Saturday, November 01, 2008

A new demogrphic?

Actually, maybe it's a sociolographic????

Anyway, one thing that distinguishes Red States from Blues States is the Starbucks/Walmart ratio.

From FiveThirtyEight.com (a meta polling site):

Starbucks:Walmart ratio is exactly what it looks like: take the number of Starbucks in the state and divide by the number of Walmarts. While there is a connotation that Starbucks is a place where liberals go and Walmart is a place where conservatives go, it's probably more strongly correlated to population density. There are rarely Starbucks sitting out in the middle of farmland, and you can't have a Walmart on every corner of a big city.

Either way, though, lots of Starbucks relatives to Walmarts is a good sign for Obama. The ratio in Oklahoma is one of the lowest in the country.

From TS Perspective:
Top 7 highest Starbucks to Walmart ratios:
Washington (13.6:1)
California (12.5:1)
Oregon (8.4:1)
Nevada (8.0:1)
Hawaii (7.4:1)
Colorado
New York (4.6:1)
All of these states will/should go to Obama on Tuesday.

Now the bottom 7:
Arkansas (0.19:1)
Mississippi (0.29:1)
West Virgina (0.41:1)
Oklahoma (0.41:1)
New Hampshire (0.42:1)
Alabama (0.44:1)
Louisiana (0.51:1)

Except for independent leaning New Hampshire, you get the picture.

1 comment:

David Amulet said...

Fascinating. I wonder if there's a similar correlation/divide between Windows/Mac users and between those who prefer Jennifer Aniston over Angelina Jolie!