have moved apart on the issues, and, at the same time, the economic gap between rich and poor has increased. As a result, rich and poor people remain distinct in their voting patterns--even amid the cross-cutting social issues that have led casual observers such as Michael Barone to mistakenly suppose that the Democrats are now the party of the "trustfunders" and the Republicans are the party of the "common people."

Read more »

Partisan activists need to study the work of objective political scientists like Andrew Gelman and of objective partisans like Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. That's because very few pundits or campaign consultants are terribly numerate. (For a comic example of the innumeracy of our political elite, observe Hillary strategist Mark Penn's recent calculations in the Wall Street Journal on the piles of easy money you can supposedly make off running a blog that gets 3300 visitors per day.)

Partisans need to understand the numbers, or they turn into losers. Consider John McCain's recent campaign.

Read more »

Dr. Gelman writes:

"Sailer's story based on house prices fits in here--in particular, middle and upper-middle-class families moving out of California (or not choosing to move there) because they want more space--and, as I have said, the story makes sense to me--but it doesn't work on its own. It needs to be fit into the larger picture of polarized political parties and ideological voting."

Thanks. There's kind of a chicken-or-egg aspect to determining causality in something like this. I'm more personally attracted to "geographic determinist" explanations rather than political/ideological ones, perhaps only because they are less obvious.Yet, I have to admit, much of the time the more obvious answer is the right one! Thinking about the big picture, however, I find the approach ably outlined by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort intriguing.

Read more »

Eric Rauchway reminds us that public opinion isn't the only thing that swings elections--voter turnout matters too and is an important part of political strategy, whether it be Karl Rove turning out the evangelical vote, Barack Obama inspiring ethnic minority voters to come out to the polls, or maybe, as commenter TGGP suggests, getting convicted felons to vote. Also there's voter suppression, negative ads, and all the rest.

Regarding the question of how electoral politics would change if turnout were to be increased, I'd like to refer youall to some research by Baldassare, Highton and Wolfinger, and Leighly and Nagler. Really too much for me to summarize here; you can read about it in detail if you're interested.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to address the issue that's come up a couple times so far, of the connection between political science and political activism.

Read more »

I appreciate Nolan's discussion of religion and income and his reference to the work of Huber and Stanig, upon which we leaned heavily in chapter 7 of our book. I have little to add beyond Nolan's discussion of what might be underlying the pattern that religious attendance is more strongly related to conservative voting among the rich than the poor in many different countries.

And, since Nolan posted a graph, I'd like to post one too--actually, something I posted a couple of months ago right after I got the Pew pre-election poll data.

Read more »

Steve Sailer discusses how California has moved from the Republican to the Democratic column while Texas has moved the other way.

My quick story about California and Texas is that Californians are more liberal than Texans on economic issues and particularly on social issues, with the differences largest among upper-income people. This translates into changing voting patterns because, as Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder have discussed, ideology, particularly on social issues, has become more important in voting in recent decades. Forty years ago, Texans were still more conservative than Californians (I conjecture) but the connection between conservatism and Republican voting was not so strong.

Read more »

Matt sounds disappointed that Gelman et al. don't give politicians or activists much useful advice; indeed, they seem to argue that demography is electoral destiny. Andrew responds by offering some advice as to how candidates can benefit from marginal gains.

I'm sure Andrew's right, but let me go a step beyond the marginal advice. You might have to despair at his report if we had 100 percent of the voting-age population voting. We don't.

Read more »

Aaron Swartz asks why I didn't add a journalist as coauthor to Red State, Blue State, perhaps in the manner that Steve Levitt collaborated with Stephen Dubner.

The short answer is that nobody asked me. Like just about every other researcher who writes a book for a general audience, I was hoping for my new book to become "the next Freakonomics." If Dubner, or some other journalist, had called me up and said he wanted to write a book with me, I certainly would've given it serious consideration!

The other factor was timing. I came up with the idea for the book in summer, 2007. It came out in summer, 2008. There was barely time to get it published, let alone find coauthors. All would've gone smoother had I thought of writing the book (or if a journalist had suggested to me the idea of writing the book) a year earlier. Then it could've come out in early 2008, and maybe we'd be having this discussion two months before the election.

Probably like most of you, I'm interested in political science not just to learn how the world works, but to change it. That's why I co-founded BoldProgressives.org, a group to help get progressive candidates elected. Our current campaign is about pushing Norm Coleman to end his pointless legal challenges by getting people to donate a dollar for each day he stays in the race -- see right.

But Matt Yglesias notes that mainstream political science seems to think not much can be done to affect whether Republicans or Democrats win. "That kind of nihilistic point of view", he complains is "disappointing to political activists who like to think that sharper arguments or exciting new facts are likely to swing things."

Is there hope?

Read more »

My advice to Democratic and Republican insiders is that they should stop falling for their own traditional talking points. It's understandable if you keep spouting them in public, but it's inane to believe your own propaganda in private.

For example, Democrats think they are against increasing inequalities in wealth, while standard Republican ideology suggests they should be suspicious of public schools. Republicans, however, should keep in mind that there's a famous city that has so many rich people and has public schools so dysfunctional that a full 30% of children attend private schools, roughly triple the national average. You would think this bastion of "school choice" would be a friendly to Republican candidates. But, it's not. It is ...

Read more »

Matthew Yglesias asks what advice can be drawn from Red State, Blue State for people who want to understand how to influence election outcomes. As Yglesias points out, the default assumption among political scientists is that candidates and parties are usually doing what they're doing for a reason and that there probably aren't any low-hanging fruit or they would've already been grabbed.

On the other hand, if political candidates are taking their advice from Dick Morris and Mark Penn, well . . . maybe there are some useful things they could learn from our book.

Most of the free advice in our book comes in chapter 9, where we provide evidence in support of the following points. I wouldn't say we prove any of these claims, but the evidence is certainly consistent with them, and they make sense to me:

Read more »

One of the most intriguing findings in Red State, Blue State (one that is echoed in my own work) is the how income and religion interact in vote choice and partisanship. Many commentators (think Thomas Frank) have assumed that the rise of a religious cleavage in American politics has somehow suppressed the role of class and income. But the findings in Red State, Blue State and Polarized America show that not only is this not true, but that religion may actually exacerbate the role of income in party identification and vote choice.

Below I have reproduced a figure from Polarized America which shows the Republican identification for white "born again" or "evangelicals" compared to other whites at a number of income levels. Note that all the data used in this figure are whites so there is no direct role of race. Although as Eric points out, there may be an indirect one.

Read more »

I should point out to readers that Andrew Gelman isn't just lead author of a rich and thorough book of political investigation, but he's one of the most prominent and talented statisticians in the country. His book, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models may not be quite as popular as Red State, Blue State among the general public, but in its field, it's quite the hit.

So I certainly don't disagree with his suggestion that, in society's division of labor, he should focus on data analysis and leave the interviews and anecdotes to others. Indeed, I frequently use Gelman's analyses in my own work, combining it with equally-valuable work done by others in different fields. But, like Ezra Klein, I can't help but wonder why academics don't attempt these combinations themselves. Perhaps Red State, Blue State just had too many coauthors as it is, but I can't help but think that adding a journalist to the mix would be powerful.

Of course, I also agree with his call for us all to interact here, so I'll hazard some comments on the other posts.

Read more »

Andrew Gelman conjectures offhand that "For most of the TPM audience, I suspect that the main appeal of Red State, Blue State is the potential to better understand why some people vote Republican, and what positions the Democrats should take, or need to take, in order to win elections" whereas his readers at New Majority are looking for help in the reverse quest. I, personally, picked up Red State, Blue State months and months ago mostly hoping to achieve a smug sense of superiority vis-a-vis other pundits.

But I think he's basically right. Mostly people care about understanding voter behavior because they want to understand how to influence election outcomes. But unless I'm reading the book wrongly, his disappointing thesis is that you basically can't. That kind of nihilistic point of view is pretty common among political scientists, but it's disappointing to political activists who like to think that sharper arguments or exciting new facts are likely to swing things. But that's the way it is. Or do I have this wrong? Is there electoral advice for, say, the now-out-of-power Republicans lurking somewhere in this book?

Andrew Gelman wrote on Tuesday: "I like Sailer's theory--which is why I featured it in our book--partly because it fits into another fact we emphasized, which is that the much-remarked-upon red-state, blue-state, rich-state, poor-state pattern of Democrats in the coasts and Republicans elsewhere is relatively new, having arisen in the past thirty years or so, with the key transition occurring during the brief period from 1980 to 1992."

Consider the two most important states in the Electoral College. California voted Republican in nine of ten Presidential elections from 1952 through 1988, but has gone solidly Democratic in the five contests since. In contrast, Texas had been a swing state in Presidential elections, voting for JFK in 1960, LBJ in 1964, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Richard Nixon in 1972, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Texas, though, has now voted Republican eight straight times.

Why the change?

Read more »

I want to respond to the points raised so far, but first I want to point out how irrelevant the red/blue divisions are to much of politics.

Talking Points Memo, the host of this forum, is unusual in the blogosphere in focusing on news, rather than opinion. And the recent headlines on TPM are about potential torture prosecutions, wiretapping, Israeli spying, kickbacks.

What do these news items have in common? None of them are about economic policy, which the evidence shows is the dominant factor in swinging votes and elections. (Briefly, there are three pieces of evidence that the economy is crucial to voters: first, national economic conditions do a reasonable job at predicting national elections; second, people who express more liberal or conservative economic views are more likely to vote for Democrats or Republicans; third, when you ask people what issues are most important, they overwhelmingly mention economic concerns--and that was true last summer, even before the economic meltdown (and even before John McCain found it necessary to reassure us that the fundamentals of the economy were still strong).

Read more »

Are the differences in political attitudes between red and blue states unique to the American political system, or are they a more general result of the interaction between where voters live and income?

In our book we try to put the U.S. in comparative perspective by analyzing recent presidential elections in Mexico, in which there was also a profound regional divide between high-and-low-income states and a huge controversy over the votes of rich and poor voters. We also took a look at income and voting in other countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

Read more »

Andrew Gelman's 2008 book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do is an outstanding work of political science, rigorous yet accessible to the quantitatively inclined non-academic.

Along with uncovering much that is new regarding voting patterns, the book reaffirms some old truths that have tended to be glossed over in recent years by more impressionistic observers, such as David Brooks, with his sociological portraits of affluent coastal Democrats and economically humbler inland Republicans.

For example, Gelman finds that the party that emphasizes tax-cutting, the GOP, tends to appeal more to those who pay a lot of taxes. This is one of those stereotypes that is so obvious that it can get overlooked.

Read more »

Andrew is certainly a bit too modest when he says that Red State, Blue State does not offer many explanations for the voting patterns it documents. The book has a lot to say both about why the patterns exist and why the media and other political observers often misinterpret the evidence.

But having done some work on the link between income and partisanship, let me offer some of my own favorite hypotheses about why income has increasingly played an important role in shaping political behavior. In Polarized America, Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, and I document that in the late 1950s and early 1960s voters in the highest income quintile were no more likely to identify with or vote for the Republican party than those in the bottom quintile. But by the 1990s, the top quintile was twice as Republican as the bottom. We suggest that such a pattern of growing income-based voting is consistent with four different possibilities.

Read more »

Let me begin by saying Red State Blue State is a delight. First of all, every work of sufficient psephological sophistication ought so reassuringly to reference Dr. Seuss. But second of all, the book neatly and precisely sticks sharp pins in the fatuous media balloons that swell ever more each year, reaching alarming distention during presidential elections.

Roll up, and see punctured the original "real America/red America" fable; see the "trustfunder left" utter a dying sigh, see Obama's trouble winning white working-class voters--especially in "battleground" Pennsylvania--go the way of the dodo. Sean Quinn had it right--in the main, racism and other cultural indulgences are luxuries that worse-off voters can't afford. The "culture wars", as Andrew points out in his post, get fought principally between factions of richer people. Most of the rest of us vote for completely different reasons.

Read more »

Andrew et. al.'s book is chock-full of facts. Indeed, I bet it has more charts than pages. And yet, I have to confess, I don't feel I came away from the book informed. And I worry that others won't as well.

Gelman and his co-bloggers over at The Monkey Cage (an indispensable blog about political science) are often complaining about irresponsible journalists telling stories at odds with the facts. To pick an example at random, here's Adam Nagourney claiming "Republicans voters have displayed a zeal for their candidates that Democrats could only envy." The bloggers quickly run the numbers and show that, no, the numbers have been pretty similar over the years.

And yet...

Read more »

Our book is mostly descriptive, not so much giving theories as laying out some facts about public opinion; briefly:

1. The pattern of income and voting varies geographically and demographically in the population. In particular, income predicts Republican voting more strongly in red states and among frequent church attenders, while income is only weakly associated with voting patterns in blue states and among non-attenders.

2. Or, to put it another way, the differences in political attitudes between red and blue America are concentrated among the upper middle class and do not show up so strongly among lower-income voters.

3. These patterns have largely arisen in the past thirty years, during which voting has become more issue-based.

Read more »

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!