How Indian food can predict vote choice

Sometimes, seemingly nonpolitical topics can shed light on people’s political choices, even after accounting for things like partisanship, education, geography and ideology. It’s as if the answers to these questions help account for some of what traditional political measures leave unexplained.

When was the last time you had vindaloo or tandoori chicken? Chances are if you’re a Democrat in Iowa supporting Joe Biden, it has been a while.

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll asked 584 possible Iowa Democratic caucusgoers lots of typical political questions, like whether they were Democrats or Republicans, and whether they planned to vote. But it also asked a few less obviously political ones, like if they’d been out for Indian food or how important it is to buy organic food.

Questions about food, travel and the kinds of sports people engage in can be used as an index of someone’s local versus cosmopolitan orientation. In polling during the 2008 Democratic primary, such questions helped differentiate voters who chose Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary from those who chose Hillary Clinton. The more likely that people were to experience other cultures probably unfamiliar to them — through travel or food — the more likely they were to vote for Obama, even controlling for things like income, education, personality, racial attitudes and city living.

This orientation toward the world also helped differentiate people who supported Donald J Trump from those who supported any of the 16 other candidates in the Republican primary in 2016. Voters who had been to Europe, Australia, Canada or Mexico or had eaten at an Indian restaurant were less likely to choose Mr. Trump by 10 to 12 percentage points beyond the differences explained by other factors like the ones mentioned above.

In a recent paper, David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein and Neil Malhotra returned to a workplace setting and showed that these orientations also separated technology entrepreneurs from other economic elites in terms of their attitudes toward economic and social policy. (Tech entrepreneurs are more cosmopolitan than other economic elites, and the authors think the rise of tech could therefore help to reduce economic inequality and other social and political inequalities, as these cosmopolitans start influencing politics and policy.)

In Iowa this year, a similar theme is emerging among possible Democratic caucusgoers. The Times/Siena poll revealed the same descriptive differences across the candidates’ supporters on basic demographics like age, education and race, and on political characteristics like whether they describe themselves as ideologically moderate or very liberal. For example, Bernie Sanders’s supporters tend to be younger and more liberal; Biden’s are older and more likely to be nonwhite.

There were no discernible differences on most of the nonpolitical questions across the candidates’ supporters in Iowa, such as on buying organic foods (most supporters of all the candidates think it’s important), using Twitter to read political news (most don’t) or watching television shows on premium outlets (also uncommon). Accounting for things like age and education soaked up most of the differences that appeared at first glance.

But, as has also been true in past contests, Indian food was a distinguishing characteristic. In Iowa, supporters of Sanders are its biggest fans: 71 per cent of them report going to an Indian restaurant sometime in the last 10 years. Biden’s supporters are less likely to have done so by about 30 points. This makes sense. Sanders’s supporters are younger and perhaps more likely to live in the college towns or in major metropolitan areas.

Of course, it’s not that eating Indian food leads a person to support one Democratic candidate over another — that’s silly. (And there are voters for whom Indian food is the taste of home.) But a voter’s orientation toward the world is related to candidate choice, and it turns out that eating in restaurants that celebrate less familiar cultures is one way to measure where people think they are more connected: To those around them locally or to people farther afield.

Which Democrats will prevail this primary season — the cosmopolitans or the local-focussed? Something to consider the next time you eat out.

©2020 The New York Times