The University of Chicago statistics department Tuesday at 4:30.

1. On Monday morning I’m doing an activity on the Electoral College. But you can’t come to that unless you’re a 4th grader in Zacky’s school.

2. Monday 4.30pm at room 801 International Affairs Building (at Columbia), I’m speaking on Red State, Blue State in an event cosponsored by the Columbia Journalism School, with discussions by Nicholas Lemann and Thomas Edsall and moderated by Sharyn O’Halloran.

3. Monday 7pm at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan, I’m speaking and signing books. You can only go to this one if you’re a member of the club, I think.

4. Tuesday 4.30pm at Robertson Hall at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, there’s an event sponsored by the New York and New Jersey chapters of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, featuring Joe Lenski, Chris Achen, Larry Hugick, and myself. After the panel there will be lots of time for informal discussion as well.

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. . . .

P.S. The interview is here.

That was our aim. . . (Click here for full review.)

Bryan also comments that, to his eyes, the correlation between income and voting is pretty small. He writes, “As an economist, I [Caplan] was raised to expect virtually all poor people to be Democrats, and virtually all rich people to be Republicans. From this starting point, Gelman’s data show that income is practically irrelevant.” I agree that income matters less than one might think in the U.S., and it actually matters even less in most other countries for which we have data. As we discuss in the book, the correlation between income and economic ideology is low (and it varies quite a bit by state). On the other hand, it’s a difference of 20% between the high and low end, and that ain’t nothing. It’s the difference between voting like Massachusetts and voting like Texas. We’re always dancing around the magic 50% point, and so even small differences can be important. As Bryan says, a lot of how you interpret this depends on where you’re coming from.

I also agree with Bryan that we are not really shooting down the ideas of journalists and others, but rather looking at polls and elections in a different way. We did try to convey in the book that we respect the insights of the many journalists who’ve talked about the red-blue divide, and that we’re trying to go further by seeing how these divisions have changed over time and how they vary across different groups of the population.