Sunday, April 13, 2008

How Does Pennsylvania Compare? Part II: Stocks and PBS

This is the second part in my three part series on how Pennsylvania compares on a variety of cultural measures. I noted in Part I that Pennsylvania is most like Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and Illinois when it comes to the percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers and pickup truck owners. In this post, I'll look at the percentage of citizens in each state who watch PBS (at least occasionally) and the percentage who say that they are invested in the stock market. Each state is plotted on these dimensions below:
Again, these two measures seem related to each other, though there are some outliers. In particular, few residents of Washington, DC appear to watch PBS but a high percentage are invested in the stock market.

On these measures, Pennsylvania is closest to Wisconsin, a state that it also ranks close to on Wal-Mart shoppers and pickup truck owners. Of course, Obama won Wisconsin 58-41% and there is really no indication that he will be able to pull off such a victory in Pennsylvania much less win the state at all. But it is interesting to see that on these four measures I've plotted so far, Pennsylvania is consistently closer to Wisconsin than it is to Ohio or other states that it has been compared to by pundits and analysts.

Don't worry, I'm not finished yet. In Part III of this series (coming early this week) I'll look at gun ownership and feelings toward Jon Stewart.

No comments: