

Chart: Republican vs Democratic occupations - randomname2
http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/

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DrScump
I think it's intellectually dishonest to change the title and thereby imply
something that the data does not say at all.

The data for the first chart is _specific to political contributions reported
to FEC_ and is _totally unattributed with respect to scope or date range_.

The second chart, "Which way does your occupation lean?", references no data
source _at all_.

~~~
randomname2
I had added to the title: "79% of software engineers lean D"

Per your feedback I have removed this part, as more accurately this would be
described as "According to FEC data, out of 100 software engineers who made
political contributions, 79 were to democrats and 19 to republicans"

In any case this is strong evidence software engineers lean overwhelmingly
democrat rather than republican, compared to other professions.

Per [http://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-
professio...](http://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-professions/)
and [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
fix/wp/2015/06/03/ho...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
fix/wp/2015/06/03/how-democratic-or-republican-is-your-job-this-tool-tells-
you/) the data source for the second chart is the same, and refers to the
self-reported occupations from the 2012 and 2014 cycles.

~~~
DrScump
Yet again, both sources exhibit the same problem. _They are cooking the data._

I've worked with voter data a lot over the years, both on the
registration/turnout side and the contributions side. The "occupation" field
is just a self-assigned 35 character text field, lacking a discrete set of
predefined titles to choose from.

The data referred to here represent the authors pooling a semi-random
assortment of descriptions into specific buckets of _their_ definition (for
example, very few FEC entries actually say "Beer wholesaler", since people
performing that role would use any of 5-10 different terms in preference,
given that such wholesalers almost never limit themselves to just beer... and
I doubt that a statistically significant population actually records its
occupation as, literally, "cattle feeder").

Point being, trying to make general inferences from unattributed, cooked data
is more parody than news.

By the say, can anybody get that search box on the WP page to do anything? It
does nothing for me on either IE or Chrome.

