Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...Follow

Jophed,

You sure it's not something you continuously hear from your liberal buddies?

I don't have any liberal buddies. They all voted for Mark Kirk.

/tear.

It's anecdotal, and based on observations of behavior and message of the two parties:

1. Most high profile "uber rich" people tend to be liberal. That could just be them playing cover of course, but we also see this trend among elected officials. Certainly, when you look at the US congress and look at the members with the most personal wealth, they are overwhelmingly Democrats.

This forms my "leaders of the party are wealthy" position.

2. While the voting demographics based on economic status is "close" in most economic ranges, where we consistently find the largest gaps (shown pretty clearly in Joph's data) is in the "very poor". We're consistently seeing 2-3 times as many people in that category voting Democrat. On the flip side, the importance of votes isn't as significant because my argument is about the "rich leading, poor following". There's also some issue in terms of "uber rich" versus just merely "wealthy".

This forms my "followers of those leaders are poor" position.


If the "poor" (under 15k/year) overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and the "uber rich" leaders overwhelmingly are Democrats, then it stands to reason that the Democrats are the party where a small number of very very wealthy people have constructed a platform to get a large number of very very poor people to follow them.

Meanwhile, on the GOP side, a larger percentage of the political leaders are more likely to be middle class or just "kinda wealthy", and the people voting for them are more likely to be "middle class". Hence, my statement about the Demographics. I was specifically talking in the context of the presumption of some small group of powerful wealthy people controlling a mass of poor people increasingly dependent on the decisions of those powerful wealthy people. That absolutely appears to me to be happening in the Democratic party and *not* the GOP.


So... take that for what it's worth. That's my analysis and assessment. You're free to come up with your own.

Edited, Nov 4th 2010 4:06pm by gbaji

Do you really want to open this can of worms again? Evidence is against you, bro.

I'm disputing your supposed Dem/GOP bell curves, neither of which is supported by the data. But it's supported by your imagination so I guess that counts for something. To you.