So in your opinion - what kind of people do you think eat sushi? Or rather, who prefers meat to raw fish - democrats or republicans? I would believe it did differ a bit - so I was glad to find that the guys over at the headquarter of Urbanspoons also wondered about this, and set out to find if there were in fact correlation between choice of favorite food and political opinion - or trying to calculate the Steak/Sushi Index (SSI)! Ahh. What fun minds!

After some careful and extensive investigation they did actually find a correlation. They calculated the ratio of steak to sushi restaurants or the Steak/Sushi Index (SSI) for cities around the US and then compared that to the election results from Bush vs. Kerry in 2004 (measured by the spread in the percentage of the vote). Cities in general lean Democratic, but there’s still a clear relationship here — the more sushi, the more liberal. Somehow this feels intuitively obvious. You’d expect more red meat in red states.

But they don’t stop there - they also try to predict the future. They believe that if they could only see how public interest in sushi vs. steak is changing over time, they could also predict which way the political winds are blowing… Oooo. Interesting! So - who will win the election based on the SSI? By using Google Trends, you get a glimpse by measuring search traffic for the terms “Steak” and “Sushi”. Look at the image introducing this article. It shows good news both for the Democratic Party and Sushi or Death I would say! Or as they say:

“By this measure, you can see why Kerry lost in ‘04 (sushi down), and why the Democrats took the majority in ‘06 (steak down). If this trend continues, it looks like a Democratic sweep in ‘08!”

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