In 2008, Rich States Vote Democratic, Poor States Vote Republican — Again
November 6th, 2008, by Boris
Andrew posted earlier about how wealthier voters again voted disproportionally Republican. What about states? Did rich states vote Democratic in 2008, as they did in 2004? Did poor states vote Republican? In short, yes, they did.
The two raw data scatterplots show the average per capita income of states in the election year (in 2006 dollars) on the horizontal axis, and the Republican share of the vote on the vertical axis. A best-fit line is drawn in each year. The income-vote slope decreases a small amount in 2008. Overall, though, rich states are still blue, and poor states are still red.
So how can rich states vote Democratic, while rich individuals vote Republican? And is this pattern new? Buy our book to find out!
Next step: multilevel models of individuals nested in counties and states. That’s going to have to wait until we get the exit poll data.
Similar Posts:
- Red/blue/rich/poor: 2008 update
- Big city Barack
- Trends in income inequality within and between states
- Vote swings in rich and poor counties
- Religion and voting
3 Comments
Add your own1. John P | November 7th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
The average income in Wyoming (WY) increased from (peers at graphs) $38,000 to $46,000 in four years? Hard to believe. Was there a gold rush up there? Did all the poor people move or die? Or perhaps a very rich person moved in?
I think median income would be a better metric. Income distribution is skewed in the US.
Are the raw data available?
2. Boris | November 9th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Yes, Wyoming had a huge jump in income. See here for the data from BEA:
http://bea.gov/regional/spi/default.cfm?satable=summary
Select “per capita income” and 2004/2007 (2008 data won’t be available till next year, of course).
A little digging around suggests that WY income increased because of a boom in prices for natural resources. And as you suggest, this is an artifact of using mean income by BEA (and the undiversified WY economy).
3. William T | November 9th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Is it just me or do the “red states” show a bigger increase in income between 2004-08? They all seem to fall to the right of the trend line in the latter case (or is that simply because the trend line is flatter?).
In fact, it seems (by eyeball) that states such as Florida and Virginia haven’t increased in income quite so much as some of the other red states….
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed