Blacks and Southern Whites both vote for more than economics

Last edited Wed Jul 10, 2013, 06:13 PM - Edit history (3)

This is obvious, but always interesting to see discussed formally. On average, the more money you have the likelier you vote Republican.

This breaks down bigtime with black voters as a group, however. They have a racial group interest in addition to just money. Being of a persecuted group they feel a strong interest in not being persecuted and thus vote for Democrats very one-sidedly whether rich or poor individually. (Money can soften the personal impact of racism, but not eliminate it. (After all, only rich blacks are kept out of country clubs because of race... poor whites and poor blacks alike are pre-rejected, kept out by the fees. Being rich doesn't solve the problem for ones self, let alone for one's family and friends of color.)

All understandable and well known.

What is felt, but less discussed numerically, is that Southern Whites are also extremely skewed. In the same way that many rich blacks vote Democratic, many poor southern whites vote Republican.

White voters in general are only slightly more conservative than their income level would predict. (On the chart, the distance from the orange line represents the degree of discrepency between the voting income would predict versus actual voting.) It appears that on average white voters outside the south who vote Republican do so mostly because they have money.

Southern whites have less money than the national white average and, just going by income, southern whites would be expected to break about 50-50 Dem vs. Pug, but they are (unlike other whites) a big outlier... almost as skewed from income-based expectation as black voters, but in the opposite direction. (Both skewed by more than 30 percentage points from what income would predict)

If we consider the national black and the southern white votes, they seem two sides of one coin. Two racial group distortions in the money=party preference curve.

This suggests (what we already know, of course) that southern whites are motivated by a racial group interest in the same way blacks are. This part is my opinion, but also rather obvious—southern whites perceive a racial group interest in oppressing black people.