Higher-income people are more likely to vote Republican, and we’ve seen this in many different subgroups of the population. Among whites, among blacks, among religious attenders, etc., the poorer voters among these subgroups are more Democratic and the richer ones are more Republican.
This got me wondering: What are the subgroups of the population for which this isn’t true? Or, more generally, how do rich and poor differ in their voting patterns, in different subgroups of the population.
Here’s we found, courtesy of the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg surveys. For each group, we’re looking at Republican share of the two-party vote intention among people in the upper third of family income, minus Republican share … among people in the lower third of family income:
(Click on any of these graphs to see larger versions.)
A striking pattern. The differences between rich and poor are much larger among conservative, Republican groups than among liberal, Democratic groups. At the very bottom of the graph above, you see a few groups where richer people are more likely to vote Democratic. All of these are groups that are mostly liberal and Democratic.
To look at it another way, we made a graph showing the different subsets, plotting rich-poor voting differences vs. average Republican vote for the group. Separate graphs for 2000 and 2004:
Pretty consistent, I’d say. Now we have to think about what this all means.
P.S. The graphs were made by Dan Lee (who’s not the same as Daniel Lee, who made a bunch of other graphs that I’ve been posting recently). I’m a lucky guy to have been able to work with two different Dan Lees.
P.P.S. In the lower graphs, the x-axis is the Republican-ness of the group (as measured by % favoring the Republican candidate for President, minus % favoring the Democratic candidate for President), compared to the U.S. average. The y-axis is the difference in Republican vote preference, comparing people in each group who are in the top third of U.S. family income, comparing to those in the bottom third.
And, yes, it’s vote preference, not actually votes. Which is why non-citizens can be included, I guess. I’ll have to go back to the surveys and check that.