Andrew Gelman Talks Voting Patterns and Income

Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. –Tolstoy

My Summary / Notes

• People in the top 50% of income vote differently based on the state they’re in, e.g. they vote Republican in Texas and Democrat in Connecticut.
• Overall, rich people tend to vote Republican
• Democrats win rich states, Republicans win rich voters.
• Lower-middle class people vote similarly in both red and blue states, but richer people in these same states vote differently.
• The lower income you are, the less difference religion makes in your voting. In other words, among richer voters church attenders are far more republican than secularists, but among poor people not so much. This gives support to the idea of post-materialism, where rich people have the luxury of thinking about higher-order issues than poor people.
• Some confusion from the media comes from the fact that most writers come from parts of the country that don’t have major differences between the parties.
• The largest differences between red and blue states are occurring within the upper-middle class.

The rich vote true interests, while the poor vote god, guns, and gays. (paraphrase from multiple sources)

My favorite quote, made during the question period, was on the topic of the range of differences between left and right in other developed countries vs. in the U.S. A questioner asked if he’d looked at any other countries, like in Europe, that have much wider divides between left and right.

Dr. Gelman responded by saying that in fact the U.S. has a much larger gap between the two sides than most any other country. He went on to add that in this context, California and the Northeast are like Europe, and the south is like Mexico.

Anyway, really cool stuff. The data succeeded in changing my model, which made it highly valuable. Did it surprise you guys in any areas? ::