These are polarizing times in America. And what better to understand that then a highly polarized measure?
I took the forecast margin of victory for each state for Clinton and Trump, as of today, on Five Thirty Eight. The scores range roughly from -28 to +28, and I reverse them to get the positive score for each candidate (I excluded DC). Then I asked Google Correlate what searches were most correlated with each list of state scores. All the searches here are correlated with the candidate margins at .83 or higher.
Here’s the map as of today:
The Clinton list is dominated by vegetarianism and yoga, Top Chef, and the kind of annoying movies that liberals just love (Before Sunset).
The Trump list is racist anti-Obama stuff, patriotism, and, mostly, the kind of guns you don’t use for hunting. Google gives 100 for each list; I deleted those that weren’t easily categorized. (You can see the full lists here and here.) Here are the highlights:
Really, you people are so predictable.
But what of the Before Sunset-lover working in the Obama Jokes town? The Biggest Gun husband and the Vegetarian Sushi wife with their Ayurvedic Massage therapist next door? Of course, this method will never show the nuances of social life, the moments when people reach out from their silos and grasp, however fleetingly, the hands of those whom the winds of fortune and arbitrary social divisions have attempted to sweep away from them forever. And it won’t show the big, messy middle, the people who do use guns for hunting, eat tofu but aren’t vegetarian, listen to Tom Tom Club and also learn country guitar. I’d be happy to see something about them out there today.
Family Inequality 
Reblogged this on tiggerblog2 and commented:
Give a man a fish…
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I’ve come to be a tad skeptical about Google correlates. You get some very idiosyncratic items with high coefficients. I find it hard to believe that all across the Blue states, people are curious about a Murakami novel of 14 years ago. Or “Before Sunset.” Why that one and not the other two “Before”s, which were better films? And in the Red states, is there really such widespread curiosity or concern about babies born prematurely by three or seven weeks but not five or eight?
It’s almost as though a very small number of Googlers might be driving up the correlation, though I have no idea how that might happen.
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