Wow what a superb post! Who the heck is eriposte, anyway, and why don't we hear from he/she more often?

Eri - I've just re-read this thing the 4 or 5th time. Amazing. It's dense, scholarly, comprehensive and definately not for the attention-limited.

I feel like a Yogism - "I knew that, but just didn't know it that way."

You can extend the example of 'blue' states making wise public policy choices and doing well to national policies as well. The fruit of the New Deal reforms was the American boom from the late 1940's to the early 1970's. With the rise of the Nixon coalition in the late 60's and its acceleration during the Reagan years we slowly began the slow deteriorating process that we are now suffering from.

To put it in the old populist saying "If you want to live like a Republican, you'd better vote for the Democrats."

I expect to say a little more about this in the future when I discuss globalization and free markets.

Eriposte,

I agree that the correlation between income and Republican voting should not be a surprise (although it's lower than one might think based on a purely economic-voting hypothesis).

I think there are two reasons people might be surprised. The first reason is that, in political discourse in a democracy, there is an extra virtue associated with lower-income voters. I think that partisans on both sides tend to forget that "the other side" has the support of half the voters. On the Democrats' side, this can lead to people to deny the good reasons that nonrich people can have for supporting conservatives. On the Republicans' side, this can lead for people to minimize or deny the fact that richer voters tend to vote Republican. See here for a discussion of an extreme version of this mistake made by Michael Barone (author of the well-respected Almanac of American Politics).

More interestingly, the evidence is that people do not decide their votes based on self-interest. See here for some discussion by Bryan Caplan, who recognizes that richer voters support the Republicans but still doesn't want to believe it because he associates the income-Republican correlation with the discredited idea ofself-interested voting.

Andrew,

Thanks for the links. One of the other things I have been focusing on in my blogging here is the media and one of the points I have tried to make on more than one occasion is that as long as the media is inaccurate, voters are not likely to know the true positions of candidates, and therefore unlikely to know what is really in their best interest, when it comes to voting. I am consistently amazed at people who make assumptions about voters voting based on self-interest, when the reality is commonly not in sync with that assumption.