Rich State, Poor State

Via Henry Farrell, Gelman et. al. post some interesting maps. First, which states would John Kerry have won were only poor voters allowed to vote:

Basically it seems that here Bush wins only the whitest of states, though not super-white Maine. Next, only people in the middle third of the income distribution:

This looks a lot like the actual election results, though there are a few states Kerry carried in reality despite losing middle income voters. There are no states Bush won without carrying middle income voters. Last, people in the top third:

Basically, rich people love Bush. But not the rich people who live New York, its suburbs in New York or New Jersey, or DC, or the DC suburbs (i.e., Maryland) or those who live in California. Interestingly enough, a huge proportion of political journalists and editors and people who run media companies live in precisely those places. One wonders if this doesn't have a distorting effect on media types' perception of what's going on in politics.

Comments

Oh, no, one knows for damn certain. There's no wonder about it. It's just that how it distorts depends on whether you're asking liberals or conservatives.

Posted by jhupp | October 26, 2007 5:26 PM

"Basically, rich people love Bush. But not the rich people who live New York, its suburbs in New York or New Jersey, or DC, or the DC suburbs (i.e., Maryland) or those who live in California."

In other words, but not the super-rich whom Paul Krugman is always complaining about.

If you want to know what really drives states red or blue, it's affordable family formation. See
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2005/05/08/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future/

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 26, 2007 5:29 PM

excellent point

Posted by saifedean | October 26, 2007 5:43 PM

This is a little misleading. The paper is very clear that individual income is always positively correlated with voting Republican. The super-rich in New York and California voted for Bush. The difference is that state income has the opposite effect: "Within each state, richer people are more likely to vote Republican, but the states
with higher income give more support to the Democrats." Individual income has less effect in rich states than poor ones, but the direction of the effect is the same.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | October 26, 2007 5:47 PM

Sailer has it backwards. In high-cost-of-living states like New York, New Jersey and California, there are a lot of people who qualify as "rich" by national standards, but not by local standards. By local standards, they're middle class, so we should expect them to vote like other middle class people.

In other words, there are a lot of "rich" Californians and New Yorkers who aren't actually rich. Those states also have a few super-rich people, but not very many, not enough to make a difference in election results.

Posted by Cardinal Fang | October 26, 2007 5:48 PM

Geez. Texas isn't among the "whitest" of states. (The sky's so blue there however).

After the election, I discussed how Kerry won. Please, do not learn your lesson, the GOP is counting on it.

Posted by TLB | October 26, 2007 5:50 PM

The paper also suggests some good answers to Matt's questions:

The centers of national journalistic activity are relatively rich states including New York, California, Maryland, and Virginia. Once again, the journalists—and, for that matter, academics—avoid the first-order availability bias: they are not surprised that the country as a whole votes differently from the residents of big cities. But they make the second-order error of too quickly generalizing from the correlations in their states. As we have discussed earlier, richer counties tend to support the Democrats within the “media center” states but not, in general, elsewhere. And as shown in Figure 5, richer voters support the Republicans just about everywhere, but this pattern is much weaker—and thus easier to miss— within these states.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | October 26, 2007 5:56 PM

One thing I'd want to know before assessing these maps: is the breakdown by national income level or income level within the state? For example, when the map shows Kerry would have won Maryland even if only the wealthiest third of voters were allowed to vote, does that mean the wealthiest third within Maryland, or those Marylanders who are in the wealthiest third nationally?

Posted by cminus | October 26, 2007 6:07 PM

Actually, if GOP had really such a gold mine of votes among low income people, why they did not secure their power "forever" by aligning "cultural values" with economic. Have planks of eliminating abortion, protecting marriage, universal healthcare and benefits for parents. Plus some virulent nationalism. This is roughly what Polish "right wing" is doing (was doing, they just lost elections). The guys who want low taxes and low regulations are called centrists, because they are moderate on "social issues".

The logic of American alignment of programs is not totally clear. Why environmentalist should support higher taxes than non-environmentalists in USA, while in Central Europe it can be the other way around? (The logic in Poland is as if the richer people of Alabama tried to emulate the values from the rich states like California and New York, hence environmentalism, while the poor would be swayed by the appeal to the state pride against the diktat of federal regulations. The memory of brutal Californian occupation and an aliance with New York would complicate things further).

Posted by piotr | October 26, 2007 6:34 PM

"Basically it seems that here Bush wins only the whitest of states, though not super-white Maine"

Where do you come up with this race baiting crap?

Democratic wins in your only lowerclass map

Percent White
Maine 96.9
Vermont 96.8
West Virginia 95
Kentucky 90.1
Minnesota 89.4
Wisconsin 88.9
Illinois 87.5
Oregon 86.6

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/maps/st_profile.htm

Posted by Dave | October 26, 2007 6:37 PM

Right, the cost of middle class family living in coastal states is so much higher than in the the sprawling middle of the country that Blue State people are less likely to be able to afford to get married young or have more children, so GOP family values appeals fall on deafer ears. That's why

- There's a Baby Gap: Kerry carried the 16 states with the lowest total fertility rate among white women and Bush carried 25 of the 26 highest.

- A Marriage Gap: Bush carried the 25 highest ranked states on "years married" among white women age 18-44.

- The Baby and Marriage Gaps stem from the Mortgage Gap: Bush was victorious in the 26 states with the least home price inflation since 1980. Kerry triumphed in the 14 states with the most.

- At the root of it all is something non-ideological: the Dirt Gap. Blue State metropolises, such as Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tend to be on oceans or Great Lakes. Their suburban expansion is permanently limited to their landward sides. In contrast, Red State metropolises, such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix, are mostly inland. Thus they tend to be surrounded almost completely by dirt, allowing their suburbs to spread out over virtually 360 degrees. The supply of suburban land available for development is dramatically larger in Red State cities.

So, states with more dirt for housing tend to have cheaper land, which in turn allows people to get married more and younger which leads to more babies, which leads to them voting Republican on family values issues.

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2005/05/08/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future/

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 26, 2007 6:40 PM

I guess the media's notion that Kerry would have a difficult time appealing to the working poor because of his wealth was predictably misguided. But these maps explain why voter registration campaigns are so crucial, but even more crucial is that they need to be targeted. In Ohio in 2004, there were Democratic voter registration efforts in places like Holmes County, where 8 out of every 10 voters are likely to vote Republican. Or take where I'm from, Tuscarwas County, which President Bush carried by 10 points. There were plenty of voter registration efforts that I was involved with that ended up being counterintuitive. The young people we ended up registering were, despite the generational likelihood of voting Democratic, predisposed to voting Republican because of their socially conservative upperly mobile parents.

Posted by Matthew Struhar | October 26, 2007 6:44 PM

I don't typically comment on typos or malapropisms that don't really distort meaning, but I was terribly confused by Matt's

First, which states would John Kerry have won were only poor voters allowed to vote

I took this to mean if poor people had been permitted to vote, whereas some further context reveals it was intended to mean if poor people had been the only people permitted to vote. I concede that it's actually written grammatically for either meaning, but more care might seem desirable.

Posted by Warren Terra | October 26, 2007 6:55 PM

Classic NY'er, you don't even mention blue MA in the third map!

Sheesh.

Go Sox!

Posted by Redstar | October 26, 2007 7:07 PM

Re: Bush carried the 25 highest ranked states on "years married" among white women age 18-44.

Which to me suggests that Bush did well in states with lots of older people. It should go without saying that "years married" must also correlate with the average age of the population since no one can be married for, say 20 years if they are not at least verging on middle age.

Re: Their suburban expansion is permanently limited to their landward sides.

But in some of those cities the landward side offers a huge amount of dirt to exapnd into: Detroit and Chicago for example. Suburban sprawl is certainly not limited in either place.

The main problem with Sailer's article though is that it totally ignores the fact that GOP policies have been making families less and less affordable. A recent exhibit: vetoing sChip. But maybe more to the point, the whole housing bubble thing which has priced many families out of the mortgage market and was directly caused by Bush-o-nomics and its enablers at the Fed. If Sailer is really commited to Affordable Family Formation he should pay a visit over to Ross Douthat and listen to Ross' lecture about the needs of Sam's Club Republicans and the policies required to appeal to and favor them.

Posted by Jonf | October 26, 2007 7:31 PM

"Which to me suggests that Bush did well in states with lots of older people."

No, you don't understand the statistic -- it's a measure of the average number of years a woman between 18-44 is likely to be married, so women over 44 are irrelevant. (It's modeled on the "total fertility rate," which estimates how many babies women currently in their fertile years are likely to end up having.)

Thus, the Bushiest state in the Union was Utah, which is also just about the youngest and has the highest total fertility rates among whites (about 2.5 babies per woman) and the highest years married rate - an average of 17 years between 18 and 44. In contrast, the Kerriest "state" was DC, where the TFR for white women was around 1.1 babies per lifetime and white women average being married only 7 years out of those 27 from 18 through 44.

May I suggest you actually read the article and my other articles linked to that one? You may actually find you learn something.

As for Sam's Club Republicans, obviously my friends Ross and Reihan have been much influenced by my analysis. I would agree that the GOP elite has done far less than it should to make family formation more affordable -- the most flagrant example being Bush's promotion of unskilled immigration, which lowers wages, raises land costs, and makes public schools less attractive.

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 26, 2007 11:30 PM

We all know Jennifer right? "You racist idiot. You are a big racist idiot." Gets a little annoying and predictable at times. But when it comes to someone like Sailer, you gotta admit her approach has a lot to say for it.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | October 27, 2007 12:29 AM

I think Steve Sailer has hit on an important point-- the cheaper it is buy a house, the more egalitarian the world appears. That is, the easier it is for a working class person can buy a house(in many parts of the South, new houses start for less than $100,000), its easier for Republicans to sell the idea that they're part of the "ownership society".

Logically, a renter with a union job, health insurance and a solid pension has more economic security than a homeowner with none of those, but what does logic have to do with politics?

Another factor is the "zoning tax" issue.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10635

Because of different zoning regimes, a house in San Francisco is $%600,000 more expensive than a comparable house in St. Louis. A city's topography can't be changed, its zoning laws can be changed by the city council. So reforming zoning laws to make housing cheaper is humanly possible.

But since the zoning tax is built into the housing prices and mortgages of existing homeowners (who are more likely to vote than renters), it will never be politically possible.

Posted by beowulf | October 27, 2007 1:21 AM

Zoning is part of the story, especially in Portland, an inland city that pretends to be on the coast by preventing development in large sectors of its would-be suburbs. But San Francisco is the classic example of a metropolitan area hemmed in by by saltwater and mountains. The geography of San Francisco comes close to mandating that it will be a liberal, Democratic-voting, family-unfriendly place.

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 27, 2007 1:34 AM

What is the national distribution of the rich? A priori, it's heavily concentrated on the coasts - and especially in blue New York, New England and California. I guess this would hold even correcting for the cost of living. Of course the richest 1% don't matter much for the voting result, but they do enormously for campaign funding. For 2008, it looks as if it's the Republicans who have the problems this time, which suggests a significant shift in sentiment among the rich.

Posted by James Wimberley | October 27, 2007 5:53 AM

Re: it's a measure of the average number of years a woman between 18-44 is likely to be married

OK, but my point still stands: a 21 year old woman (or man) will not be married more than a couple of years at most. The older the median population the more long-term marriages it can have. Utah is a unique case here, due to the LDS-- and I rather doubt you are promoting Mormonism for all!

Re: I would agree that the GOP elite has done far less than it should to make family formation more affordable

It's a bit more than not just doing enough. Many of their policies work against the ability of people to afford families. I'm not so convinced that immigration is a major issue here, at least not for the middle class (working class and the poor, yes.) I grew up near Detroit and there's a huge immigrant population up there, much of it Middle-eastern (plus lots and lots of Canadians), yet housing affordability is fairly decent. (The Middle-easterners also tend to be entreprenurial, which creates jobs, albeit mostly service industry jobs).

Re: Because of different zoning regimes, a house in San Francisco is $%600,000 more expensive than a comparable house in St. Louis. A city's topography can't be changed, its zoning laws can be changed by the city council.

There are also issues with building codes. But some of these you don't want to monkey with even if they do act $$ to the cost of housing. There are good reasons to require earthquake-proofing in California, and hurricane-proofing in Florida.

Posted by JonF | October 27, 2007 9:38 AM

Yeah, it's not so much poor/middle-income/rich as urban/suburban/hillbilly.

Posted by abb1 | October 27, 2007 10:11 AM

"why they {the GOP] did not secure their power "forever" by aligning "cultural values" with economic. Have planks of eliminating abortion, protecting marriage, universal healthcare and benefits for parents. Plus some virulent nationalism. This is roughly what Polish "right wing" is doing . . .The logic of American alignment of programs is not totally clear."

That's what Krugman, Thomas Frank, and others are getting at, though they disagree on the exact details. In this explanation. the party has been taken over by its reactionaries, who have been trying to implement a frankly plutocratic agenda on the behalf of the very rich, turning the clock back to the 'Long Gilded Age' of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, before FDR's New Deal. Of course, put nakedly like that, it's not an appealing prospect to most non-plutocrat voters, so, they argue, the GOP has to win on other messages that will mislead or otherwise convince people to go against their own and their country's best interests -most notably kulturkampf "values" (sez Frank) or race (sez Krugman). In other words, the point are those economic policies that make it harder and harder for average Americans to raise a family with any level of security; the cultural ones - however defined - are just the packaging, the candy coating, etc.

"The memory of brutal Californian occupation and an aliance with New York would complicate things further"

That's made this thread entirely worthwhile.

"it totally ignores the fact that GOP policies have been making families less and less affordable"

Yep. Not a bug, a feature.

"So, states with more dirt for housing tend to have cheaper land, which in turn allows people to get married more and younger which leads to more babies, which leads to them voting Republican on family values issues"

This seems more than a little simplistic - gee, Martha, dirt is cheap! let's get married! While having kids does tilt people towards more conservative attitudes, according to some research, I suspect that something else is also going on, to the degree that "family values" issues are actually driving voter choice. That is, the kind of folks who would vote Republican on - perhaps - "family values issues" are also the ones who are going to get married more, younger, and have more babies. In addition, if anything limited class-mobility options (and perhaps insecurity, of a certain kind) are also going to drive early marriage and child-rearing - there's no point in putting it off to find one's authentic self, finish a expensive college degree/earn a post-college degree, or reach a certain point in one's career, because frankly, these choices are probably already foreclosed, irrelevant, out of reach, or (establishing a career) going to provide so little advantage as to be pointless (one's work is more likely to be a job than a career, and putting off family for a decade only means a decade less of family (both in terms of fulfillment and support) with little advancement or gain to make it worthwhile.

For a somewhat different but fascinating take on this, see Doug Muder's essay Red Family, Blue Family

Posted by Dan S. | October 27, 2007 11:53 AM

We all know Jennifer right? "You racist idiot. You are a big racist idiot." Gets a little annoying and predictable at times. But when it comes to someone like Sailer, you gotta admit her approach has a lot to say for it.

Yes, particularly for those who are too ignorant to actually think up a counterargument for Sailer's points.

Posted by Glaivester | October 27, 2007 2:46 PM

Re: there's no point in putting it off to find one's authentic self, finish a expensive college degree/earn a post-college degree, or reach a certain point in one's career, because frankly, these choices are probably already foreclosed, irrelevant, out of reach, or (establishing a career) going to provide so little advantage as to be pointless (one's work is more likely to be a job than a career, and putting off family for a decade only means a decade less of family (both in terms of fulfillment and support) with little advancement or gain to make it worthwhile.

Note though that the people who really take the above strategy to the extreme (the young single mother who doesn't even see any hope in waiting for marriage before she has children) is far more likely to be a Democratic voter, if she particpates in politics at all.

Posted by Jonf | October 27, 2007 11:46 PM

I really hate these two-tone maps. Hasn't anyone come up with a graduated color map for this so we can see the concentration of voters by vote differentials and population densities (does the data exist?)? I'd recommend a blue to red scale for vote differential with population densities indicated by addition of white to the primary color (red, purple, blue, pink, lavender, power blue,…, mmmmm, sounds lovely). Are these maps based on "relative" poverty or by average incomes (I'm too lazy to check)?

It's really insulting to the areas shaded red (or blue) when the voting differential is ±3 percent. Having 47% of the local population voting one way is not unremarkable. These maps tend to exaggerate the effect and provide one level of granularity above where it might be useful.

"If you want to know what really drives states red or blue, it's affordable family formation."

There's always that point in time when you know the extent to which the right-wing welfare system has reached its zenith.

Posted by Rihilism | October 28, 2007 11:21 AM

One thing I'd want to know before assessing these maps: is the breakdown by national income level or income level within the state?

The "poor", "middle" and "rich" categories were based on the average income in the states :

The estimates are based on a model fit to all the data, then we take estimates for the lowest category (0-16th percentile), middle (33-67th), and highest (95-100th).

This plot from the same site shows the story better. The red-blue divide is only true for the wealthiest demographic. The poorer the state, the more likely it's richest voters came out for Bush.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/scattermiddle.png

In the poorest state(MS) 40% of the poorest people voted for Bush, 65% of the middle income group and 80% of the rich. In the wealthiest state (CT), he received about 45% from each group.

Posted by Jinchi | October 28, 2007 1:45 PM

Whoops, that should've read:

The "poor", "middle" and "rich" categories were based on the average income in each state.

Here's the abstract from their published paper:

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 coasts, and Republicans dominating in the “red” states in the middle of the country and the south. Through multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county- and state-level demographic and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns.

Furthermore, 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.

Posted by Jinchi | October 28, 2007 1:55 PM