One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they are o

One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they are ordinal variables. Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). [0] http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf and http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf