Yes, even a blind pig may find an acorn from time to time. Brendan Nyhan,
no friend of Kos, found
this tasty nugget (pdf) of wisdom, dispelling many long-held myths and pseudo-rants with cold hard statistics. Authors: Andrew Gelman, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, David Park. There's more...
We find that income matters more in "red America" than in "blue America." In poor states,
rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential
candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with
vote preference. In addition to finding this pattern and studying its changes over time, we
use the concepts of typicality and availability from cognitive psychology to explain how these
patterns can be commonly misunderstood. Our results can be viewed either as a debunking of
the journalistic image of rich "latte" Democrats and poor "Nascar" Republicans, or as support
for the journalistic images of political and cultural differences between red and blue states--
differences which are not explained by differences in individuals' incomes.
For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republicans
representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pattern,
with Democrats performing well in the richer "blue" states in the northeast and west
coast, and Republicans dominating in the "red" states in the middle of the country. Through
multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county- and state-level demographic
and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns.
3 Results
3.1 Richer states now support the Democrats
3.2 Richer voters continue to support the Republicans overall
3.3 Richer voters continue to support the Republicans within states
3.4 Richer counties support the Republicans in some states and the Democrats in others
Another way to understand these patterns is to compare counties within richer "blue" Democratic-
leaning states and poorer "red" Republican-leaning states. In deep-red southern states such
as Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi, the richer counties support the Republicans and poorer
counties support the Democrats. In contrast, consider the states nearest major national media:
New York, Maryland, Virginia, and California. In these particular states, the richer counties
showed a slight tendency to support the Democrats.
Thus, amusingly, the journalists noticed a pattern (richer counties supporting the Democrats)
that is concentrated in the states where the journalists live. For example, Brooks (2001) compared a rich county in Maryland to a poor county in Pennsylvania. Had he compared counties within
states such as Oklahoma, he would likely have noticed an opposite pattern.
We can look at these patterns another way by comparing all 50 stateswithin each election year.
Figure 10 shows the coefficient of county income within each state (that is, the varying slopes in
the multilevel regression), plotted against average state incomes, for each election year. In most
years (especially the early ones), the income effect was smaller for richer states than it was for
poorer states. In the poorer states, the richer counties used to strongly support the Republicans
but this has mostly disappeared by 2000.