Numbers, graphs, politics? Confused? Don't worry—Arnold and Gavin are too.
Ladies and gentleman, Democrats and Republicans (you too, Green Party People), please take note of the following, slightly-brilliant study put together by Urbanspoon. The mathematical geniuses there have developed a formula—called the Steak/Sushi Index (SSI)—that finds a correlation between a city's political ideology and the city's ratio of sushi and steak restaurants:
Cities in general lean Democratic, but there's still a clear relationship here -- the more sushi, the more liberal. Somehow this feels intuitively obvious. You'd expect more red meat in red states.Furthermore, San Francisco, with a ratio of steak-sushi ratio of 0.33, is by far the most "sushi-fied" city in America, which makes sense, given the general political climate/history here (by contrast, Dallas has a SSI score of 3.01).But once you've established a connection between voting, steak and sushi, you can't help but try to apply that knowledge. As my statistics professor used to say, "correlation is causation". If we could only see how public interest in sushi vs. steak is changing over time, we could predict which way the political winds are blowing ...
By this measure, you can see why Kerry lost in '04 (sushi down), and why the Democrats took the majority in '06 (steak down). If this trend continues, it looks like a Democratic sweep in '08!
As for the 2008 elections, it looks like a sushi year according to the graphs, but beware: steak-eating cities are growing in population much more quickly than their counterparts, so you know, plan accordingly.
· Democrats pin hopes on sushi [Urbanspoon]
