RALEIGH – Democrats are the party of poor people. Republicans are the party of rich people. That’s the common understanding. Is it accurate?
Well, sort-of. It’s true that lower-income people, in America in general and North Carolina in particular, are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than for Republican ones. In 2004, in fact, the major statewide candidates on the Democratic ticket (John Kerry, Mike Easley, and Erskine Bowles) got at least 60 percent of the votes of the 27 percent of North Carolinians earning less than $30,000 a year. In most cases, their share among these voters was closer to 70 percent.
Meanwhile, voters making more than $100,000 usually favored Republicans. But the graph lines don’t feature a constantly upward slope. While President Bush did win 60 percent of the votes among the 3 percent of North Carolina voters you might call “super-rich” ($200,000+), that’s actually lower than his 67 percent showing among the 3 percent who were just “rich” ($150,000-$200,000) or the 71 percent he got among the 11 percent of voters you might call “upper-middle-class” ($100,000-$150,000). For GOP nominees Richard Burr and Patrick Ballantine, there was a similar bump: the latter beat Mike Easley among the upper-middle-class but only tied him among the rich.
Notice, also, the disparity in numbers between these two groups of voters. Low-income voters represented a little more than a quarter of the North Carolina electorate. Upper-income voters represented 17 percent. If that was the end of the story, Democrats would be perpetually happy and Republicans inescapably morose.
It’s not even the middle of the story, however. Voters in the center of the income distribution – those making between $30,000 and $100,000 a year – constitute most of the electorate and decide most electoral outcomes. The reason Republicans have been doing well in North Carolina lately, in national races, is that they are winning roughly the same share of the middle-class that they win among the wealthy.
And the reason why most other Democrats are beating Republicans for state office is that they are at least tying the GOP among the middle class. Easley won 50.1 percent of these voters, compared to Ballantine’s 49.3 percent. That was enough, given the governor’s high numbers among poor voters and relatively solid performance among wealthy ones, to ensure his easy re-election. If Ballantine had performed as well among these voters as Bush did, he likely would have eked out a victory.
So to sum up, it is correct to say that poor people tend to vote Democrat and rich people tend to vote Republican. But these general categories can obscure some important subtleties – and more importantly, the middle class is where the action is.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.