Combining two of my interests

Paul Alper writes:

Hi Andrew (or Andy or even Gelman [17 of them]):

Go to this link and have some fun with (useless? powerful?) data mining.

As the authors say, it is addictive. Paul (no other way to spell it) Alper [215 of us]

I’m reminded of this discussion from 2012, “Michael’s a Republican, Susan’s a Democrat.” As I wrote at the time:

It’s no surprise that men give more to Republicans and women to Democrats, or that the average contribution to a Republican has a larger dollar value than the average contribution to a Democrat, nor perhaps should we be surprised that “Tom” splits his support between the two parties while “Thomas” is a strong Republican. Still, it’s fun to see the data.

Overall, I think this graph understates contributions to Republicans because it doesn’t include those new super-pacs.

But the new tool seems to be based on a different dataset, opinion polls rather than campaign contributions. Playing around a bit, I see a lot less variability in party ID by name (estimated using the survey database) than in partisanship of campaign contributions by name (using the campaign contribution database).

I’m not sure what to make of this. But perhaps both data sets have some flaws. In both cases, I’d say the data are fun and worth exploring but we should be careful before assuming the numbers are correct.

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