Amazon: GOP Sells a Lot More Books

If Amazon book sales were votes, the 2012 election would be the most lopsided in history. Amazon has introduced an "election heat map" tracking sales of political books, and right-wing books are crushing left-wing ones, the Guardian observes. Overall, "red" books lead "blue" ones 56% to 44%, but the big surprise is that as of this writing, blue books are winning in only four states: New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island.

Two others, Maryland and Minnesota, are split at exactly 50-50. The rest of the country is in the red, including perennial Democratic strongholds like California and Illinois. Of course, the map includes a lot of books that aren't directly about the election, like Bill O'Reilly's book on Abraham Lincoln, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Individually, Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope is outselling Mitt Romney's No Apologies, the Guardian points out. Click for another election model predicting happy days for Romney. (More Amazon stories.)