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But, is this divide too simplistic?
Harris School Assistant Professor
Boris Shor and colleagues, in
their recent working paper “Rich
State, Poor State, Red State, Blue
State: What’s the Matter with
Connecticut?”, believe it is.
The media and pundits got one thing
right, says Shor. “For the first time
in modern history, the richer the
state, the more likely it was to vote
Democratic. As a result, journalists
said, Wow, there is a real cultural
change going on.”
However, they then made the
mistake of extending that trend to
individuals and too quickly generalized
from the correlations in
their states. “They thought about
typical individuals, and since they
mainly live in metro New York or Washington, the typical Democrat
they conjured up was a wealthy
one, a ‘limousine liberal.’ At the
same time, they conjured up a
typical conservative as poorer,
more religious, a ‘Nascar’ Republican.”
In fact, as Shor finds, “when we
look nationally at individuals, the
richer the person is, the more likely
he or she is to vote Republican.”
Yet these findings are seemingly at
odds with the national trend that
shows richer states voting Democratic.
“Where you live matters,” says Shor.
“When you look within a state, it’s
still true that richer people are more
likely to vote Republican. But there’s
something very odd that is happening
in the richest of states, such as
Connecticut.” There, he says, “income
doesn’t matter, and that is new.”
The other extreme is Mississippi, a
poor state. There, income matters a
lot. The wealthy in a poor state
such as Mississippi are much more
likely to vote Republican than the
rich in Connecticut.
“If I only knew two things about a
person—that they were wealthy and
where they live, I could tell you
the probability of how that person
would vote. In Connecticut, if
they were rich, the probability of
voting Republican would be 40%,
but it would be 80% in Mississippi.
“That’s a really huge difference,”
he says. On the other hand, among
the poor there is no difference
between Mississippi and Connecticut.
They both vote Republican about
40% of the time.
In other words, geography matters
in voting, but it matters differently
for different people. It matters less
for the poor and more for the rich.
So in the end, is the red state/blue
state analogy helpful or miscast?
Shor thinks it was helpful in that it
focused our attention on geography.
It also captured a new trend in the
very wealthy states on the coasts.
“There really is this new breed
of relatively liberal rich people,”
says Shor. However, he warns, the
limousine liberals are hardly the
only wealthy individuals in this
country, and to lump them all
together as the media has done
risks missing an important nuance.
“The real division,” says Shor, “is rich
state/poor state, not red state/blue
state.”
The media are extremely powerful
in shaping our perceptions, and
Shor argues that it might benefit
them and the country if they
looked beyond their immediate
environment more often. “When
those media are clustered on the
coasts,” says Shor, “they look around
and see rich Democrats and poor
Republicans. But that scenario is
only true for tiny areas.”
Barbara Ray
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