I just caught an interesting analysis by Matthew Yglesias over at the Atlantic Monthly. His analysis suggests that we are hugely misreading the class issue in voting patterns by confusing class and race. His point is simple: if you take ALL voters who made less than $50,000, John Kerry won that group by 11% over Bush in 2004’s Presidential Election.
It’s when you take the black vote OUT that Bush starts to look good in that income group. People are forgetting that blacks who make under $50,000 have many of the same issues as everyone else with incomes under $50,000. In short, Bush did not win the working-class vote. And, the white working-class vote doesn’t really exist. They have most of the same concerns as other voters in the same income group
I guarantee you the same dynamic holds in 2008. The Democrats need to re-frame this fact accordingly in the general election. We need to stop treating this groups as separate and identify the divisions that are building in our society based on income and wealth.
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