Income and voting: what if it’d been Clinton vs. Romney?

November 5th, 2008, by Andrew

The first thing I did after getting back from Grant Park was to look at the exit poll results on income and voting and compare to 2000 and 2004.

Up through the middle class, there was little change:

But at the high end there was a flattening out, even a turn toward the Democrats, that we didn’t see before:

Is this a real change, perhaps a move to a new era in which, at a national level, the upper middle class and rich are divided evenly between the two parties?

Or maybe it’s coming from the economic crisis, which in financial terms is hitting higher-income voters harder. (After all, who has money in the stock market?)

Or maybe it has something to do with the candidates themselves. What would the breakdown of voting by income looked like had it been Clinton vs. Romney? (There might be some poll numbers on this from the primary election season, but I don’t know that I’d trust them much.) Maybe it would’ve looked more like 2004.

P.S. regarding the first line above: Boris and I didn’t have tickets. We just observed the crowd from a distance.

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Entry Filed under: Voting