The Numbers on the White Working Class
When blogging on George Packer’s reported piece on Democratic outreach efforts among the white working class in Ohio, I wondered what Andrew Gelman thought. He was kind enough to respond with these charts:
What you see here that there’s substantial income-voting linkage among white voters, with earning more money making a non-hispanic white more likely to vote Republican just as it does for a black voter or a hispanic voter. But among whites, the GOP starts with a very high base securing the votes of almost half of low-income non-hispanic whites. Plus you figure that some of those low-income whites are students or American Prospect Writing Fellows. So while white voters are hardly indifferent to class/income income effects at the polls, it’s also the case, as Packer’s article implies, that there’s a very substantial proportion of economically struggling white voters who over the past two cycles haven’t found the Democratic candidates’ economic messages particularly compelling.
It’s also interesting how neatly the ethnic breakouts dovetail with one another — rich blacks vote similarly to poor hispanics (about 25 percent like Republicans) and rich hispanics vote similarly to poor whites (about 50 percent like Republicans) and then the GOP wins majorities among middle-class and rich white people.
36 Responses to “The Numbers on the White Working Class”
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October 9th, 2008 at 10:54 am
What’s fascinating in those charts is what I’d call “the dip” — the drop seen in Bush’s 2004 support somewhere between middle income and rich among everyone except white voters.
What are we seeing there? I could guess a relatively secure, educated segment that takes a someone longer view than the really rich, while still relating at least marginally to older relatives/community who had an experience of exclusion from the US mainstream. Living in California, I feel like I know a lot of these people. But I’m generalizing from anecdotal experience. Any better explanations?
October 9th, 2008 at 10:54 am
these are the kinds of graphs that demonstrate why Senator McCain is an idiot and Senator Obama understand the consequences of his policy decisions.
Both candidates support open borders and unlimited immigration. Senator Obama supports open borders because importing millions of poor Hispanics will eventually create millions of automatic Democratic voters who vote for high taxes and create demand for government provided social services. Senator McCain supports open borders and unlimited immigration because he does not understand that it leads to higher taxes, bigger government, and the end of the Republican Party as a relevant political party.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Asians, mof***er, ASIANS!! Say something.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:03 am
In case it wasn’t clear, Asians seem to be the only group who substantially changed their minds after experiencing 4 years of Bush. I’d thought that would be worthy of some comment.
Go Asians, the evidence-based community.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:21 am
The Asian numbers are astonishing. Welcome to the real reality-based community, the only American ethnic group which responded rationally to the fiasco that was Bush’s first term. Who’s the Maccaca now?
(Of course, Matthew, a product of the racist Dalton school and Harvard, a school which discriminates against Asians in admissions, has nothing to say on this.)
October 9th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Yes, Asians are the most interesting graph here, because they’re apparently more swingy than all the other ethnic groups. It appears that Asian allegiance was governed by income in the 2000 election. They voted their pocketbooks. But it looks like in 2004, they were turned off by Bush across the board.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the other ethnic groups (except whites — whites are REALLY Republican!) follow suit this time. Pollster types might want to track Asians more carefully next time, if they want to follow the swing vote. It makes sense, too. Asians are generally well-off enough to resonate with the low-tax, hard-work message of the Republicans, but they’re also the butt of everyday racism (see “Macaca”), so they know never to trust the GOP.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:28 am
There’s an interesting article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2201246/) about why we rarely hear the candidates pander for Asian American votes. The article claims it’s not just about population size, it’s also because most of them don’t live in swing states too matter all that much.
I guess the great lesson in American politics is if you want to be shamelessly pandered to, you should either live in a swing state or declare yourself an independent.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I also found the upper middle class/barely rich dip fascinating. I suspect that this income range in chock full of the kind of post-grad degeee having folks (lawyers, engineers, academics, etc.) that democrats (especially Obama) does very well with. Once you get past that you are hitting old money, doctors with large practices, and finance types, all of which go pretty solidy republican.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:46 am
The asians swinging against Bush, can be pretty much explained by the muslim factor. The asian muslim community I think went slightly for Bush in 2000. Considering the rhetoric coming out of Bush and his party during the 2004 election its probably almost solely due to that.
I’m be interested in a break down between Arabs, Pakistanis, Indonesians and the rest of Asians.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:52 am
You could argue that black voters are equally evidence-based, they just picked up on the evidence quicker.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:56 am
The asians swinging against Bush, can be pretty much explained by the muslim factor … I’m be interested in a break down between Arabs, Pakistanis, Indonesians and the rest of Asians.
Arabs (and Persians) probably wouldn’t be included in the Asian category.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Look, everyone knows that Asians are by a pretty wide margin the smartest and best-educated of the demographic groups listed above…
Do we really need some stupid graph to prove that?!…
October 9th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Kiran — There are probably less than a million Muslim voters in the USA, and about 30% of them are African-Americans who, unlike their immigrant co-religionists — never worshipped the Bush.
The Muslim vote is about as important as the trans-sexual vote. And about as valued.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I think Muslims are likely well less than 10% of the Asian population in the United States, so that isn’t the explanation.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
The moderately-high-income Hispanics had The Dip in 2004 but not in 2000.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
janinsanfran:
What’s fascinating in those charts is what I’d call “the dip”…What are we seeing there?
um… does the phrase “liberal elites” mean anything to you?
NB: The liberal elites are not the actual elites.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
RKU:
Look, everyone knows that Asians are by a pretty wide margin the smartest and best-educated of the demographic groups listed above… Do we really need some stupid graph to prove that?!
Actually, judging by their votes, blacks are by far the smartest people in America.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Spurious,
I don’t think that Asian Americans (other than the Hmong, Filipinos, and in some regions maybe the Cambodians and Vietnamese) are particularly the victims of racism in the United States.
The ‘macaca’ slur drew attention in part because it’s so outlandish- South Asians are not typically the target of racial slurs in the U.S. (unlike, perhaps, Britain) and “macaca” is a term for Arabs, not Indians.
October 9th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Ikram, Dalton may be a school of immense privilege, but (contrary to what some rambling, bitter guy who might have prepped students says) it’s not really racist. Nail it for its $30,000 a year tuition and the fact you might need connections to even get in, but the racism accusation is actually pretty offbase.
Harvard does indeed discriminate against Asians. It, also, plays games (”geographical diversity,” etc.) to limit its Jews. And in the past it had actual quotas for Jews. But, indeed, for the past few decades it’s been Asians who’ve felt the particular brunt of their bullshit. A true disgrace.
But as Asian communities further assimilate and prosper Asian-Americans find themselves more and more in the situation of American Jews. Still facing discrimination from the Ivy League, but with large numbers who can send their kids to the kind of schools Matt went to, which negates somewhat the way the system is fixed to keep their numbers from being too high for the (often “progressive”) racists’ comfort.
Also, I hate to be too harsh, but, of course, there are other ethnic groups that were onto Bush from day one (African-Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, etc.) If you’re going to give Asians credit for figuring Bush out after his first time then you have to give Puerto Ricans even greater credit for true prescience. They didn’t want him from day one.
Moving on . . .
What can I say? Matt’s ignorance of America continues to astound and delight!
Yes, Matt; the are large numbers of working-class whites who haven’t been voting Democratic!
To think it took a ‘New Yorker’ article to make you even contemplate the idea, but even then — even then you needed charts to be sure!
Charts!
My God.
Now all we need is HBO to do a series about poor whites in somewhere like Akron and Matt will, you know, totally get it!
October 9th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Wasn’t it only as far back as Clinton’s run in 92 that the conventional wisdom was that the poor vote Democrat and the rich vote Republican and the battle was for the hearts and minds of the middle class? Hence Clinton’s focus on welfare reform and all that talk about rewarding folks who “play by the rule”. Whatever happened to that? 16 years is not that long. Is Thomas Frank right after all that the cultural/religious stuff is more powerful now? Or has the Democratic party totally fails in its economic responsibility towards the working class?
October 9th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
L.C — Actually, the “bitter” one is a former Dalton teacher, Anisha Lakhani, who has written a book about privilege and rampant cheating among Dalton students. She says about Dalton:
so much cheating is occurring and it needed to be exposed.
And more controversially,
it is my strong belief that many of these “pushes” for diverse students and faculty are actually racist. Not all, but some. I can’t help but wonder how much of hiring a diverse faculty is about promoting diversity itself or attracting a student body that will secure optimal acceptances to elite Ivy League Schools. If Langdon Hall [the Dalton stand-in] had 200 white, Jewish kids in their senior class, would that have secured them as many college acceptances than a class mixed with other ethnicities?
So non-white students at Dalton exist to help white Jewish kids get better college admissions — at colleges that discriminate against high-achieving Asians! Matthew’s success is on the backs of a thousand Maccacas!
Matthew Yglesias, I demand reparations.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Well, I don’t know much about Dalton, but it seems extremely obvious that Harvard (and the other top Ivies) discriminate pretty heavily against Asians in their admissions policies.
There are several different means of analysis that provide this same conclusion, plus anecdotal data indicating exactly the same thing…
October 9th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I’m a mostly Indian-American and I don’t care that Ivy League schools ‘discriminate’ against other Asian Americans. It’s the necessary price of having the racial composition of academic institutions make at least vague efforts to reflect that of society at large. Again, I don’t complain if people with my skin color are held to higher academic standards to get into good schools. So I’m not sure why white people are compelled to complain on my behalf.
I don’t believe that Asian Americans (with the exception of Hmong, Filipinos, and Vietnamese) are discriminated against in any meaningful way in the United States. (Affirmative action for black and Latino people doesn’t count.) If you have any evidence, then let’s see it.
Frankly I care much more about Steve Sailer and his crew implying that people like me are impotent and effeminate, than Ivy League schools not allowing in more Indian Americans.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Basically, looking at those graphs, it’s easy to see that race drives voting most of all. Income matters some, but less than you’d expect, especially less than marriage. In fact, much of the upward slope of those lines might well come from marriage — two incomes being combined into one household income might well account for most of the upward slope.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I would suggest that the blatant Christianism of the first Bush administration was a major turn-of for Asians, even though many of them tend to be socially conservative– but are often very secular, or Buddhist/Hindu. (Yes, I know there are some Christian Asians too).
re: two incomes being combined into one household income might well account for most of the upward slope.
You may be right about that much, but if you had just landed from Mars and never drunk the rhetorical kool-aid you might wonder why married people should therefore support the GOP when the GOP’s policies (as opposed to their rhetoric) is brutally hostile to the well-being of families.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Steve Sailer Says:
“Basically, looking at those graphs, it’s easy to see that race drives voting most of all. Income matters some, but less than you’d expect…”
Not so. Poor Hispanics and poor Asians display similar tendencies, but those similarities go away as income increases. Furthermore, both groups display a qualitatively similar dip in their 2004 preferences at moderately high wealth, just before the high end of the income scale. Presumably both races have their fair share of comfortably wealthy, presumably well-educated “Whole Foods” lefties.
At least for these two groups, income and education level are stronger influences than race itself.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
JonF,
I think there are probably more Christian Asians than Buddhist/Hindu ones. There are only about a million Indians in America, remember. (And I know a lot of Hindu immigrants personally). Remember that almost all Filipino immigrants are Christian, as well as most Koreans, probably a good chunk of Vietnamese (remember, Catholic Vietnamese were more likely to have been on the losing side) and a large minority of Indians (Syrian Christians from the South).
Christians in Asia are often among the more educated people as well as ones who may feel more ‘cultural’ ties to the west, so they tend to be more likely to emigrate. (This is true, in India, of the Catholics and Jacobites- a lot of the evangelical Protestant converts, by contrast, are relatively poor and uneducated, and often ethnic minorities).
In terms of my own family and family friends you’re right, their secularism or Hinduism tended to make them extremely hostile to Christianity in the political arena. I don’t think my family though is typical of all Asians.
In my experience, traditional Hindus tend to be fairly socially conservative in family/sexual matters. They do tend to be pro-choice though, since Buddhism and Hinduism do not view life beginning at conception.
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