Department of Correlations

Greg Mankiw observes:

Obama leads in 18 out of the 19 states with the largest recent declines in home prices, whereas McCain leads in 13 out of the 14 states with the largest recent increases in home prices.

Marc Ambinder says “this statistic explains the election.” Obviously that was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I actually think this statistic is pretty useless. For example, the data shows a large decline in home prices in California and also a sizable Obama lead but we hardly need to look to this data point in order to explain why a Democrat would be doing well in California. You need to look at the minority of states where presidential elections are actually close.

Here you find Nevada and Florida as states that John Kerry lost but where Obama has the lead and where you’ve also seen large declines in home values. But home prices are up in Iowa and Indiana, both states where Obama is doing much better than Kerry did.

The economic situation definitely has an impact on voting behavior, but this particular statistic doesn’t seem to explain very much. It might be interesting, however, to bore down into, say, the Florida data and see if Obama’s increases over Kerry’s performance are disproportionately coming from the parts of the state where the price declines are largest.