Why America’s Poor Vote Republican (or Not)
Tumblr’s election blog offers up the following from Gary Younge of The Guardian:
Poor people may be more likely to vote Democrat; poor white people are not.
Except not.
John Sides took this myth head on, using Larry Bartels work in Unequal Democracy, back in February saying: “For emphasis, one more stab at the zombie: The white working class has not, as a whole, become more Republican. Full stop.”
The chart below shows that low income white voters are more likely to vote Democratic than high income white voters:
And Andrew Gelman, whom Mr Younge cites in his articles, wrote, “Ronald Reagan did about 20 percentage points better among voters in the upper third of income, compared to voters in the lower third. The relation between income and voting since 1980 is about the same as it was in the 1940s.”
Do some low income white voters vote Republican? Sure. Are they more likely to vote Republican? Not according to most of the research done on the topic. Seems counter intuitive when you see articles like that from Mr Younge, but there it is.
