razib | November 6, 2008A Muslim blogger who I am acquainted with, Tariq Nelson, has been threatened:
To the coward that called from a BLOCKED NUMBER and threatened me! I HAVE CALLED the police and I am PUSHING HARD to FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE and I will prosecute to the fullest extent possible! Apparently you know of me in some way or know someone that had my phone number. I am not going to tolerate your BS for one second and I will NOT allow you to harm me or my family.
I am posting here so that everyone will know that I am receiving these threats and that a phone call is too close to home. I want people to know that…
razib | November 5, 2008Yes. This weblog is ostensibly about genetics. And yes, I've gotten a little obsessed about crunching election data. Honestly, I get a little bit like this every four years...I remember the '96 election and the primitive years of the internet even. I decided I might as well post on my fixation for a few days to get it out of my system. Be aware that you won't have to deal with any normative political arguments from me; I don't care enough about ought, or, more accurately I don't think you are really interested in my opinions about the Good Life and how to obtain it.
In any case, since…
razib | November 5, 2008In 1996 Bill Clinton won with 49% of the vote vs. 41% for Bob Dole. The New York Times now allows you to compare county-by-county outcomes across two elections between all presidential years between 1992 and 2008. I think 1996 is the most analogous to Barack Obama's victory yesterday, so I want to focus on that map. My comments:
1) Obama got more of the black vote. No surprise.
2) Geographic proximity matters. Much of the Upper Midwest where the black turn out can't explain Obama's advantage over Clinton is not too far from Chicago. One could term it Greater Chicago, but I don't want to…
razib | November 5, 2008Andrew Gelman reports the finding from the national exit polls that the highest income brackets seem to be leaning toward the Democrats this cycle. The difference between 2008 & 2004 is striking and of note. But, remember that $100,000/year in Palo Alto is a working stiff. $100,000/year in Little Rock is a very good living.
I suspect that throwing all the data together into one pot and not correcting for regional differences in cost of living removes important information. The correlation between income and region, and voting and region, might mask the true relationship between income…
razib | November 5, 2008I suggested below that though on average whites did not move toward the Democrats, regionally there might be differences. I inferred this from the fact that areas where blacks are thin on the ground in the South it looks as if John McCain did better than George W. Bush in 2004. So I compared the voting patterns of whites in the 2008 and 2004 elections; and there are regional differences.
2008 Democratic presidential white vote declined 15% or more vs. 2004
2008 Democratic presidential white vote increased 15% or more vs. 2004
2008 Democratic presidential white vote 10 pts or more below…
razib | November 5, 2008The MSM rocks, specifically the New York Times.
If you filtered out blacks I'm pretty sure that the swath of red would be far more discernible in the South.* The blue patches match up very well with the Black Belt. It looks like the East South Central Census division, the core of Old Dixie is for now the Other America, along with parts of Appalachia.
I spot checked 2004 exits and compared them to this year. Whites in the deep South seem to have shifted Republican against the national trend. We're back to old school sectionalism, but now blacks can vote. People have said that the white…
razib | November 5, 2008Over at Culture11 James Poulos refers to the Great Flip; the Republicans of 1860 were a regional party of the North and Greater North (e.g., California). Today to a great extent that is the position of the Democrats; the narrow wins by Barack Obama in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina were due to suffrage of non-whites (which wasn't an issue in 1860) and the "fake" parts of these states dominated by recent migrants from the North. Take a look at the map below to see the flip for yourself.
But the flip was not just regional, it was also ideological. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's…
razib | November 5, 2008The New York Times put together a really nice interactive map for the election...but I thought it would be nice to have the three displays right next to each other instead of just toggling. So below the fold are the:
1) States as allocated to each candidate
2) Counties allocated to each candidate, shaded to illustrate the size of the percentage margin
3) Counties allocated to each candidate, with a bubble representation whose size is proportional to the absolute margin of the winning candidate in that county
To some extent, perhaps the Obama coalition could be characterized like so: the…
razib | November 4, 2008I'm still chewing through the exit polls, though Steve is right that there are no big surprises. I think I'll put up a few charts which display questions where responses can be thought of in an ordinal manner just to make clear the trend lines. But of course Andrew Gelman has already crunched the data. His main findings are:
1. The election was pretty close.
2. As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor. But the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories.
3. The gap between young and old has increased-a lot. But there was no massive…
razib | November 4, 2008David Boaz of the The Cato Institute observes that Barack Obama is Not Just the First African-American President:
But his achievement is even more striking than "first African-American president." There are tens of millions of white Americans who are part of ethnic groups that have never produced a president. The fact is, all 42 of our presidents have been of British, Irish, or Germanic descent. We've never had a president of southern or eastern European ancestry. Despite the millions of Americans who came to the New World from France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Scandinavia, Russia, and other…
razib | November 4, 2008Please read this post from Mark Blumenthal on the purpose and uses of exit polls. I'll probably starting digging through them and start posting facts and charts late tonight trying to smoke out interesting regional and social dynamics. You can check the exit polls yourself; don't take someone's word when they assert something, check it yourself, pundits lie or are misinformed a great deal of the time. I learned that from listening to election "coverage" during the primaries on the radio, I can't imagine what TV must be like....
razib | November 3, 2008FuturePundit points me to new work on a genetic mutation which might predispose one to Season Affective Disorder, A missense variant (P10L) of the melanopsin (OPN4) gene in seasonal affective disorder:
SAD participants had a higher frequency of the homozygous minor genotype (T/T) for the missense variant rs2675703 (P10L) than controls, compared to the combined frequencies of C/C and C/T. Individuals with the T/T genotype were 5.6 times more likely to be in the SAD group than the control group, and all 7 (5%) of individuals with the T/T genotype at P10L were in the SAD group.
It looks like…
razib | November 3, 2008Since the voting has started in New Hampshire, my predictions...The popular vote for President will be:
Obama 52%
McCain 47%
Other 1%
The electoral college & Senate outcome map are below. I think he Democrats will fall short of 60, but Georgia will go to a runoff as neither candidate will reach 50%.
Please note that I'm just guessing based on polls.
razib | November 3, 2008This is the last Jay Nordlinger post. I suspect what's going on here is a chasm between different Ways of Knowing, but this anecdote that he passes on is just bizarre:
So, my husband is black, I am biracial (white/Korean). Here is my three (homeschooled) children's experience of life: All their black and Korean relatives are voting for McCain (security, taxes, marriage, and abortion). All their white relatives are voting Obama (well-meaning, misguided liberals). At least half the Republican families they know are black homeschoolers.
What exactly does this mean? The myth that the proportion…
razib | November 3, 2008Geneic Future has a review & mulling over of implications of a new paper, High-Resolution Mapping of Expression-QTLs Yields Insight into Human Gene Regulation. Well worth the read.
razib | November 3, 2008Jay Nordlinger has responded to the critiques about his comment about Vermont (thanks to Jim Manzi):
Yes, yes, I heard from Professor Gelman too -- thank you, Jim. You have well and truly schooled me. And I was indeed writing impressionistically and rhetorically -- saying I was taught that the Republican party was the party of the rich, and the Democrats the party of the common man, pure and simple. I was meaning to say: When I grew up, I realized it wasn't so simple. And, yes, I was writing as a journalist and observer, not as a statistician. When I want to write less breezily and more…
razib | November 3, 2008If you've been following Pollster.com or FiveThirtyEight, you probably think that Barack Obama is a shoe-in. On the one hand, Kathryn Lopez's cherry-picking of polls in The Corner is not impressive. But, I've found some data which strongly suggests that there is a major systematic bias and flaw in all the polls which is grossly overestimating the support for Obama. My results and analysis are below....
BOOOHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SHOCK POST!
Sorry, I just like scaring people, and there are many spooked & nervous liberals & Democrats right now. Too tempting & too easy....…
razib | November 2, 2008Photo: Zhou Xun
I've mentioned EDAR before. If you've ever wondered why East Asians tend to have rather thick hair, it is likely due to genetic variation at this locus, in particular the SNP rs3827760. Yann reminded me that a new paper has come out which replicates and clarifies some earlier findings, A replication study confirmed the EDAR gene to be a major contributor to population differentiation regarding head hair thickness in Asia. Below the fold is an important figure from the paper.
JPN obviously means "Japanese," and 1540T/C is the same SNP I pointed to above. The concluding…
razib | November 2, 2008Dept. of Enduring Myths:
I've just come back from a weekend in Vermont -- and here's how I understand it: Modestly off people -- "real Vermonters," as some people say -- are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them -- driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on -- are voting Republican.
Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich,…