Poor Rural Voters
Barack Obama’s speech at a fundraiser in San Francisco caused a lot of controversy for portraying rural Americans as “bitter” and “clinging” to guns and religion. However, the implicit argument that rural American are favoring their social interests over their economic interests, and subsequently voting for Republican presidential candidates seems to be taken as factually correct.
Let’s look at the data. Using the American National Election study, I plot Republican vote share by presidential election year from 1952 to 2000 for poor and rich rural voters.
We can see a steady decline of Republican support among rural poor voters starting in 1972. Even with a big jump in 2000, support for the Republican presidential candidate was less than 50 percent. So, Obama, it looks like poor rural Americans have no problem voting for Democrats.
Comments
Without knowing specifically what Obama's thesis is, it's hard to know whether this data proves or disproves his theory. It does show a huge spike toward the GOP, so perhaps Obama is arguing that despite having a small majority of rural poor voters, the Dems have LOST a large amount of them over the past decade for the reasons he said. I imagine that this is what he is arguing.
Posted by: Nicholas Warino | April 16, 2008 07:28 PM
The implicit assumption of your question is that the rural poor believe Democrats help the rural poor economically more than Republicans do but I haven't seen any data on this. You have to assume that there are social conservatives who are simultaneously economic liberals or else the conflict you're talking about doesn't exist.
Posted by: Robert L. www.neolibertarian.com | April 16, 2008 08:39 PM
Could you please clarify whether the graph is Republican vote share or Republican share of the 2 party vote? It is hard to assess the trend without knowing whether Perot is taken into account for '92 and '96.
Posted by: Jason | April 17, 2008 02:06 PM