[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Liberty & Power]
An interesting economic demographic from Charles Johnson: contrary to much Democratic hand-wringing and Republican gloating, it appears that Kerry won the working-class vote, even in the red states; and the wealthier a voter was, the likelier she apparently was to vote for Bush. Degree of economic benefit from the existing system may thus be a better predictor of Bush support than fundamentalist religious convictions are (though I agree with Chris Sciabarra that the religious issues are relevant).
In other words: perhaps “it’s the plutocracy, stupid!” After all, it’s the economic élite who have traditionally been the chief boosters of the corporatist-imperialist state. (See, e.g., Roy Childs’ Big Business and the Rise of American Statism; Walter Grinder and John Hagel’s Toward a Theory of State Capitalism; Chris Sciabarra’s Understanding the Global Crisis; Joseph Stromberg’s Political Economy of Liberal Corporativism and The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire; and Kevin Carson’s Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital.)
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This blog entry says: Election data thanks to CNN Election 2004 Exit Polls.
These are the same exit polls which predicted a Kerry landslide (early on). The polls in which – let’s be honest – the exit pollster can select anyone he or she wants out of the stream of exiting voters to query. The exit polls which any of the polled voters can walk away from and refuse to fill out (the number of questions is absurd, I would have laughed at any pollster who approached me). The pollster himself could fill out the form on behalf of the voters, and no one the wiser.
They don’t spell it out in the CNN exit poll page, but their overall exit poll result gives Bush 49% Kerry 48%. But the actual popular vote result was Bush 51% Kerry 48%. Somehow the exit pollers “missed” 2% of Bush’s vote – by either accidental or statistical sampling error.
Maybe the rich did get behind Bush in a big way, but I would trust these exit polls about as much as I would trust a news story by Dan Rather.
I think it’s safe to say that in this election, Bush made a majority of Americans feel like they belonged to the plutocracy, whether they deserved to or not – “you can have your guns, you can have your butter, whereas the other guy is wishy-washy on the guns and all he wants to do with the butter is move some of it around from here to there”.
Should read: “… by either accidental or OR DELIBERATE statistical sampling error.”
The new American sense of affluence is a cheap Asian knock-off.
Illegal immigrants and people on welfare probably never vote Republican. The rich people don’t want the poor people in their neighborhoods so are pleased to ceed one city in every county to the Dems.
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