The Numbers on the White Working Class

When blogging on George Packer’s reported piece on Democratic outreach efforts among the white working class in Ohio, I wondered what Andrew Gelman thought. He was kind enough to respond with these charts:

What you see here that there’s substantial income-voting linkage among white voters, with earning more money making a non-hispanic white more likely to vote Republican just as it does for a black voter or a hispanic voter. But among whites, the GOP starts with a very high base securing the votes of almost half of low-income non-hispanic whites. Plus you figure that some of those low-income whites are students or American Prospect Writing Fellows. So while white voters are hardly indifferent to class/income income effects at the polls, it’s also the case, as Packer’s article implies, that there’s a very substantial proportion of economically struggling white voters who over the past two cycles haven’t found the Democratic candidates’ economic messages particularly compelling.

It’s also interesting how neatly the ethnic breakouts dovetail with one another — rich blacks vote similarly to poor hispanics (about 25 percent like Republicans) and rich hispanics vote similarly to poor whites (about 50 percent like Republicans) and then the GOP wins majorities among middle-class and rich white people.