Andrew Gelman

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 […]

Reading these news articles that slam more and more nails into the already-dead reputation of Hewlett Packard executive Meg Whitman, I keep thinking: what if she’d won her election a couple years ago and was now governor or senator or whatever she was running for? Then nobody would care that her company was falling apart! […]

Tyler Cowen points to this news article by Lauren Sandler: Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe [and coauthor Lisa Neidert] […]

This discussion arose in the context of statistics teaching: April Galyardt writes: I’m teaching my first graduate class this semester. It’s intro stats for graduate students in the college of education. Most of the students are first year PhD students. Though, there are a number of master’s students who are primarily in-service teachers. The difficulties […]

Avi Feller and I write: The basic question driving the 2012 campaign was always clear: could Mitt Romney gain enough of the vote among older, upper-income white Americans to overcome President Obama’s overwhelming advantage among young, low-income and minority voters? . . . But there’s much more to this story. The maps we have made […]

Following up on a comment by a reader, the above title is my quick summary of the income/voting graph: [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

From the exit polls: This is all pretty obvious but it seemed worth posting because some people still don’t seem to get it. For example, Jay Cost, writing in the Weekly Standard: The Democratic party now dominates the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most powerful cities. And […]

How America voted in the 2012 election: More here. The short story: nonvoters have different attitudes, on average, compared to voters. When lots of people don’t vote, this affects political discourse: An example is health policy. As my colleagues and I have found in our analysis of national survey data, attitudes on health care reform […]

Hillary Clinton vs. Paul Ryan. I know, that’s a boring speculation, but as a statistician I gotta go with the highest-probability event. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Mike Bloomberg and Chris Christie. Sonia Sotomayor. Paul Ryan. Those guys distorting the numbers in some back room in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That waiter who secretly taped Romney’s “47%” speech. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Is Rick Santorum bummed that he didn’t succeed a few years […]