November 9, 2006
The 2006 Election Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST The Republicans are the party of the rich, right? Well, they used to be, although even in 2004 the Democrats did a hair better than the Republicans with people earning over $100,000. In 2006 the Democrats did better still. A fascinating piece on Slate points out that on the East Coast the Democrats took 57 percent of voters with household incomes over $100,000, compared with a 49-to-48 margin in 2004. This year, 63 percent of Eastern voters earning between $150,000 and $200,000 voted Democrat, as did exactly half of Eastern voters earning more than $200,000. The same trends are visible in the West and South; Republicans do better in the Midwest. Since the rich are likelier to vote than are the poor, winning over the rich matters more than you might think (in the South, voters with household incomes exceeding $100,000 make up 23 percent of the people who actually vote). Given Republican policies, which greatly favor the rich, the rich seem oddly ungrateful. It is tempting to ascribe this to distress over Iraq, but there are other possibilities. My guess is that waging the culture war turns out to mobilize a lot of voters on both sides. Better-educated voters also increasingly trend Democrat, although it is worth working over the statistics to figure out how much education is a proxy for income. What does seem clear is that the Republicans risk becoming the party of lower-income white voters, and that is a losing strategy. My other guess is that the Republican hole card remains national security. This year a lot of voters may have thought there was no good reason to assume that Republicans are better at ensuring national security than Democrats are. My sense is that the Democrats will be well-advised to allay lingering doubts about that one. A darker possibility is that the Democrats also made gains with Midwestern working-class white voters by appealing to fears of globalization and suspicions of free trade. Since my sense is that better-educated voters are more committed free-traders and less sympathetic to economic nationalism, the Democrats may have to choose between one of their new constituencies and the other. The good news is that Republican appeals to nativism seem to have failed, so at least we may be spared a bidding contest for that constituency. As more analysis of the vote comes out, I expect some interesting blogging here.
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