The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A ‘Big Tent’ Can Be Too Big

March 30th, 2010 by Christian

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what's on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

Thus, they caucus block us.

. . .

Articles noting this phenomenon anecdotally appear all the time, and despite the recent hopeful spate of Democratic victories, it's undeniable that the Republicans form an exceptionally effective opposition party. Today, we're going to perform a data-driven investigation of why this might be—and discover some fascinating things about the American electorate along the way. Our data set for this post is 172,853 people.

A Picture Of Our Political Evolution

I should start off by pointing out that the Left/Right political framework we're usually handed is insufficient for a real discussion, because political identity isn't one-dimensional. For example, many Libertarians have Left-leaning ideas about social policy, and Right-leaning ideas about personal property. Where do they fit on a single ideological line?

There are many methods of looking at the political spectrum, but the best way I've come across is to hold social politics and economic politics separate, and measure a person's views on each in terms of permissiveness vs. restrictiveness on a 2-dimensional plane. Like so:

As you can see, I've superimposed some 'party' labels, to add some real-world context. One could quibble with the names I've chosen, but I feel that, in a broad sense, they fit: Democrats have a permissive social outlook and believe in restricting the financial sector (through regulation); Republicans essentially believe the reverse. In their corner, Libertarians would like to end restrictions across the board, and, down in the lower right, we have people who prefer that all aspects of life be guided by some authority: religion, the government, whatever.

. . .

Now, with the definitions out of the way, we can get to some information. We'll begin with the most basic measurement: people's economic and social values. Because our data set is so comprehensive, we can even measure the change in these values with age.

If these lines were of a single person's lifespan, they'd contain a neat little story:

  • Both socially and economically, teenagers prefer an anything-goes type situation.
  • But as these teenagers grow up a bit and enter the job market, they quickly develop progressive economic ideas: perhaps a bit of "levelling" seems pretty good when you're staring up the professional ladder from the bottom rung. Meanwhile, their youthful live-and-let-live social philosophy begins to fade.
  • In their late 20s, they start making real money. Economic progressivism goes out the window, preferably out the window of a building with a doorman. As the adult mind turns to more material matters, social views don't change that much.
  • Finally, after the mid-40s, retirement looms. Our former teenagers check their collective 401(k)s and think, you know what, let's all get checks from the government. Social views take a hard turn for the more restrictive. At the end of the journey, economic and social views are again in agreement—only this time on the other side of the philosophical line!

I realize I'm taking a bit of poetic license with this stuff, but the above sketch still illustrates generational differences very well.

Either way, the numbers really come alive when we take a more solid intellectual step and plot social and economic beliefs together as an ordered pair. So doing, we can get a picture of how a person's total political outlook relates to his age.

With the above plot in hand, we can go even further with our data. The American two-party system creates an interesting mathematical situation: we can bisect our political planea two-party system allows us to bisect the political plane and see which party more closely reflects a given age group's ideology simply by asking which side of the line the group lands on. People sitting in the upper right half should vote, in theory, for Democrats. People in the lower left, for Republicans. Like so:

The Implication of Our Two-Party System

But of course this line assumes that social and economic values are equally important to a person and that his priorities don't change as he gets older. Obviously, neither is the case in real life. So let's see exactly how those political priorities change with age and do even more with our graph.

Digging deeper into OkCupid's matching database, we find the following new information on people's political priorities:

The way this data bears on our political plane is mathematically cool, but arctan(x) really has no place in a political discussion (except in Flatland!), so I'll just summarize bya change in political priorities causes our
dividing line to rotate
saying a shift towards either social or economic issues causes our Democrat/Republican dividing line to rotate about the center of our political plane. Here's exactly how it happens; this chart is basically the sum of all the information we have shown so far. Use the slider to step through the people's ages.

The Effects Of Changing Political Priorities
age

From this animation, we can consolidate all that we've learned about each group into a single plot. The blue dots are the ages likely to vote Democratic, the red are the Republican ones. In case you're keeping score, there are 21 blue dots and 22 red ones.

People's Ultimate Political Tendencies

This detailed portrait of the electorate jives well with the actual exit poll numbers from the last few Presidential elections. The New York Times has collected this data and present it very well, if you have time to take a look. Here's the part that concerns us:

To wind up this section, I'd like to take one last look at our political plane, with a final set of overlays that I think are most illuminating:

The polygons I've drawn over the dots are called convex hulls; they are a geometric way to measure the spread of a set of points. In this case, the hulls tell us the size of the ideological/age base of our political party.

As you can see, the Democrat's base is much larger. And the range of political values it encompasses is vast. Here's party-to-party comparison in tablet form, for easy digestion:

Unlike in many things, size here is a liability. Yes, a political party that's this wide-open is probably a more intellectually stimulating organizationideological size is a liability to be a part of, and it has a lot more potential power. But bigger base is also just that many more competing viewpoints Democratic politicians must cater to and that many more different viewpoints in play among the actual elected officials themselves.

Also, well over half of the Democratic party's hull lies outside of its upper-right-hand ideological home, implying that you've got many groups of people who might tend Democratic, but who have disagreements with the party on particular issues and could defect, should the slant of the party or the country tilt the wrong way. On the other hand, the Republicans are concentrated in the lower-left-hand corner. This red cluster has multiple, apparently self-reinforcing, reasons to vote with their party, giving the Republicans both a more fervent power base and a little more ideological wiggle-room along either the social or economic axis.

So when you read about the thousands of Catholic nuns who recently came out in favor of health care reform, it's easy to get excited about being a Democrat. But do you think those same people will side with us on things like gay marriage? Or abortion rights? Hull no!

. . .

That's the crux of the problem: Republicans cohere, Democrats don't. After the above mathematical dissection of the political plane, let's take our conclusion in hand and see how it plays with other dating data we have.

Issues, Matching, and Politics

This whole Republican/Democrat situation reminds me (as it surely reminds you) I think of
Mamluks sometimes
of when Napoleon and his few French divisions dispersed the vast Mamluk horde by the banks of the Nile. Like an army, a political party must be coherent and disciplined to be effective, and these qualities alone can carry the day, even against greater numbers.

Let's look at ideological distributions on a few hot-button issues and see how the Democrats are spread out and exposed. We'll start with views on abortion. This chart shows the opinions of social conservatives and social liberals. Everything is as you'd expect: liberals are pro-choice; conservatives pro-life.

Now let's look at how economic liberals and conservatives view abortion:

Again, the conservatives are strongly pro-life. But the economic liberals have widely distributed views. A solid portion of the Democratic economic base actually sides with Republicans on this issue. It's those nuns again!

While the two conservative curves are nearly congruent, the liberals ones are totally different. The takeaway, the Republican advantage, is this: economic conservatives and social conservatives agree, while the liberal halves of these spectra don't. Furthermore, the purple overlap—in a sense "the swing vote"—is largely on the conservative side!

We see same pattern repeated again and again. Here, for example, is a look at the 'Gay Marriage' issue:

. . .

Finally, I want to wrap up this jam with a look at OkCupid's specialty: matching people up. Our final analysis will be to exclude explicitly political questions and see how groups of different ideologies match with themselves; i.e. how compatible they find each other.

Below is a matrix showing person-to-person match percentages for the various points in the political plane:

How Points In The Political Plane
Match With Themselves

As you can see, Republicans get along with each other quite a bit better than Democrats do, even on non-political issues. We've used match percentages like these to facilitate over 100,000 marriages in the last few years; their accuracy is pretty well-tested. If you're wondering, the site-wide average is 60.

Anyway, we calculate these numbers by posing a series of questions to our users. Just to give you a sense of what these questions are like, here are the top three most important (by user vote):

1. If you had to name your greatest motivation in life so far, what would it be?

  • Love
  • Wealth
  • Expression
  • Knowledge

2. Which makes for a better relationship?

  • Passion
  • Dedication

3. Are you happy with your life?

  • Yes
  • No

I find groupthink frightening. But that fact that Democrats can't get together on some multiple-choice Q & A speaks volumes about why they struggle with the infinite possibilities of government.

. . .

We're Hiring!

OkTrends is looking for a full-time blog analyst and a couple summer interns. These people would help us make more posts just like this one. The positions are in New York City. The internship is paid. The permanent position is not. Just kidding, it's paid, too. For both jobs, the ideal applicant:

  • is a quick learner, and clever
  • has an intense interest in data, particularly in data visualization
  • isn't intimidated by sprawling, complex problems

All applicants must know: Python, SQL, subversion (or any version control), and some college-level statistics. Writing skills and a rigorous math background are big plusses.

Send resumes and a cover letter to hr@okcupid.com.

. . .
. . .

143 Responses to “The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A ‘Big Tent’ Can Be Too Big”

  1. MelvinHicks

    Absolutely fascinating and strangely horrifying. The former in the sense that you have the raw demographic data to extrapolate on complex issues with a keen degree of insight and clarity; and the latter in the sense that you have the raw demographic data to make attractive deductive conclusions that your necessarily large audience could be ideologically swayed by. I like this experiment, nonetheless.

    In the understandably simplistic scheme of things I would best fit within the ‘Libertarian’ label. Moreover I consider myself an panarchism advocating anarchist. I also consider myself a futurist and a model* agnostic. These different beliefs tend to skew how the polls and questions on okCupid view me as opposed to how I view myself. I am often labeled a Democrat (yech) because my social beliefs aren’t always formed in relation to the current situation of governance as much as they are in futurist utopian ideology (please, i wont be reading follow up comments, so dont bother), with the immediate goal of distancing myself from a increasingly totalitarian government teetering on the verge of fascism and socialism. I am socially progressive in relation to my hopes for the future and economically conservative in my desire not to be a wage slave for consolation prizes from greedy f**k people in the meantime. At the same time in my idea world my affiliations and beliefs could easily be retired should humanity try to live in harmony for its own self-fullfilling sake and end its lifelong obsession with the need to be fathered and/or mothered by alpha dominants and mythological divine entities.

    Next time try to fit THAT in your charming yet overly-simplified break down of human ideology.

    *In a secular sense, or the unwillingness to try to force all of reality through any single model of perception.

  2. 21stCenturyMonk

    Republicans getting along well on non-political issues is “scary groupthink”, and the government offers “infinite possibilities” ?

    The site is great, but I wish you’d keep your Marxist politics out of the mix. Been there, done that, left the USSR.

    Thanks.

  3. J

    Republicans don’t cohere, they conform. That’s the whole message. “Be like us, and we’ll let you in to the club…” Older folks are necessarily more republican because the conservative powers that be make it hard to live too long if you don’t buy in.

  4. This is just quantifying and analyzing to death what has been common knowledge since forever.

    In Europe they say that if a man is not a socialist when he is twenty he has no heart. If he is still a socialist at forty he has no head.

    Will Rogers said as long ago as 1932, “I am a member of no organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

    How much do these graphs add to those familiar notions?

  5. Michael

    I can care less about anything you have (or anyone else has) to say on political parties being of the opinion that the entire concept of a political party is an abomination in line with neither the intent of the founding fathers nor common sense, but I have to comment just to say that your data visualization does Tufte proud.

    Also, that trend in your heatmap fits exactly to your observation that the democratic party is larger and less homogeneous (see convex hulls).

  6. Brock

    Children and the elderly vote Democrat, while grown-ups with small children vote Republican? Tell me something I don’t know. The dependents of the nation always choose to have the government provide them with more perks, since those dang parents/grown children don’t pay them a big enough allowance voluntarily. Meanwhile the folks who pay all the taxes (age 30-50) just want to be left alone so they can raise their families. Surprise, surprise.

    Don’t worry OkCupid guys. You’ll understand when you grow up a bit.

  7. drew

    you guys are amazing!! keep it up.

  8. J

    Brock, for many of us “growing up” has nothing to do with reproducing as soon as possible and consuming as much as we can get our hands on.

    The Republican party is no more interested in leaving you alone to raise your family than the other guys. They just want the taxes put to different ends, like perpetuating the myth of eternal growth by propping up the economy with arms, petroleum, patrimony and other destructive industries instead of asking you to pay some of your success forward.

  9. CRM__114

    Interesting. Just to provide an alternative interpretation, I’ll note that people’s party alignment also matches up well with what party was in power when they came of political age (say, 18-ish), with a successful presidency drawing people to the party, and an unsuccessful one away from it. So those middle-aged Republicans were formed in the age of Carter (bad D) and Reagan-Bush I (good R), while Democrats were shaped by Clinton (good D) and Bush II (bad R) if they’re young, and Nixon (bad R) if they’re old.

    This is not exclusive of the longitudinal interpretation, and surely the long-remarked upon increasing conservativism with age does occur.

  10. No H8

    I continue to love your analyses, though on this one I would have preferred an unbiased approach. As a straight Republican supporter of same sex rights, I disagree with your interpretation of the graph “Economic Conservatives vs. Economic Liberals: distribution of views on legalizing gay marriage.” The red curve on this issue is much flatter than on the abortion chart above it, though you have labeled it as another of the myriad examples in which Republicans stick together. Please, give some credit to the significant subset of us who are in favor of marriage for all!

  11. Sean

    I love OkC, but I am seriously confused on this. Dems just reformed healthcare, student lending, and made 15 recess appointments – in a week. Republicans have done nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. And they are proud to say so.

    I’m sorry, but you guys really have to explain yourselves on this one.

  12. Kristinn

    Really interesting stuff, it’s great to see this analysis go into new territory. But like djspaz I think that aside (”for one thing, this chart doesn’t actually show a single individual’s lifespan but rather how people of different ages think right now”) might be pretty significant, especially on the “social” side. More people accept homosexuality as totally normal now than ever, and it looks to continue that way (even leading to gay marriage in Mississippi by 2024 maybe?). I can’t see any reason today’s queer-friendly 20-somethings will turn into homophobes by 60-something.

  13. There are a lot of different personalities in both parties and outside the parties, I am an independent voter myself. The Republican party seems to do a very good job at ” whipping ” it`s members to follow party thinking. The Democrats seem to allow their members more freedom to think for themselves, this can throw the party off track, to many different views on how issues should be approached.

    An old hippie and former liberal when I was young, much more main stream now that I have aged and seen the changes in our country. Sure Social Security was formed by bi-partisan support from both parties, same with medicare, but has the GOP ever really done anything to correct their problems that help the average working family?

    They have constantly fought against any increases in the payroll tax, how many have seen their 401ks take a hit, or closed to keep them from bankruptcy or the loss of their homes, medical bills.

    THE GOP takes a stand against abortion, but how many mothers and fathers lost children due to gun fire in this country last year? It is just my view that not every one in this country is mentally fit to own a gun. If both parties would take a united stand, you use a gun in the commission of a crime and you die for it things might be different?

    Picture America as the Titanic, we are leaking, jobs, enough energy to maintain our economy and standard of living, but we keep letting more people on board a sinking ship?

    Our fathers that founded this country probably had no clue of the changes, it is just my thinking that they wouldn`t be happy with some of them.

  14. There are a lot of different personalities in both parties and outside the parties, I am an independent voter myself. The Republican party seems to do a very good job at ” whipping ” it`s members to follow party thinking. The Democrats seem to allow their members more freedom to think for themselves, this can throw the party off track, too many different views on how issues should be approached.

    An old hippie and former liberal when I was young, much more main stream now that I have aged and seen the changes in our country. Sure Social Security was formed by bi-partisan support from both parties, same with medicare, but has the GOP ever really done anything to correct their problems that help the average working family?

    They have constantly fought against any increases in the payroll tax, how many have seen their 401ks take a hit, or closed to keep them from bankruptcy or the loss of their homes, medical bills.

    THE GOP takes a stand against abortion, but how many mothers and fathers lost children due to gun fire in this country last year? It is just my view that not every one in this country is mentally fit to own a gun. If both parties would take a united stand, you use a gun in the commission of a crime and you die for it things might be different?

    Picture America as the Titanic, we are leaking, jobs, enough energy to maintain our economy and standard of living, but we keep letting more people on board a sinking ship?

    Our fathers that founded this country probably had no clue of the changes, it is just my thinking that they wouldn`t be happy with some of them.

  15. Jake

    This is pretty clever. However, it’s not really the way things work. Parties do not divide up ideologically. Each side tailor’s its ideology to attract a minimum-winning-coalition. In political science this is called Duverger’s Principle, and there is a boatload of research saying it works. What this means is that the Republican/Democrat divide is not 50/50 on the ideologically spectrum like you have it, but more like 40/60.

    Additionally, as you admit, this is a snapshot of the current electorate. There are good reasons, however, to expect older people in the future to have different political preferences. The reason is that people tend to take their ideologies with them as they age. Not completely, but enough that a person’s previous voting pattern is more important to predicting their current voting than is their age. Add to this that we know ideology is powerfully influenced by individuals voters’ early experiences with politics (like the first 3 or 4 elections: Mark Franklin did the research on this), and we can expect these distributions to change.

    Finally, about half the people don’t vote, and who these people are is non-random. Without adding in a model of turnout, we can’t know anything about election outcomes.

    I offer these not to denigrate this post. Like I said, I think this is really clever research and the data here can be used for some very interesting research. I just mention these points to alleviate the worry of any Democrats on the board, and to prevent Republicans from relaxing. Elections are still won by parties, not demographics.

  16. S Block

    That 4-quadrant map has been done before, but better. Yours is biased in favor of libertarianism, which I suppose you subscribe to hence make it sound better.

    Most people will prefer if you were to label the “authoritarian” quadrant as “populist” and change the “economically restrictive/permissive” label to “economically progressive vs. selfish”. This will put blue collar working class democrats and roman catholics (among some others) where they belong, as populists, not authoritarians.

  17. Joe

    Nice article.

    It is an interesting theory into the current political landscape, but the most interesting thing to me is that there are more non-whites than whites being born in this country for the first time ever, this will have a huge influence on the future political landscape.

    The world that the people on the right half of the first graph grew up is extremely different than the world that the next generation will grow up in.

    If you add race to the mix it starts looking very bad for Republicans who have more and more become a white-person party.

  18. Regina29

    Hi, It is great that you are continuing to take on challenging questions! Just wanted to point out that in your initial analysis of social versus economic beliefs, you may have some flawed logic underlying your assumptions. For instance, I’m 48 and indicated that economic beliefs are more important so I fall right in with the rest of the people in my age range. In theory, I should be a Republican.

    The truth is I chose economic beliefs over social because I believe that economic oppression is the source of the major problems in this country. I also believe if there was more economic justice in America, many of the social issues would decrease. In other words, if people are more economically secure they are probably happier and more tolerant of others; therefore, they may very likely be less liable to scapegoat other people, such as the gay population or racism in general. I believe we need to focus on mass financial regulation of the markets or at the very least go back to the regulations of the Franklin Roosevelt era.

    I am a total liberal on the far left of the Democratic Party on both economic and social issues. It makes me wonder how many others may be similar to me in this regard which would put a pretty big hole in your analysis. People’s interest in economic issues may not mean that they are only thinking of their bank accounts and decreased taxes. In fact for me, I would have no problem paying more taxes if all Americans could have access to free health care; a free college education at a State University; that a massive amount of federal dollars could be put into developing high speed rail, including mass transit trains across the country;and large investments could be made in developing alternative energy and cleaning up toxic waste sites and polluted water. Just thought I would point this out.

    Oktrends is just fascinating…thanks for making it a priority on your site!

    Peace, Regina

  19. Brian r

    @S Block

    Hm, I’m still not clear on this. Are the “selfish” people the ones who want to tax someone else in order to services for themselves? Or are the selfish people the ones who want to hold on to their money and not help anyone else?

    It can be so confusing to figure out who the villains are. Oh wait, I remember – the villains are whichever side I’m not on right now. Simple!

  20. The split on social issues amongst democrats can be explained by the simple notion that tradition is well-defined, uniform and coherent; whereas progress is forward-looking, open to possibilities and therefore uncertain. Though in the case of a liberal government, one commenter above is right in refuting the claim of “infinite possibilities” – progressive opinions can be held just as deeply and unrelentingly as traditional ones. I identify with neither camp, but it’s interesting to see how a lot of people are quick to make the claim that republicans agree because their party discourages independent thought. A baseless accusation, at best.

  21. Scott

    I LOVE you guys. This was entertaining and insightful, as usual. Keep up the great work!

  22. I am most likely considered an extreme conservative by today’s dem/lib/socialist/marxist/leftist standards (not labeling, just trying to be all-inclusive of those in favor of articles such as this) and I have always enjoyed OKC for it’s entertaining diversity (even though it is somewhat skewed in it’s fairness to it’s participants), but this blog has been a GIANT waste of my time.

    Part of the problem is that some idiots try and stuff U.S. into groups with titles, labels and self-conceived descriptions…let us be Proud Americans and stop pushing your agenda on U.S. and we will not need to derail your “frustrated and disorganized” Democratic chaos. We will do it every time, because we know what we believe in and what we stand for. The Republican right, however expansive and diverse, only wants to be left alone with no one poking and prodding U.S. into crap that we don’t want. We want to mind our own business. We want live our own lives without interference from you or your excessive Government. We want the same thing for you…once upon a time it was called FREEDOM.

    I suggest sticking with entertainment and avoiding politics.
    Major fail this time Christian.
    JMO.

  23. tish

    This finally explains why my father, who was a left-leaning radical in the ‘70,s became a Faux News watcher in the past 10 years. Kinda scary about that might say about my future!

  24. Aaron

    Funding social programs for the middle class and the poor gives them greater economic freedom (ex. public schools). If you do it by taxing the rich, you are restricting the economic freedom of a small group of people to benefit a much larger group of people – there is a net gain in the population’s economic freedom.

    The variable should be about redistribution. Not freedom.

  25. ben

    This is an interesting look at the politics that run the country, but I think that you forgot on key thing. people born in poorer areas are going to tend to vote democrat there whole life, when they vote. I think that the political spectrum is changing in this country and part of that has to do with the fact that in the last election the disenfranchised saw that if they all went out and voted they can elect a candidate that even less than 10 yrs ago wouldn’t have had a chance. basically what I’m getting at is if your born in Detroit or east LA your more typically going to vote Democrat because it’s a party that is going serve your interests, (urban renewal, decreasing the economic divide) while if your born somewhere like Beverly Hills or Dallas, you going to vote Republican because there going to be the party that is going to serve your interests. (i.e. lower taxes on the wealthy and more control of social issues, not to say that everyone in Dallas is against things like gay marriage, but most of them I would think would be). In ending I would say that the last presidential election is a turning point. I think that there is a good chance that the Democratic party is going to stay in power for quite some time due to the fact that people that didn’t see the power of voting before see it now, and are going to keep voting, and my guess is there going to vote Democrat. I could be wrong, but something tells me my logic on this is sound. I would also like to add that I agree with Melvin hicks as well that this analysis dose take a very narrow look at the political spectrum in that there are people the take views outside of the Libertarian, Authoritarian, Democratic and Republican Views. My own political views are a mix of Parecon and Democratic ideas. (my core belief is the the setup we have now of one person working under another and making them wealthy is the last form of slavery.) yet I don’t see anything here that would indicate that Parecon is being counted. thank you

  26. franktanana

    Actually, peoples political attitudes don’t change much throughout most of their life. They’re generally formed and then solidified during the time when they become politically active and are (e.g. the first three or so elections they participate/vote in).

    That’s why you see a consistent trend of age vs. social liberalism. The oldest voters grew up in an age with religious indoctrination in schools, segregation, interment camps and other such horrors. Society has consistently becoming more socially liberal, and peoples attitudes in that regard are reflective of the time period when they grew up.

    The economic axis, on the other hand, has swung back and forth. The oldest voters favor social insurance partly because they are the major beneficiaries, but also because they grew up during FDR/Truman/Eisenhower when there was a massive increase in government involvement in the economy (the new deal, social security, the FDIC, massive public works projects, the interstate highway system, etc.). Ike or even Richard Nixon would be considered a hippie by todays Republican party.

    The middle aged group came of age during Reaganism and an era of massive deregulation, making them economically conservative. The youngest cohort represents a backlash against that combined with the rise in environmentalism and similar issues.

  27. Ubercorey

    I grew up in a politically involved household and I’ll leave it at that. Its interesting to see everyones opinions on this topic. I think this article is a helpful discussion on the topic and more like this would be healthy for our Nation. However, the article and the subsequent comments are indicative of the scariest part of American politics. That is, most people confuse their emotional impulses or beliefs about politics for the facts, probably more so than any other national issue. The highest classes (top 0.01-0.5% of the population) spend a lot of money on think tanks, psychologists and communications companies to exploit this fact, keeping control of money and policy and playing various demographics against each other. For example, if you think that American politics has anything do with a two party system, you are going off a belief fed to you by the partially fabricated culture of the lower classes.

    Why should a single psychologist make 6 million a year? Thats the top earning bracket for Industrial and Organization Phd.’s who’s job it is to keep the working class from imploding in their own fruitless monotony. They get paid that much because controlling popular opinions and beliefs means controlling policy, controlling policy means controlling the money and money is the ability to make things happen as one sees fit. These are some of the facts about our political system, but they are facts that make people uncomfortably self evaluating, its much easier to talk about opinions that validate our own comfy positions in life, meaning our sense of belonging in this world. That is not healthy for our nation. If this comment made you upset, or annoyed you think about that, think about why, think about what it means that you were put off, and the implications of if what I said was totally true. What are the implications of that on how you have been in your life up to this point and the implications of where our county is going. Are you upset because you feel used or that you’ve been arguing moot points for x many years now?

    I’m not being condescending, I’m being dead serious. The debate is happening in a completely different arena and if we don’t get in there, as a nation of young people, we are screwed. I don’t want that for my golden years or our future generations, so I’m totally cool saying unpopular things if it will help us all clear our heads of the bogus info that has been put in them since our childhoods. Highest true is highest freedom.

    All the best, for you and yours.

    Corey

  28. Jon

    I am wondering where this data is coming from? It appears this is based off of information from your the dating site?

    I agree that these charts look like the current age and political affiliation break down but I would dispute this playing out the same way over the next 30 years. The generation that is 30 and under does not have it ingrained in their head to have a distaste for government.

    I agree with an above comment by Joe highlighting the completely different demographics of the 18-30 yr old age group and an number of studies (I recommend brushing up on Pew Research) have observed the change in comparison to historical data sets.

  29. dto1984

    I hate to say this is a relatively useless topic, but, it’s a relatively useless topic. Anyone who has watched a cable news channel for half an hour during an election year could tell you the same thing.

    I don’t think you sufficiently tied all your data to its ramifications for OKC users. So Republicans get along with each other better than Democrats get along with each other? Do people really need a graph to tell them that? I expected there to be a point here, somewhere, but it read like watered down liberal propoganda. (Next time you try to present a set of supposedly objective data related to politics, refrain from using the word “us.”)

    I’d be curious to know how many OKC users are liberal versus conservative, My guess, the liberals easily out number the conservatives. (They certainly do on the message boards. Perhaps this explains why the majority of the message board posts are so incomprehensible and hateful.) And if that were so, surely it would be deserving of statistics. Using such data, you could, for example, answer the question of why so many more liberals have trouble finding dates than conservatives.

    I would also be curious to know how many (if any) conservatives have married liberals after meeting on this site, But I wouldn’t find the answer to that here, would I?

  30. James

    Sean: “Republicans have done nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. And they are proud to say so.”

    Ever read Aesop’s Fables? Especially the one about the frogs who wanted a king. Zeus said “Here’s your king” and dropped a log in their pond. After a while, the frogs became unhappy because King Log didn’t do anything, so they called on Zeus to send them a king that would do something. He sent King Stork, who promptly started eating the frogs :-)

  31. Kent

    I’m not positive this data is an accurate depiction of the US population at large. There is surely a group of people more likely to try internet dating, especially over a certain age. This might inadvertently mess with the numbers.

    What matters is whether or not people actually vote. A political stance is irrelevant if the person does nothing about it.

  32. Cathy

    The problem is both parties cooperate to maintain their control and to benefit the wealthy and powerful, first and foremost. There are exceptions: Waxman, Inslee. If it wasn’t obvious neither party had the average citizen’s interests at heart during the health INSURANCE legislation, you aren’t paying attention. Obama has caved, as the Dems caved during the Iraq war vote.

    The statistics also don’t address fraud. It is interesting that the exit polls did not match the election results in the 2004 presidential race. And on and on…

  33. This is facinating.

    But from the perspective of predicting future political patterns, the assumption that social views change with age and not date of birth is key. I think this is a very important factor although social views may change over time too.

    Do the social views of 70 year old people have more to do with their being 70 or with their having grown up in the 1940s and 1950s? In 2060, will 70 year old people have social views similar to today’s 20 year old?

  34. Ray

    Fascinating analysis, but it is not complete. Three more steps need to be taken:

    1. Collect age-population data for people who actually vote.
    2. Convolve the age-population data with the age based political curve.
    3. Donate money to politicians a few years ahead based on the results of #2.

    4. take over the world

  35. second of all, i’m amazed at the hatred that republicans seem to have for this blog entry: probably not all of them, but you can certainly feel their provoked EGO when they defend themselves and tell someone to stop talking about them…

    and first of all, this is a thoroughly enjoyable/stimulating (i.e. provocative) read. “…caucus block us.” i’m going to use that for years to come.

    let me inject my two cents so everyone can get even more polarized: REPUBLICANS (and small children) lack sustainable and constructive methods for disagreement! haHA!

    (i vote republican)

  36. JS

    Keep up the good work with visual statistics. I find it funny that you get to use people’s internet dating questions as your continual source of population/polling data. Glad to see you have received a lot of postive press recently.

  37. edrees

    I agree the tendency to grow conservative is there as you age, however, I think it’s a tendency. There are also a lot of factors that push older people into being in the “democrat” side (for example, lets say the have a kid that turns out to be gay), as well as things that push younger people into the “republican” side (being born into a rich family, for example) there are just way too many factors that control people’s political ideology. Age is one of those factors, but not the most important one, and I think you should have acknowledged that at the very beginning of your analysis.

  38. Nat

    The adjectival form of “Democrat” is “Democratic”. It’s a grammatical error associated with an ideological position, which undermines your argument.

    http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/060807ta_talk_hertzberg

  39. Jacobus

    Stereotypes usually have some individuals they apply to and many they don’t. I am less than 2 years shy of 60. And the more totalitarian my (US) government becomes, the more disgusted with it I get, and the more Libertarian I lean.
    I could respect the Republicans if they ACTUALLY worked toward smaller government and preserving the Constitutional principles as the highest law of the land. They don’t, and I don’t. They pushed us into war outside our borders for the profit of the military-industrial complex.
    I could respect the Democrats if they ACTUALLY took care of the weak well, while preserving the Constitutional principles as the highest law of the land. They don’t, and I don’t. The compromise “health-care” law is a sham, IMHO. There is reason why the industry supported it: it makes minimal demands of them while forcing the working class to buy a mediocre product. And they are continuing the trashing of the Constitution and all other questionable activities the Repubs did. The only difference is the rhetoric.
    Some of us old guys are awake.

  40. This was the worst post you’ve ever made. You relied on the authoritarian/libertarian crap axis to define the political spectrum (which doesn’t exist!) instead of using the eight-orientation system used by Brian Patrick Mitchell. No wonder you got it dead wrong.

    Let me lay it out for you: only half of each party is hard left or hard right. The other half is somewhat in the middle, Rockefeller Republican or New Democrat. This is why you had so many Dems voting for the Iraq war. Now these centrist portions are both split into another two portions which skew along lines of tradition vs reform. This gives you culturally conservative Democrats and culturally liberal Democrats, in addition to the social radicals (liberty focused people) and social progressives (hard-core environmentalists, socialists) which are together frequently figured as social liberals. On the Republican side, you get both cultural conservatives and cultural liberals, but with a leaning towards social conservatism (made up of theists and neocons). While the social conservatives and social liberals dominate politics, the culturalists dominate the business world. It’s just the way American democracy works, and has been since the Reagan Revolution (and abortion) brought the theists into the political spectrum.

    When two non-charismatic people (like Bush and Gore) vie for the presidency, the electorate schizms 50/50, as is shown in polls. The deciding factors are, regrettably, outliers of questionable sanity. These hardliners are the people who have given you the mistaken impression of there being dozens, even hundreds of different political perspectives, when in reality there are only a handful of “balanced” perspectives as such. You can always tell these people for their conflation of one of the cultural poles and one of the social poles into a single dominant ideology with its own distinct utopian vision. In market economies like America, hardliners have great power because they can make people react, and this same talent enables them to get attention in the press. They are very fearful and afraid, and as such are willing to work harder and, sometimes, to go farther to gain power.

    The cultural conservatives and the cultural liberals differ on how they deal with their left/right splits. Left-wing culturalists in general pay more attention to problems and technological development, while right-wing culturalists focus more on protecting themselves. (Google vs Microsoft evidences the split) However the left-wingers also tend to defer to the right-wingers in a distinctly aristocratic fashion — indeed, this deference was probably the origin, at a mental level, of aristocracy. It remains today in the Blue Dog Dem movement, where you have culturally conservative Democrats who basically obey their right wing counterparts on many issues. Cultural conservative hardliners, like Bart Stupak, are hard-core collectivists who insist on promoting that spirit of deference. (It’s worth noting that Stupak has everything to gain from Dem losses — an exit by social liberals from the congress would remove the barrier to the “old boys club” of backdoor deals, some of which, we indeed saw in the Senate bill before that clause was repealed).

    I’m actually quite proud of this congress… the Democratic party at this point is previously the least corrupt it’s ever been… but we’re seeing how these insane hardliner madmen (and women) are controlling our collective reactions. I swear the hardliners on both sides are all over the media today… you can’t get away from them because the demand is too great, and it’s killing the civil discourse. Palin is proving particularly disastrous — not a day goes by that she’s not square on the front page despite not holding any elected office (currently) and that’s something of a disaster because her inability to perceive a difference between culturally conservative back scratching and socialism (or else she’s masking a psychotic obsession with ending all hope). I think America is kinda in danger today, because Sarah Palin is just the kind of person who could succeed in poisoning a country to the point that it devolves into incivility (as is already happening). In the aftermath of the Abramoff debacle millions of voters left the GOP, but these people recollected themselves as Tea Partiers in a spirit of anger over the deficit and the bank bailouts. Now they are going right back to the same corrupt people they threw out in 2006. Worse, the tea parties have a decidedly sociopathic and anti-altruistic character, as evidenced by their opposition to health care reform. This wouldn’t be the first time conservatives made good from opposition to altruistic endeavors — it’s already happened twice in the past. But the real threat to the Dems is not the Tea Parties — it’s Dem hardliners, like Michael Moore, who are determined to punish the Democrats, and take the party back to the radical fringe. (which will ensure that the Republicans remain in power for a long time). Because they won’t be voting, these Dems won’t be canceling out the approximately proportionate right wing hardliner vote, making for a likely defeat come November. But if they do abandon us, then I think we really ought to think about what qualifies a person to vote, because the concept of democracy rests on the firm notion that individuals can exercise proper judgment in the exercise of their rights. A vote isn’t meant to be statement of opinion, but a well reasoned judgment — or at least, that’s what the founders believed. Might be best to, over the long term, kick all the fringe voters on both sides square to the curb. We don’t let crazies inside the asylum vote, nor even prisoners, so why should we let mad people exercise more power than prisoners? Something about that doesn’t make sense.

    And we shouldn’t expect the Obama swing-voters to jump over — they are by now subsumed into the fear and furor of the Tea Party leaders, and probably won’t have their heads about them again until the economy is recovered. All in all, it’s a really pitiful state of affairs because it’s an example of Democracy in dysfunction.

    Anyway, I think Michael Moore really should reconsider his push to hurt the party, or he might find himself something of a pariah even among his own people come November.

  41. altheasyriacus

    It seems to me the kind of distribution shown on your charts are is given in majority-rule, winner-take-all system, assuming people are selfish.

    To illustrate, begin with the population divide up into perfectly coherent blocks (blocs ?) – groups of people who have exactly the same interests and therefore vote exactly the same. Merging with another block increases the new, larger block’s power in the majority-rule system, but at the cost of decreased benefits to individuals within the block, as they compromise their interests for the sake of coalition. The more similar the interests of the block that merge, the lower the cost of coalition, so start merging blocks with their nearest neighbors in terms of interests.

    Continue the process until one block holds 50% of the voting power.* Having achieved majority power, this block will stop growing, because expanding the tent further reduces benefits to each individual in it without additional increase to the block’s power. All remaining blocks must now merge in opposition, which greatly increases compromise they all must make, but if they do not merge they lose everything in the winner-take-all system.

    Part of what your chart demonstrates is that workers at peak career constitute the largest (in terms of voting power) coherent block in the US, which in a predominately wage labor (as opposed to, say, subsistence farming) society, is terribly unsurprising. That members of this block are so are alike in other ways, I would think is an artifact of the wage labor system, or in other words, due to the demands of those careers: success in the workplace both filters for and enforces a great deal of conformity.

    *Your block’s voting power equals
    the number of people in your block;
    times percent eligible to vote (citizens, of age, no felonies, have permanent address);
    times percent who turn out to vote (have adequate time and resources to study issues and get to the polls);
    plus number of people outside your block you can trick (through deceptive advertising) or pressure into voting with your block;
    plus number of people outside your block you can deter (through discouraging advertising and intimidation) or prevent (though restrictions on polling places, voting rights, etc.) from voting at all.

  42. altheasyriacus

    It seems an implication for OkCupid (and other dating websites) would be that Republicans are very easy to successfully match, and Democrats very difficult. Does that hold true?

  43. Oh, and the age thing only applies to conservative-leaning cultural liberals. Most of the others have a sense of persistent political identity, but the conservative-leaning cultural liberals (particularly the individualists) are oriented towards one thing and that’s improving their individual lots. They want government to work FOR THEM, NOBODY ELSE. They have a Freudian sense of self, created by countless succeeding traumas and moments of self-realization. It’s pretty easy to figure that a young person feeling they must be completely self-reliant will want more help from, and be more willing to tolerate the existence of, socialist programs. It’s equally easy to observe that the same person would seek to “defend their paycheck” by opposing these programs after they have established themselves. Finally, you could expect that as seniors they would have a somewhat paranoid interest in defending the social security trust fund, especially with all this scary (and ridiculous) talk of social security “running out” by such and such date. But these are hardly universal sentiments, applying only to these particular folk who, despite having an acute sense of where they have been, are sorely lacking a sense of their own natures and as such, lack for any sense of constant self-volition. Still, in a sense you are correct in that this small minority forms the “swing voter” group which decides elections. (the same being the motivation for politicians to promise freebies whenever election time comes up, in an attempt to offer the sweetest deal to the younger members of this group).

  44. John S

    Having completed 3 years of PhD work in Government at an Ivy League school, with political theory as a first field, all I can say is JUNK science. This is pathetic. The questions you use to drive your dataset are ridiculously simplistic and context less. And too few to make a decent qualitative survey to draw a picture of a single human being or a collectively-drawn one(s), either. The political theory that underlies your essay is horribly superficial. Is the person who wrote this versed in the concepts of political philosophy as abstract discourse, or the practical nexus of political theory and practice, “praxis?” Something that is going to develop a new taxonomy of ideologies has a pretty big hill to climb and does so questionable when not accounting for the “collectivist/socialist/marxist” ideology that has been a cornerstone of politics for more than 100 years. Being educated in statistics is far from enough in doing real political science. It’s easy to create a dataset and then draw out any sort of quantitative” finding one wants, but with a terribly-designed data collection process, poor, simplistic questions, and theorizing that is almost a parody of theorizing (in how simplistic, reductionist, and superficial it is), you’ve produced a few thousand word-long joke.

    You really need to get over yourself here. You have a decent service, but you can’t shake your narcissistic reveling in your cleverness with the annoying, cute phrasing (to the detriment of rather of being substantive). I think you’re a bunch of clowns who think you’re doing something meaningful with analyses like this one. I hope someone who REALLY is a political scientist rips this “research and analysis” to shreds.

    Why don’t you fix all the typos on your website before you try to get cute again with some b.s. project like this? You know, Maslow, priorities? I’m sure there are some who are impressed by your junk analysis (here and elsewhere), but subject to informed critique and you’ll be exposed as fools.

    People: This analysis is worthless. The questions at the basis of their dataset are not good proxies for evaluating the person who’s answering’s attitudes and characteristics. They weren’t designed for a political analysis and aren’t suited. At that, good researchers publish their methodology, which OKC didn’t do. Show ALL questions considered, etc. so we can make up our own minds about suitability. The analysis is based on something of a “universalist” view of human beings: It talks about something like ‘people in their late 20s….’ as if everyone were the same, as much as it tries to differentiate overall, in great part universalist-based concepts drive the “study.”

  45. Oliver

    Interesting analysis. Unfortunately, there’s one problem with it: You speak of real-world data but restrict the whole thing to a spectrum that actually is quite unique to the US. In no other place in the world would Republicans vs. Democrats be seen as a “right vs. left” issue. In fact, the issue is underscored by the major political test here which is quick to label people’s belief as “socialist” if they are on the Democratic “left” wing or further. I wonder if you are aware you’re falling for Republican propaganda there? In any case, if you use this political framework, you can use solely data from the US, and even that would have to be controlled for expats. I’ve lived in the US for years myself without adopting the US political spectrum as my own.

  46. tcaudilllg

    As individuals, right-wingers are discriminating towards each other, classifying each other as “good” or “bad” based on their beliefs. But as a political unit, this distinction is lost because they don’t want to risk a muddled message. They will take moderates, nut-jobs, extremists… anybody who will vote for them, and will avoid speaking out against them in public. (Bush himself was quoted as calling religious right leaders “nuts” in a TIME magazine article shortly after his re-election). The idea is to manage the reaction, manage the rage. It’s very calculated, scripted… professional. Left-wingers don’t care — they will fight each other like crazy, curse and do whatever. They have no holy text to constrain them. And yet at a personal level, they are better towards each other than the Right-wingers have ever been, because they have more compassion. The Right has to really work at developing its compassion — it’s something they always struggle with, and tend to err on the side of not granting it, as we saw with the Guantanamo torture debacle. But because they are not as good inside as Left-wingers are, they live better, typically happier lives. They don’t try to push the limits of compassion by casting their perls before swine — hell, that very passage in the Bible in something they explicitly keep in mind and live by. They go for the hottest, sexiest, and most worthy partners out there and do whatever they have to to “win” that quarry.

    Another thing: conservative don’t innovate. They don’t. Ever. They hire left-wingers to innovate for them, and use a mixture of mass production and exploitation of the left-wing’s disorderliness to achieve dominance and hire/buy out more left-wing innovators. Because they don’t innovate, Right-wingers can spend all their time understanding the systems the Left creates. They debate the merits of innovations; determine the winners; and institutionalize these as cultural mainstays. Because conservatives don’t innovate, they can spend all their time figuring out which tools are best for the task. When they don’t have a system which can account for everything they see (perhaps because they’ve lurched too far away from the Left emotionally), they despair and Left-wingers take control. The Right overcomes this despair by going “back to basics” and destroying everything it doesn’t recognize. When this process is complete, all that is left is a familiar world which can be understood and controlled. (we are somewhat in the grip of such a process right now, I think).

    On the Left-wing side, you have a million competing ideologies and systems, with islands of agreement. Each system means something important for its developer, something personal and self-defining. For a Left-winger it’s not just about finding “the hot girl” or “the nice girl” — it’s also about finding a soul mate who can appreciate the system created. So, your assertion that Republicans have it better than Dems is accurate.

    The real question… is if this is so, what are we going to do about it? How can we make it easier for Dems to find other Dems that they agree with? How do we make it easier for Dems to find soul mates?

  47. Charrua

    Very interesting. It’s already well known that the Republicans started first on the path to ideological coherence (the Southern Strategy, the Goldwater campaign, etc.) so I wonder if part of what you see isn’t self reinforcing.
    That is, some economic conservatives support cultural conservatism because they know they are supposed to. Rigid party discipline can have that effect, I suppose.
    Once the Republican identified voter sees that his party consistently supports and enforces support of a policy, he either adopts it or leaves the party, while a Democrat identified voter wouldn’t see the kind of consistent enforcement of ideological discipline and can keep his peculiar beliefs easier.
    I don’t see the usefulness of the whole age group thing, by the way. The key is that Democratic voters are spread all over the ideological axis, not their ages (race, income and education probably explain as much as age, after all).

  48. Kevin

    A couple analytical suggestions:

    1) When measuring the dispersion of the convex hull, it doesn’t make sense to equally weight each point. Rather, each point should be weighted by how many people are that age–maybe 25 year-olds are way out to the top right of the box, but if there are less 25 year-olds than 30 year-olds then this will shift more weight to the center of the hull. You need at least one extra dimension for the size of each age group.

    2) I’m not sure it is safe to say that we only care about the mean result of each age group, while ignoring the spread. Again, maybe 25 year-olds are very tightly centered around the point in the top-right of the box and they lean Democrat fairly reliably. But maybe there is much bigger variance around the 30-year-old dot, and in fact many 30-year-olds find themselves on the Republican leaning side even though on average they lean Democrat. This will of course change your measure of dispersion.

    Bottom line: why not just plot everybody into the box and then analyze the concentrations of the quadrants? You can color them by whether they lean Rep. or Dem., but ultimately I’d be more interested to see if the people in the lower-left are more concentrated than the people on the upper-right, regardless of age. Then you can use age to color them as Dem. or Rep.

  49. Hat Trick

    Just a thought, with something like this, you can generally measure how clearly you spoke truth by how many people think you were biased against them or in favour of someone else.

    As I skim the comments I see handwaving and criticism from Republicans (complaining that you’re Marxist or Libertarian) from Libertarians (asserting that they’re above all this bullshit) and Democrats (whinging that the Republicans do nothing while they make positive changes), I’d say you must have spoken a little too much truth all at once, to too many people.

    Keep up the good work.

  50. SeanD

    I’m curious to see the matching data controlled for race, etc. Democrats are more diverse across a broad range of demographic parameters than republicans; mightn’t this explain the differential in matching rates?