It's a wash in both cases. Popular sports are like factory towns: accessible and yet lucretive, so there are more blue collar socially conservative whites and more blacks and hispanics overall, who will always identify as liberals. Unpopular sports attract outsiders, who are liberal; but have enough of a baseline self-esteem so as not to equate crowd approval with social acceptance: which, I think everyone in this thread will agree, means they're white. And at least a third of them will be at upper middle-class someday, professionally or through marriage, so that's your conservative base.
