Matched Perfect, and Staggered Special

I don't know much about NASCAR, but I doubt NASCAR fans could be as monolithic a political bloc as the media tend to portray them as. The homestretch of the 2000 Presidential campaign coincided almost exactly with a Subway Series between the Yankees and Mets, leading to a few quasi-scientific polls on the culture and political fault lines between the teams' respective fan bases. The same New York City epithetted by that same media as the liberal nanny state redoubt of transsexual immigrant francophiliac heathens turned out to be a complex ecosystem that included declasse people who put ketchup on their scrambled eggs. (They were invariably Mets fans.) Does anyone know of good data on the divergent predilections of prominent Nascar drivers' fans? Iowa sports sections devote considerable space to motorsports, so I've been reading all about Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s move to a new racing stable, which will entail a new sponsorship deal, and possibly a new car number. Earnhardt seems to straddle the young-apathetic and arch-red state demographics---as an underachieving legacy kid, he has natural affinities with the performance-oblivious loyalties of Junior Bush's implacable 29%--but he seems atypical in this way. Meanwhile, I fail to understand Sony's interest in replacing Budweiser as his big-bucks sponsor. Not that rednecks and youngsters aren't big segments of the consumer electronics market, but I imagine that logo placement of this sort works best for products with low cost- and quality-differentials. Bud, Coors, Busch, Natty Light and Beast all cost about the same, and taste about equally bad. Buying a case of Bud because Jr. pretends to drink it doesn't NOT make sense. But purchases of the kind of high-end items that Sony markets are much, much more likely to be influenced by product research and price comparison, which already lifts a potential buyer out of the quasi-subliminal state in which marketing seems to work most effectively.