The maps show the exit poll results for Obama in shades of blue vs. Romney in shades of red by income.
States in white are those where no exit polls were taken.
Adam Serwer has
written a succinct and piercing take on the political media's stereotypical look at what constitutes a Democratic voter. Which is backed up, in part, by Andrew Gelman and Avi Feller's
perspective on red and blue states, shorthand which distorts the reality of those states. Serwer:
[T]he notion that people with liberal or left-of-center views are all NPR devotees is a right-wing meme the mainstream media has mindlessly parroted for years. I suspect why this happens because the upper middle class liberals in the DC metro area are the Obama voters beltway reporters frequently come in contact with. That's why much of the national media's image of the quintessential Obama voter remains some yuppie with a taste for gourmet coffee. There is no room in that political shorthand for the retired black Marine in Ohio who knocked on doors for the Obama campaign, or the Latina mom who stood in line for hours—at three different times—just to be able to cast a ballot. The working class people of color who now make up much of the base of the Democratic Party often seem as invisible to political media as they were to the Romney campaign, whom The New York Times described as being shocked that the Obama operation turned out "voters they never even knew existed."
You can almost understand the Romney campaign's surprise. The national media doesn't talk to these voters much—they work hard and play by the rules but were never the group that politicians used to refer to as "working hard and playing by the rules," because before Obama, only white people were described that way.
Gellman and Feller approach this from another angle. They say Team Romney's campaign was focused on getting enough of "older, upper-income white Americans to overcome President Obama’s overwhelming advantage among young, low-income and minority voters?" That misses the boat on one count. It's not just upper-income white Americans Romney went after, but those enveloped geographically or ideologically by the Southern strategy, which was what the dog whistles were about, useful among some voters who don't live anywhere near the South.
As we all have known since Tuesday night, the strategy didn't work. One big reason it didn't work, the authors say, is because there is a split among richer voters that doesn't exist so much among the less affluent:
Remarkably, this same pattern has occurred in every presidential contest over the past twenty years. Lower-income voters consistently support the Democratic candidate in nearly every state. Upper-income voters, on the other hand, are more mixed in their political views: wealthy voters in Mississippi are strongly Republican while wealthy voters in Massachusetts are strongly Democratic. Extensive analyses of survey information from these elections show that this relationship holds even when controlling for age, race, sex and education.
In other words, contrary to what you have heard, there’s only a strong red America-blue America split toward the top of the income distribution. Toward the bottom, the electoral map is a sea of blue.
The difference, according to Gellman and Feller: Lower-income Americans tend to vote more Democratic on economic issues while upper-income Americans, with less concern about getting food on the table, tend to vote more based on social issues. "The so-called culture war between red and blue America is concentrated in the upper half of the income distribution, and voting patterns reflect this," they say.
The encouraging long-term story is that among minorities, among women (though far less so among white women) and among young people, Gellman and Feller's maps confirm what we already knew: The future is not with the Republican Party as it is currently constructed. Those voters, ignored or disdained by the chattering classes for so long, are coming into their own.
Maps show voting based on exit polls, with blues for Obama and reds for Romney.
States in white are those that had no exit polls.