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0 pointssmt883y ago0 comments

> Shouldn't the median republican voter have an higher income (and way higher capital) than the median democrat voter?

It's not really this simple anymore.

Americans are sorting into the party of college grads (Democrats) and the party of non-college-grads (Republicans). This doesn't translate as neatly to income as you might think, but it's definitely a factor.

> they eat venison and a lot of homegrown vegetables, they ride horses and sell lilies (no joke), brew their (mostly) bad beer and throw day-long parties on sunday

This is not typical of any large group of voters, including in West Virginia. As someone who grew up there, I can tell you that most people buy food from Walmart. They don't grow it. There is certainly eating of venison, but frozen pizza is certainly more popular. Horses (and the riding of them) is uncommon.

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Siddarth19773y ago

Despite being oft-repeated, that educational claim isn't really true.

In 2016, Trump beat Hillary in white college-educated women, despite all the claims about gender and education popular in certain sections of media.

I think one big problem with discussion about American politics today is that we all pretend like "Republican" and "Democrat" are in any way logically consistent groups representing two opinions. The truth is, they're both completely absurd coalitions of diverse groups, bound up out of necessity by America having a two-party system.

Instead of trying to split people into two groups along whatever line - education, income, urbanization, race, religion, we should just accept that the parties are a hodgepodge of many different groups. For instance, the Democrats have as a coalition both Black voters and LGBT voters, despite the fact that Black Americans have been far less progressive on LGBT issues than White Americans. Republicans have as a coalition both "small government" fiscal conservatives and Christian social conservatives, despite these groups often having polar opposite policy goals.

kcplate3y ago

> Despite being oft-repeated, that educational claim isn't really true.

I agree with this, it’s been my experience that most of the most intelligent and highly educated people I know are solidly GOP…except those who work in higher education. Although…some of them in higher education I know vote GOP, but claim they don’t, or don’t disclose it publicly.

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