What is Reddit's opinion of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do - Expanded Edition?

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This post reminds me of *Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State*by Andrew Gelman.

It's been a while since I've read the book. But if I recall correctly, the book concerns itself with a "paradox" of American politics. Between states, richer states are more likely to vote Democrat (eg California vs. Arkansas). But within states, richer voters are more likely to vote Republican.

>Of course, this is why we cannot allow the rights we extend to be compromised by the voting patterns of others.

Voting federal funding (read: funding for social security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and many other services that poor people across the country rely on) out of red states, as you are advocating here, would be a very strong example of compromising people's rights via voting patterns. You are arguing against your own point.

>Of course, that's why the states we think of as "Blue States" never gave up on America, and never seceded. They never dropped the torch of freedom.

Then why do you expect them to do so now?

Also, the entire concept of people voting red or blue based on their state is flawed. Poorer people usually vote blue and richer people generally vote red across state lines. Therefore, your proposal would just fuck over a lot of poor people without accomplishing much else.

(This is a good book on the topic of why people vote red or blue: https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/0691143935#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1490786252678)

I wouldn't be so quick to say that randomized control trials are lean on assumptions. If you want to take the findings of an RCT and extrapolate them anywhere outside of their narrowly defined internal validity you need to make much of the same assumptions that observational studies make. Angus Deaton goes over many of the limitations of RCTs here. Amongst other things, anytime you scale up an RCT you have to be worried about who selected into the original trial. This is less of a worry for drugs, but with something like a randomly distributed jobs training program the people who don't select into the program (maybe less educated, socially connected, and with larger mobility issues) might be the exact population you want to reach. So even if the RCT was successful policy makers have to make structural assumptions when deciding to scale it up or not.

I understand the point about wanting evidence to confirm that observational studies can yield valid conclusions, but you're left with the same problem, right? Say a policy maker is convinced by a study saying increased immigration boosts innovation. Any results from this study will still be observational, no? We can look and say "okay, we expanded immigration, did innovation increase?", but that's exactly the same as an observational study, but with less methodological rigor. In the case of immigration, things like spillover effects (meaning immigration has an impact on native wages, for example) mean that the only available tool for analysis is an observational study.

Still, here are observational studies (or lit reviews if I could find them) :

1. That increases in the minimum wage do not necessarily increase unemployment
2. Raj Chetty's work on opportunity and effectiveness of early childhood intervention
3. The aforementioned study on immigration
4. Andrew Gelman's book on American voting behavior (not causal in the same way, but still a noteworthy finding, imo)

Partly but not entirely, and that just raises the question of why older people vote red.

The real answer to the apparent paradox is that while poor people mostly vote based on economic concerns, rich people have the luxury of voting at least partly based on cultural issues.

I know this is the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom, which is now the top reply to you, that this pattern is because of rich people voting their economic self-interest. That's because that conventional wisdom isn't well-supported by the data.

Income is only strongly-correlated with party preference in red states. In blue states, the income vs. Republican vote share curve is almost flat, and most of not all of the rise happens between the poor and the middle class; rich people in blue states vote similarly to the middle class.

There are a number of possible explanations for that, including the possibility that rich people in blue states are calculating their economic self-interest differently from rich people in red states. But the one that aligns best with the data and with people's self-reported motivations is that rich people are balancing their perceived economic self-interest against their views on social issues.

Rich people in red states are more socially-conservative than their poor neighbors , so their economic interests and social views are aligned, producing a steeply sloped line: richer = redder. But rich people in blue states are much more socially-liberal than their poor neigbours, so their economic interests and social views are misaligned, producing a nearly flat curve.

One of the best predictors of someone's social views is their level of education. Age is another. But those aren't really reasons for someone's voting behaviour; they're just proxies/correlates.

More info in this book; these slides (pdf warning) hit most of the key points and contain the graphs I refer to in this comment.

> 1) I was in a school like that. I didn't join. No one hassled me. No one ever said anything to me. The really pro-union people kept to themselves and the vast majority did whatever and could actually care less.

That's good they didn't hassle you. Olof I decided to join a union I would lay back in the shadows and not be adamantly going on tangents why people should join. Glad you weren't harassed. During student teaching there was a teacher without fail that every Friday would wear her union shirt.

>2) Probably not, coming from a perspective of Power. Because it is so large and controls all of CPS, I doubt it would ever want to be split up -- even if those smaller unions are basically CPS lite.

Great point, probably.

>3) I know. Tell me about it. It did all across the state (WI). Most of the old teachers that were stuck in their ways were either asked not to come back by the district; felt like they had to retire or else they would lose all of their benefits (I'm still unclear where this hysteria came from); and, more district flexibility allowed districts to better craft budgets reflective of their priorities. It was a good 5-year window to get hired here.

I remember several years ago it had made news. Is hiring better now? I know you got a lot of flack as a state about the education stuff.

>4) There are many possible answers for this. One answer I've seen is that more conservative-minded people are in professions that typically pay more (accounting, business (management), etc.). Another answer is that that conservative ethos of conserving your wealth (being thrifty) is something harped on if you grow up in a conservative household and it is, therefore, something carried one through one's life. And there are other reasons but you should avoid blanket statements because, actually, if you (taking Republican and Democrat to be proxies for conservative-liberal, respectively) measure it, you'd see that Democrats have slightly, on average, a higher income. Believe it or not, wealth at the top quintile isn't a really good predictor of political ideology. It's actually pretty even split between R and D. In the lower quintile, you'd find a stronger correlation between income and D or R: the poorer one is, the more likely they are to vote D. Yet, a better way to examine that would be racial. There you'd see a clear split between black low income (D) and white low income (R). This whole idea of wealth impacting voting habits and ideology is something political scientists are trying to still better understand. One of the better books, written for the general public, on this subject is (still) (Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State)[https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/0691143935].

Thanks for that in depth answer, I'll be sure to look into that more.

1) I was in a school like that. I didn't join. No one hassled me. No one ever said anything to me. The really pro-union people kept to themselves and the vast majority did whatever and could actually care less.

2) Probably not, coming from a perspective of Power. Because it is so large and controls all of CPS, I doubt it would ever want to be split up -- even if those smaller unions are basically CPS lite.

3) I know. Tell me about it. It did all across the state (WI). Most of the old teachers that were stuck in their ways were either asked not to come back by the district; felt like they had to retire or else they would lose all of their benefits (I'm still unclear where this hysteria came from); and, more district flexibility allowed districts to better craft budgets reflective of their priorities. It was a good 5-year window to get hired here.

4) There are many possible answers for this. One answer I've seen is that more conservative-minded people are in professions that typically pay more (accounting, business (management), etc.). Another answer is that that conservative ethos of conserving your wealth (being thrifty) is something harped on if you grow up in a conservative household and it is, therefore, something carried one through one's life. And there are other reasons but you should avoid blanket statements because, actually, if you (taking Republican and Democrat to be proxies for conservative-liberal, respectively) measure it, you'd see that Democrats have slightly, on average, a higher income. Believe it or not, wealth at the top quintile isn't a really good predictor of political ideology. It's actually pretty even split between R and D. In the lower quintile, you'd find a stronger correlation between income and D or R: the poorer one is, the more likely they are to vote D. Yet, a better way to examine that would be racial. There you'd see a clear split between black low income (D) and white low income (R). This whole idea of wealth impacting voting habits and ideology is something political scientists are trying to still better understand. One of the better books, written for the general public, on this subject is (still) (Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State)[https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/0691143935].

Yes poor states tend to vote republican, but if you look at a breakdown of the people in that state, the richest people tend to be the most republican and the poorest tend to be democrats. The poorest people in most of the southern states tend to be african american, and we know for a fact that african americans in the south tend to vote for democrats. For the plains state, the poorest tend to be native american, another heavily democratic-voting group

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/0691143935?asin=0691143935&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Here is a far more recent article specifically about trump supporters:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/

Trump may have done better than previous republicans among working class people, but they are far from his most loyal followers.