Who watches more porn – Republicans or Democrats? That’s the latest question our friends at Buzzfeed posed to us. Previously, Buzzfeed asked us which states watch more gay porn – and the results were quite interesting.
This time around, our Pornhub Statisticians set out to answer their question by first looking at the viewing habits of all the states across the US of A. Once we knew the average number of pages viewed per visit residents of each state, we compared that to the current population and political preferences.
Some interesting trends started to appear as they crunched the numbers, and that gave rise to another question – given the per capita pageviews for each state, was it possible to use porn habits to predict election results? Read on to find out!
Red Versus Blue
For our non-American readers, the color red traditionally represents the Republican party, and blue the Democrats. Looking at a map of the US, we can see that red states fill much of America’s ample mid-section, while blues tend to be concentrated in the West and North-East. The interactive map below shows the current political representation and the number of pages per visit for each state.
Starting with the total number of pages viewed per state, our statisticians divided that by each state’s population to get the pageviews per capita.
The average number of pages per visit are pretty close – 9.33 pages in blue states, and 9.2 pages in red states. But on a per capita basis, the gap starts to widen. Blue states view 137 pages per capita, whereas red states view 121 pages per capita – a 13% difference.
Have a look at the following two charts to see how each state stacks up compared to their red or blue neighbors. Kansas, with a population of 2.9 million and 8.9 pageviews tops both the republican and overall lists at 194 pageviews per capita. On the bottom end of both is Arkansas — with nearly the same 2.9 million population, they average 9.3 pages per visit, resulting in only 77 pages per capita.
On the democratic side, Nevada’s population of 1.8 million results in 166 pageviews per capita. Maine is home to 1.3 million folks, who typically go through 9 pages each time they visit pornhub, resulting in only 92 pageviews per capita.
Porn, Pages and Predictions
Of the 10 states with the most pageviews per capita, only 2 are red states. Conversely, of the 10 states with the least porn viewing per capita, only 2 are blue states. If we were to just use porn consumption per capita as a predictor of political orientation, we could have predicted the results of the 2012 elections with 70% accuracy.
Using the same data, our statisticians could also have correctly predicted election results in 9 of the 12 swing states (75% accuracy). It’s these hotly contested battleground states that often decide federal elections due to their changing political preferences. Only Ohio, New Mexico and Wisconsin’s swingers managed to fool our porn per capita classifier. I guess we’ll just wait for CNN’s call in 2016.
Below you can see how our predictions lined up with the current political representation of each state.
Conclusions
Assuming the porn consumption per capita is normally distributed for each state and that different states have independent distribution of porn consumption per capita, we can say with 99% confidence the hypothesis that the per capita porn consumption of democratic states is higher than the republican states.