I’m the one listed on the cover of the book but it was written by five of us. The other authors are:

David Park (George Washington University), who’s done extensive research on public opinion and politics;

Boris Shor (University of Chicago), who’s an expert on state policy, economics, and ideology;

Joe Bafumi (Dartmouth College), who did much of the research on the ideological positioning of voters; and

Jeronimo Cortina (University of Houston), who did the analyses of voting and income in other countries.

See here for more information on all of us.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about Sarah Palin’s broad-based job approval as governor of Alaska. I wondered, though, whether this kind of popularity is so exceptional given the small population of the state. Here are some state popularity data I pulled off the web (here and here):

Alaska is on the left side of both graphs. That’s Frank Murkowski with the sub-25% approval in 2006 (edged out only by Ohio’s Bob Taft), and Sarah Palin with the high rating in 2008.

It seems to be easier to maintain high approval in a small state. What’s going on? Some theories: in a large state, there will be more ambitious politicians on the other side, eager to knock off the incumbent governor; small states often have part-time legislatures and thus the governor is involved in less political conflict; small states (notably Alaska) tend to get more funds per capita from the federal government, and it’s easier to be popular when you can disburse more funds; large states tend to be more heterogeneous and so it’s harder to keep all the voters happy. As the graphs show, the pattern isn’t perfect, but it looks real to me. Next step is to get data from other years.

P.S. A similar point applies to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer on the Democratic side. His popularity is impressive but nothing super-special considering he’s in a small state.

I wonder if this pattern could be another source of bias in favor of small states, to the extent that being a highly popular governor is considered to make you considered for national office.

Matthew Yglesias summarizes the “opiate of elites” argument of our book:

Poor people need to spend their money on stuff they need and cast their votes for practical reasons. But the well-off can afford to indulge their preferences about where to live, how to vacation, and what recreational pursuits to follow and divergent tastes in these matters continues into the voting booth. Our current crop of candidates offers up some pretty good examples of this. . . . the Palins choose to spend their money in very different ways. They’re raising five kids, getting into competitive snowmobiling, going on moose hunting expeditions, etc. This isn’t stuff that your typical coastal elites care to do with their time and money, but none of it’s cheap, either . . . in whatever sense snowmobiling is a “working class” hobby — and I’ll agree it doesn’t have vast appeal to big city sophisticates — it’s not a cheap pursuit, and I’m sure Todd Palin could have bought a ton of arugula with the money he spent on his snowmobile instead. . . .

See here for Herzog and Tucker’s analysis.

I’ve said this before, but seeing various speculation on the web about how people will view Obama’s and McCain’s VP choices reminds me that, as far as the empirical findings go, the Vice Presidential nominees appear to have almost no effect on the vote. It’s about +3 percentage points in the VP’s home state, and that’s about it.

Actually, there’s not much evidence that even the Presidential nominees have much effect. (See Steven Rosenstone’s 1984 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, for more on this.) Candidates do benefit slightly by being political moderates–but it’s only a couple of percentage points, so not a huge effect.

About 1/3 of VP’s have become President, and so arguably the VP choice should make a difference in how people vote–but, then again, given that even the presidential nominee isn’t crucial (as we say, people tend to vote the party, not the candidate), it all makes some sense.

With all that in mind, feel free to opine about Biden’s and Palin’s suitability to govern, but I suggest you think twice before opining on how “the voters” will react to this or that.