Predicting Presidential Votes: The Steak/Sushi Index

About a month ago, Urban Spoon had a very interesting post questioning if there are any connections between the way we eat and the way we vote. Urban Spoon thought one way to show this might be to look at the ratio of steak to sushi restaurants in each city, assigning a score to each city on the “steak/sushi index.” What they found was that the ratio of steak to sushi restaurants in any given major U.S. city correlated pretty closely to the point spread between Bush and Kerry in 2004, resulting in this cool looking chart:

The numbers on the left axis represents the ratio of steak to sushi joints. For example, Dallas and Houston have more than 3 steakhouses for every 1 sushi joint, where as NYC and San Francisco have half as many steakhouses as they do sushi restaurants. The numbers on the right axis represent the point spread between Bush and Kerry. As you can see, Kerry beat Bush by about 50% in San Francisco, while Bush defeated Kerry by about 15% in Dallas and Houston.

My summary of this topic doesn’t do justice to the further in-depth analysis Urban Spoon conducted, so I urge you to click over to the original post and read even more details.