I’ll be speaking on Red State, Blue State this Wed, 17 Sept, 12-1:30, in the Government Dept at Harvard. It’s at 1737 Cambridge St., Room K-354. If you live in the Boston area, this is your chance to come and ask your questions and give your suggestions.

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. . . .

If you live in NYC, you can hear me tomorrow (Fri 29 Aug) from 12.30-1 on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC, 93.9 FM and AM 820. I’ll be talking about the book and probably about the 2008 election as well.

P.S. The interview is here.

Robert Sommer is very kind:

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

Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter (formerly called The Logic of Collective Belief: The Political Economy of Voter Irrationality), wrote some nice things about our book and also posted a variant of this graph that I made by putting together a bunch of exit polls:

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.

Just in case you come to this site and don’t realize . . . it’s all about our new book, Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Just click on any of the tabs at the top of this page for more information.