After this, here’s more, again from exit poll crosstabs that Jared pulled off the CNN website:
Difference in McCain vote share, comparing people in each state with family incomes over and under $50,000 (thus, states that are high on this graph are those where richer people were much more Republican than poorer people):
The same graph, but for whites only (following Larry Bartels’s suggestion):
As before, the states are colored as red or blue where McCain or Obama won by more than 10% of the two-party vote, and purple for the states in between.
Lots of interesting patterns here.
OK. Colinearity between race/color and income, and there’s interactions with region. Duh.
Now what do YOU think this means? And can you do another graph with smaller range on the y-axis, so we can better see what’s where?
Much thanks for all the interesting stuff. Lots and lots of interesting stuff.
What do you think of Steve Sailer’s insights on rural voters (affordable family formation)?
Ceolaf: Data are at CNN webpage so you can feel free to make better graphs. As to what it all means, I’m not sure; given all the problems with exit polls I’d like to reserve judgment until I can get my hands on some more poll data.
TCO: We discuss this in our book, in chapter 10, I believe. You can also go to my other blog and search on Sailer.
Professor Gelman,
Any chance you might post exit polling data on income by race for the ’04 election to an easily accessible site like Swivel (it’s a 5 minute deal, tops)? It is not made available on news sites like CNN or MSNBC for the previous Presidential election as it is now.
Exit polling for ’08 breaks down income by race for whites dichotomously, into under $50k and over $50k categories. The relationship between the political money divide for whites and a state’s median income do not approach statistical significance (r-value=.14, p=.33). That’s much weaker than the relationship for all voters (r-value=.47, p=0).
I’m skeptical about the claim that in ’00 and ’04, whites followed the larger PMD trend that he says did not persist in ’08. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, state voting patterns changed little between the ’04 and ’08 elections. Some realignment of the white vote did occur, though. For the claim to hold, this would have to have consisted of poor whites in the McCain belt turning sharply more Republican than they already had been, and wealthy whites on the West Coast and Northeast becoming more Democratic than they had previously been.
Thank you for the consideration!