Is your choice of smart phone political?
Connecting state and local government leaders
A study seems to show that red and blue states prefer different mobile platforms.
We all know that in this highly contentious political atmosphere, Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on anything. You see it in political maps, where Democratic states and represented by blue and Republican-leaning ones are given red coloration. A popular program in New York, one of the bluest of states, often won’t fly in Texas, which is about as red as you can get.
But did you know that red and blue states also disagree on what mobile technology to use? That’s what one study is implying.
The Huffington Post recently compared a map of smart-phone usage that was released by Jumptap to a map of red and blue states from the past four presidential elections that they pulled from Wikipedia. From these they drew the conclusion that Republicans prefer Android platforms while Democrats would rather use Apple iOS devices.
Although there is some distinct correlation, I don’t think you can conclude anything based on it. Just to review, of the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were not in the Jumptap map), we have the following breakdown of which mobile platform is the most used:
Red states
- Red states for Android: 9.
- Red states for iOS: 6.
- Red states for BlackBerry: 5.
- Red states with no preference: 5.
- Blue states for iOS: 10.
- Blue states for Android: 6.
- Blue states for BlackBerry: 3
- Blue states with no preference: 1
- Swing states for Android: 2.
- Swing states with no preference: 1.
So that’s 46…47…48. Good. Now that we have those enumerated, let’s draw some conclusions of our own.
Well, the majority of the states that show no dominance of smart-phone platform are Red. Does this reflect the current division in the Republican Party between the moderates and extremists? Hmm.
Also, swing states seem to prefer Android, especially if you include states that are currently classified as “purple,” such as Colorado and Arkansas. Will Android users be the ones to decide the next presidential election? Hmm.
Of course the answer to both of those questions is: How should I know? I’m looking at a smart-phone usage map! With it I can only conclude things like: BlackBerry tends to dominate in states where there are a large number of government users, such as Maryland, Virginia and New York.
And: Android seems to have made a successful push into the Southwest. Stuff like that.
I guess it just shows how any statistics can be inferred to mean whatever people want them to mean. But that doesn’t stop us from having fun by speculating. So, if an Android phone ran against President Barack Obama…