Politics and Major League Baseball have a lot in common. Both are national pastimes with passionate partisans. Managers, in campaign headquarters and team clubhouses, increasingly make decisions based on analytics. Both are games of small margins, and often played by celebrities.
Like politics, all baseball is local. Fans are much more attached to their local franchises than to MLB in general (you turn on the TV to watch your team.) This is different than the NFL, where the brand is the “shield” (you turn on the TV to find an NFL game) or the NBA, where the brand is the player (you turn on the TV to see LeBron or Steph play).
Which brings us to this year’s World Series between the two most iconic and valuable baseball franchises – the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees. Given the strongly Democratic politics of their fan bases, this will be a far left-field World Series.
We’ve analyzed 394,202 Nielsen-Scarborough interviews with American adults to determine the partisan differences among each MLB franchise’s fan base. Unsurprisingly, the distribution appears to be largely a function of political geography.
This article originally appeared on Campaign & Elections -- read the full piece here.
