Comments Elsewhere

Think what you will about the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, but Sailer’s claim that “Instead, it has morphed into an alliance between the elite and the underclass” is statistical hogwash based on nothing more than an ecological fallacy. Exit polls consistently show that the higher income you make, the more likely you were to vote for Bush, and the less income you make, the more likely you were to vote for Kerry. This is true in California, and it’s true in Alabama. In fact, the only state I’ve seen where it turns out not to be true (the highest income level turns out to be as likely to vote for Kerry as the lowest, which is not very likely, but more than those in the middle) is “egalitarian” Utah.

The only places where Sailer has data that doesn’t commit the ecological fallacy is in the relationship between education and likelihood to vote Democratic. It’s true that a little education inclineth a man toward Republicans, but depth in education bringeth men’s minds about to Democrats. But advanced educational degrees are rarely the royal road towards great wealth in this country. In most states, there is usually a bump of a few percentage points in likelihood to vote for Kerry at either $75-$100,000 a year or $100-$150,000 a year; I assume that this bump indicates whatever the usual salary for advanced degree holders in that state is. But the bump always gives way more or less immediately, and the Bush-voting trend resumes among the clearly rich. At most what the data supports is a claim that the Democratic Party is an alliance between the underclass and the somewhat comfortable. But given that these bumps wash out, at the national level, to a whopping 2% bump for Kerry in the $75-$100,000 a year vote, it would be more accurate to just say that poor people elect Democrats and rich people elect Republicans.

For more data, see: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html