Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Need Cogent Political Analysis? Check Out a Dating Site!

The dating site OKCupid apparently has a blog dedicated to mining the survey questions of its (almost 180,000) members, called OKTrends. (Who knew?) From this comes possibly the most cogent piece of analysis on the relationship between demography and political strategy I've ever seen. I could summarize, but it's just easier to go read it. Fascinating.

UPDATE 4/8/10: I should probably H/T Will Wilkinson for this, and note that he thinks that a big chunk of the results from this study are a result of cohort selection: Older people grew up in a different time and had their politics informed by different forces. It's true that people's politics change as they age, but maybe not as much as would be assumed by this analysis.

On the other hand, the baby boomers, whose politics were formed in the quite liberal '60s, are now the ones with the (measured) authoritarian biases now. Is it reasonable to assume that the Obamakids will be as liberal in forty years as they were during the 2008 elections?

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