ESPN poll questions

What I like about the ESPN questions, as opposed to the CNN questions, is that on ESPN they give a map of the United States and color each state according to the leading response to the question.

This allows you to look at regional trends. Obviously, some of those trends are based on obvious personal interest or bias and aren’t that interesting. For example, if there’s a question such as: “What’s the greatest franchise in American sports,” then inevitably California goes with the Lakers, New York state with the Yankees, Massachusetts with the Celtics, etc. Nothing enlightening there.

However, sometimes really unusual and interesting patterns do occur. Some poll questions have unanimous answers for all states. Others have dissenters, and only once in awhile are they dissenting states scattered at random. Usually they have some sort of geographical link, and often it suggests a cultural insight that would have been far from obvious ahead of time.

But today’s is really odd. The poll question is: what would you rather have the NBA players on your favorite team do during a lockout– play in a foreign league, or stay home and play in domestic events?

Being a good cosmopolitan and traveler, I naturally voted for the “foreign leagues” option, though I am outvoted by Americans as a whole by a 55%-45% margin.

However, there is one dissenting state– Washington state, where the foreign leagues option wins 51%-49%.

Now, why Washington out of all the states? Is it some sort of pissy contrarianism based on their losing their basketball team (the SuperSonics) to Oklahoma City a few years ago? Or is there something inherently foreign-loving about the Washingtonians?

And in case you’re wondering, the sample sizes are not especially small at this point, though admittedly I’m not a statistician and can’t tell you what the cutoff point is for statistical significance on these things.