He’s always been one of yours.

Here’s another one (slightly modified by the blogger, I think):

The goal was to get it as close to us as we could…and landing upright stuck in the ground. HAH! Can you see that happening now!?

Scarborough Sports Marketing is the Sports division of the overall brand of Scarborough. This division measures purchasing habits of sports fans for teams, leagues, marketers and media professionals. The data gathered by Scarborough is used by clients to learn more about and assist with corporate sponsorships, fan development, merchandising, promotion, competitive information, ticket sales, marketing, media selling, media placement and schedules. Scarborough’s studies are used to determine information on local and national markets throughout the United States.

–WIKI

I find it amazing that Americans, who find government interference and snooping in individual people’s lives for political purposes intolerable, would consider use of the exact same techniques and technologies on whole populations for commercial purposes as perfectly kosher.

Market research was already well established and highly influential in the US by the 1950s, I’ve often wondered if this is what Asimov really had in mind when he wrote about psycho- history in the Foundation Trilogy. “Mules” and stochastics may make predicting history impossible, but as market animals, we are easily predictable, and vulnerable. After all, you don’t have to be successful with every product all the time, just often enough to be profitable in the long run.

And if markets are predictable, then they can be manipulated. How do you reconcile that with economic free markets and Adam Smith capitalism? Again, its not the occasional failure that really matters, its the overall predominance of successes.

But hey, it’s fun to swat one fly now and then out of the swirling clouds around here.

The graph comes from a series of graphs I linked to a while back that showed diagrams like that for many different subjects. I don’t know where the link is now, but it was cool.

Actually, it wasn’t necessary. My Cousin Robert the Red is a huge NFL fan, my anti-Castro cousin Rudy is a Marlins season ticket holder, and George Will is a Cubs fan.

Then again, Obama roots for the White Sox. Could that possibly have some profound ideological significance? Actually, that is a great graph. I must confess, I find the results highly counter-intuitive, but the methodology and conclusions look impeccable nonetheless.

However, it can still be spun to mean about anything you want.

Golf and college football are elitist pastimes, and NASCAR is definitely redneck Republican. Basketball politics are highly skewed by its popularity among African Americans. The wrestling outlier is a puzzlement, until you realize how popular wrestling is among Mexican Americans. And I must confess, I am fascinated by it myself. I used to go and audience-participate in the taping of “Championship Wrestling from Florida” (With Gordon Solie) when I was a kid.

Notice the women’s sports and the split between sports car and drag racing. Soccer is no surprise, very European socialist, eh?

The real question should be, why should sports preference have any ideological correlations at all?