Posted on 02/13/2016 4:45:46 PM PST by iowamark
Anyone trying to understand why Donald Trump always has thought New Hampshire would be friendlier to him than Iowa should put aside the polls for a moment and focus on what each state's Republican voters are putting on their Spotify playlists.
According to data for the week ending Feb. 1, Iowa Republicans can't stop listening to "This Is Amazing Grace" by Christian rocker Phil Wickham, which opens with the verse: "Who breaks the power of sin and darkness/Whose love is mighty and so much stronger/The King of Glory, the King above all kings."
Republicans in New Hampshire, meanwhile, prefer "Idle Hands" from EXGF, whose opening lines speak to a very different doctrine of inerrancy: "Just play the music/************, don't stop."
The charts that those two songs sit atop are the sample of an election-year collaboration between Bloomberg Politics and Spotify, an on-demand streaming music platform.
Trump won New Hampshire's Republican primary on Feb. 9, while coming in second in Iowa.
The Spotify subscriber list was anonymously matched to voter records managed by TargetSmart Communications to highlight trends and patterns that reflect on how politics and musical taste intersect. (The differences between Democrats from the two states were less pronounced-with the exception that the three top songs in New Hampshire are from Disney's "Frozen," none of which appear on Iowa's list.)
TargetSmart, a political-data company that works primarily for Democrats, was able to locate more than 7 million Spotify users on voter-registration rolls nationwide, and -- after stripping away all personally identifiable information -- assigned them to three buckets according to the kinds of partisan behavior and attitudes political consultants use to sort voters. (For the purposes of this reporting, those buckets are called "Red," "Blue," and "Purple.")
Spotify then compiled recent listening patterns for 43,090 subscribers in Iowa and 16,477 in New Hampshire.
The charts emphasize distinctiveness, showing songs played at an unusually high rate by Republicans in the first two voting states. In other words, the music popular on both sides of the aisle were ignored, to highlight areas where the two sides diverge.
The gap between the certainties sung by Wickham and by EKDF reflect a chasm well-documented in political demography.
While 62 percent of voters who participated in Feb. 1's Iowa caucuses considered themselves "white evangelical or white born-again Christians," only 22 percent of those who voted in New Hampshire's 2012 Republican primary did.
Only three of the songs on the Iowa Republicans' top 25 are fully secular in lyrics and message-upbeat country tunes by Jon Langston, Cold Creek Country and Brad Paisley -- while the New Hampshire chart is resolutely godless from top to bottom.
Trump and Gov. Chris Christie have picked the state to save their candidacies: Three of the top four songs on its Republicans list carry an "Explicit" warning. Christie dropped out of the race after doing poorly in New Hampshire primary.
Otherwise, New Hampshirites are comparably catholic in their tastes. The state's Republicans queue up both mainstream R&B by Miguel -- the single "Simple Things" features Chris Brown and Future -- and fiddle-driven, banjo-accented rock from Green River Ordinance. They also embrace far more racial and ethnic diversity in their music than Iowans.
The New Hampshire list's cosmopolitanism stretches from Colombian singer J. Balvin to the Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi. (Balvin sings entirely in Spanish.)
It's little surprise that Ohio Gov. John Kasich (a Deadhead who recently entered a campaign event to the White Stripes and sang a tribute to David Bowie) maintained hope that the state's Republicans could be just idiosyncratic enough to go for him -- and also hoped to woo some center-left independents. And they were -- he finished second, though by about 20 percent fewer votes than first-place finisher Trump.
At number 40 on the New Hampshire Republicans list is Vampire Weekend, which brought its winking affection for preppy New England culture to Iowa last week on behalf of Bernie Sanders.
John Kasich (a Deadhead who recently entered a campaign event to the White Stripes and sang a tribute to David Bowie)
Did you know his father was a mailman?
So-called pop music doesn’t ‘explain’ anything.
If it does anything at all other than generate deafening noise, it illustrates the precipitous decline of America.
http://www.slate.com/authors.sasha_issenberg.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/authors/AOmMaaYdnUc/sasha-issenberg
http://www.thevictorylab.com/about_sasha
> Sasha Issenberg is a contributor to Bloomberg Politics and the Washington correspondent for Monocle, where he covers politics, business, diplomacy, and culture. He covered the 2012 election as a columnist for Slate and the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe. His work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Washington Monthly, Inc., The Atlantic, Boston, Philadelphia, and George, where he served as a contributing editor.
"Oh say! Does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave, o'er the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?"
How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph
Sasha Issenberg
A meticulous, technologically advanced, highly individualized groundgame — and legalized fireworks — trumped a certain outsider candidate.
> A few hours before the caucuses began, Wilson sat in the hotel lobby and looked at his final projections and all the different ways Cruz could exceed his vote goal of 35,178. As of that day, 39,541 Iowans had directly confirmed their intention to caucus for Cruz, with nearly 4,000 of them doing so over the web site. At the same time, the campaign had 29,830 turnout targets, infrequent voters whom statistical models predicted were likely to support Cruz if they did end up choosing to caucus. It was a slice of that group deemed the least likely to turn out — with less than one-in-four odds of doing so — who received a controversial get-out-the-vote mailer that essentially shamed voters into turning out in the closing weekend of the race.
[2012] http://slate.me/LCi9Qb — Sasha Issenberg writes a must-read piece on the reelection campaign’s full-throated embrace of empiricism. They’re throwing out oodles of ads with small buys and using randomized trials to see what’s working. It’s “the result of a flowering partnership between Obama’s team and the Analyst Institute, a secret society of Democratic researchers committed to the practice,” Sasha scoops in Slate. “The Obama campaign’s ‘experiment-informed programs’-known as EIP in the lefty tactical circles where they’ve become the vogue in recent years-are designed to track the impact of campaign messages as voters process them in the real world, instead of relying solely on artificial environments like focus groups and surveys. The method combines the two most exciting developments in electioneering practice over the last decade: the use of randomized, controlled experiments able to isolate cause and effect in political activity and the microtargeting statistical models that can calculate the probability a voter will hold a particular view based on hundreds of variables.”
Why the GOP’s Data Geeks Are Hoping for a Long, Hard-Fought Primary
More candidates in more states mean more voter data in the burgeoning Republican voter file — which could come in handy in 2016.
January 16, 2015 — 2:01 PM EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-01-16/why-the-gops-data-geeks-are-hoping-for-a-long-hardfought-primary
I’ve been voting straight Conservative Republican since the very first election in which I was eligible to vote at the age of 19 (1980 – proudly for Ronald Regan – even campaigned for Regan in Maryland in 80 and 84 along with my older brother and for Helen Delich Bentley and later for Ellen Sauerbrey.)
But if you were to look at my CD collection and what is on my iPod and my computer, music-wise, you might think there might be at least 10 different people living in my house ranging in ages from 20 to 80 and of all sorts of political leanings if only based on that. LOL!
I have very eclectic tastes in music. Everything from Rachmaninoff to the Ramones to Rush; Coltrane to The Cars to Counting Crows, Death Cab For Cutie to the Dave Matthews Band to Dave Brubeck; Bach to The Beastie Boys to Beck to The Beach Boys to Beethoven….
I’ve got Elizabethan and early Medieval music, baroque, classical music from the romantic period, modern classical like Von Williams and Stravinsky, early jazz, late jazz, modern jazz, traditional blue grass, modern blue grass, blues, classic rock, disco, alternative, grunge, punk, soul, Motown, electronica, heavy metal, original Big Band and Swing music like Benny Goodman and modern like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, country from Hank Williams and Pasty Cline and Johnny Cash and to Little Big Town and alt-country/alt-blues rock like Drive-By Truckers and Old Crow Medicine Show and my new favorite, The Tedeschi Trucks Band.
Although not into modern “Christian” music per se, I have a CD by Jars of Clay (Flood) and down loaded the song by Casting Crowns - Broken Together because I think it is an absolutely beautiful song.
Casting Crowns - Broken Together
Not into rap or hip hop but I do have on my iPod play list Alicia Keys – Fallin and OutKast - Hey Ya! and the “clean” version of Macklemore’s - Thrift Shop (although I really like the Postmodern Jukebox version the best: ), FWIW - Postmodern Jukebox covers all sorts of modern pop hits with a revolving line up of singers and musicians playing popular music in period styles. Check them out on YouTube – a lot of fun.
Thrift Shop (Vintage "Grandpa Style" Macklemore Cover)
All About That [Upright] Bass - Meghan Trainor Cover PMJ ft. Kate Davis
Bad Blood - Vintage Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Taylor Swift Cover ft. Aubrey Logan - PMJ
I guess I’m just hard to pattern or pigeon hole or data mine and most likely impossible to predict who I might vote for based solely on my musical tastes.
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