They also show, unsurprisingly, that wealthy Republicans in red states are more socially conservative than Republicans in blue states are (just as I suspect poor Democrats in red states are more socially conservative than poor Democrats in blue states are).
More intringuingly, wealthy red staters are said to often be more religious than poor red staters are. That wouldn't surprise me in Utah, but in Louisiana? My first inclination is to wonder if the red state poor are more likely to be 'Scots-Irish'--a group that has historically been less religiously committed (I think) than English and German settlers have been--than the affluent red staters are.
Razib makes no mention of it in his review, but to anyone who has read the book (I have it on the way), does it address how race effects the white vote? For states where at least 10% of the population is black (excluding DC, for once a theoretical state has a black majority, it doesn't matter how whites vote), there is a correlation of .42 (p=.07) between the state's Republican support and the relative size of its black population--that is, the blacker the state, the more likely it is to vote Republican. I suspect this is in part due to whites in heavily black states perceiving welfare programs as little more than a means of taking money from them and giving it to blacks, whereas in lilywhite states like Vermont, welfare programs are seen as merely taking money from overabundant whites and giving it to fellow whites who are momentarily down-and-out.
* Looking at exit polling data for the '06 mid-terms and the '96-'04 Presidential elections, I 'estimated' mean income for Republicans and Democrats. I took the middle value of the income range category, determined what percentage of each party's total vote it represented, did this for each income category, and then came up with a mean income (rounded to the nearest thousand) accordingly. For "under $15,000", I used $7,500. For the highest income range, I used 125% of the minimum value (ie, for "$200,000 or more" I used $250,000):
|Rep avg||Dem avg|
The income gap has remained pretty steady over the last decade, with Republicans earning somewhere in the area of 10%-20% on average more than Democrats. The estimates are useful for comparative purposes. It's a pretty crude method of estimating the actual mean income of each party's voters, though.
Income grows for both parties every election cycle for a couple of reasons. One is artificially due to the way I came up with the averages--the uppermost range was $100,000 for '96 and '00 (thus capping the top earners at $125k), then grew to $200,000 for '04 and '06 ($250k tops). The other is that, according to exit polling data, the lowest income range has seen decreased representation as time goes on. In '96, it's 11% of the total vote. Ten years later, it only comprised 7%. In '96, voters earning less than $50,000 constituted 61% of the total vote. A decade later, only 40%. Of course, this doesn't take inflation into account.
Educationally, Republican and Democratic voters are close to parity. Using a simple formula similar to what was used in looking at educational attainment by state, I assign an index score to voters in each party by election cycle. The formula used is [(1.5 * Post-graduate % + Bachelor's only % - < HS grad %) * 100]:
Voters are wealthier and more educated than non-voters are. If the same formula is used for the nation as a whole, it earns a 9.3 in 2000. Half Sigma has lamented what he sees as an exodus of the well-educated and wealthy from the GOP to the Democratic side. It's difficult to discern an income trend evidencing this, especially since blue states tend to be more expensive states to live in then red states are (thus Republican voters' real buying power advantage over Democratic voters is even larger than the nominal income advantage is).
But educationally, he may be onto something. The Democratic index score has increased every election cycle over the past ten years, while the GOP's declined until '06, when it shot back up to where it had been when Clinton was reelected.
The abrupt increase is attributable to the walloping Republicans received in '06. Moderates tend to be less intelligent and less wealthy than conservatives or liberals are, and the "uncommitted" types who see their electoral leanings ebb and flow with things like gas prices or the S&P 500 index probably tend to be less educated and less affluent than those who are more committed. These moderate middlers primarily went for the Democrats in '06.
This election looks set to offer something similar. A large black turnout could again lead to Republican voters being slightly more educated than Democratic voters, as was the case in '06. Going forward, I'm hesitant to assume the increase in educational attainment among Democrats will continue because the party is increasingly becoming non-white. Some well-educated, affluent whites may continue to move away from the GOP, but I expect middle class and working class whites to move in the other direction. The educational attainment and affluence of white Democrats may well increase going forward, but it might be more than offset by the increasing number of Democrat-supporting Hispanics.