Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, Andrew Gellman.

He's a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, and he's also the director of their Applied Statistics Center.

He's published numerous textbooks about statistics as well as a popular book

titled Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

And he also runs an excellent blog, which is one of the few blogs that I read on a regular basis,

and it has the very catchy title, Statistical

Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. Oh, and then most importantly, I want to let

our listeners know that Andy was my professor in college when I was an undergraduate, which,

Andy, why isn't that in your bio? I half expected that to be

right up there, you know, above your list of awards. I'll have to fit it in there for the next

person. Well, welcome to the show. And Andy, what I'm particularly excited to talk about today

is one of the big focus areas of your research,

which is analyzing Americans' voting patterns, and specifically how those voting patterns intersect

with socioeconomic factors.

So there are these two competing narratives that I'm sure our listeners will be familiar with if they, you know,

watch or consume any media about politics. And one of them is that the Republican Party is the,

they're the fat cat elite, rich people, whereas the Democrats are the party of the people.

They're the populists. And then, on the other

hand, we have this narrative where the Republicans are the salt of the earth working every man,

...