If there is one “politics” book you should read this year, it is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Now, this sort of acclamation does need to be tempered by the fact that I myself don’t really read “political” books very often. But despite the modest N, I’m rather confident that anyone who picks up Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State will not be disappointed. To a great extent the collective of Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina have produced a work which is a response in substance, if not style, to pundit productions by the likes of David Brooks and Thomas Frank. While the prose stylings of Brooks and Frank illustrate in an engaging manner what is “known,” that is, fleshing out Conventional Wisdom with concrete specific exemplars, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is more a series of charts girded by clarifying and interpretative text. Like good science Gelman et al. generate surprising and novel results, at times defying their prior expectations. This is a contrast to the modus operandi of most mainstream pundits, who select data which can vividly depict the plausible veracity of their hypotheses. While the core of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is an analysis of the American political scene, their data sets suggest possible reasons that the pundits themselves come to the conclusions which they do. You not might agree with all the inferences made by Gelman et al. from their data, but there is value in clarity even if the contention is incorrect.
The basic argument of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is that the assumption by many mainstream pundits that the socioeconomic elites tilt Left while the masses tilt Right is wrong. To a first approximation the rich tend to vote Republican, the poor tend to vote Democratic, the old stereotype holds. But there is also the reality that the wealthier states tend to vote Democratic and the poorer ones tend to vote Republican. In a book generously larded with charts I believe this is the most representative and informative one:
(cite: Quarterly Journal of Political Science Volume 2 Issue 4, 2007: “Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What’s the Matter with Connecticut?”)
In short, as you can see, the rich in Connecticut, the wealthiest state per capita, are not much more Republican than the poor. In contrast, the rich in Mississippi, the poorest state, are much more Republican than the poor. Ohio, a middle income state, is somewhere in the middle. What Gelman et al. are showing here is that looking just at states removes critical information; class is a much better predictor of political orientation in poor states than it is in rich states. It isn’t that rich states are blue because they are rich, it is that in rich states income doesn’t matter much in relation to politics. You might wonder about the effect of race here; after all in Mississippi class and race are entangled and the political parties to a great extent are polarized along racial lines. Gelman et al. report that half of the effect is removed when controlling for race, but the general pattern of class based voting in poor states and not in rich states holds even for whites only.
By breaking down the data into county-level units Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State also generates a plausible explanation for why mainstream pundit Conventional Wisdom would hold that the poor vote Republican more than the rich, even though on an aggregate national scale this is simply not so. In blue states the wealthier counties tend to be more blue (though within these counties the rich may still be more Republican; you can see this in Manhattan where the only precincts where Republicans attain parity with Democrats are in the wealthiest neighborhoods of the Upper East Side). Red states often exhibit an inverse pattern; the wealthiest counties are the most Republican! As it happens, the media elite is based in D.C. and New York, where the upscale regions tend to tilt heavily Democratic, while economically depressed rural counties in the hinterlands are more likely to tilt Republican. It stands to reason that David Brooks could easily confirm elite media perceptions that downscale locales tend to be more Republican and conservative than more affluent ones; the D.C. metropolitan area is a classic exemplar of the dynamics operative in blue America. In the end Gelman et al. are too gentle for my taste in criticizing the tendency of mainstream pundits, who no doubt fancy themselves cosmopolitans, generalizing from their own parochial existence, but on the merits they wipe the floor with them.
Though wealth gets mention in the title, I think it is important to highlight the fact that there is another independent variable which gets extensive treatment in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: religion. “Religious State, Secular State” could easily have been tacked on if they wanted to create an even more ungainly title. It is likely no surprise that the more secular one is the more likely one is to vote for the Democratic party. This is a robust finding across states. In rich states, blue states, the rich are more secular than the poor. I doubt this will surprise many readers. But this might: in red states the rich are often more religious than the poor! In blue states the wealthy are more socially liberal than the poor, but somewhat more economically conservative. In other words, the wealthy in blue states tend to exhibit a libertarian lean. In red states the wealthy are at least, or more, socially conservative, and much more economically conservative. This is of course a natural explanation for why income matters much more in red states for partisan voting, but less so in blue states. Blue state elites have to balance their social values which are strongly Left with their economic interests. In red states elites have no such conundrum, their social and economic interests are naturally served by the Republican party, while the poor who may be socially conservative have powerful economic interests in the Democratic party.
To me one of the more interesting conclusions that Gelman et al. draw from these data is that this explains the power of economic conservatism despite the fact that public opinion polls tend to show that the public tends to tilt somewhat Left on these issues. While the Republican elites are unanimous in their support for economic conservatism, the Democratic elites are not in their hostility. “Pro-business” Democrats in states like Connecticut have to balance the fact that their constituents span the economic spectrum, from blue-collar union members to hedge fund managers with physics doctorates. Most readers are likely aware of the general outline of this phenomenon, but Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State illustrates in stark relief the particular demographic reasons for this asymmetry between the two parties.
Though less than 200 pages of text, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is a book of incredible substantive density. Despite its general academic lean it is written in an accessible manner with little technical jargon (e.g., you won’t be confronted by constant references to beta coefficients, though those do exist in the end notes). Much of the material which Gelman et al. marshal can be found online, at the companion website which has a blog and archive of articles, or, at the personal weblogs of the authors. But Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State takes all the appetizers and whips them into a very satisfying soufflé.
Comments are closed.