Last week, I wrote about Bill de Blasio’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, and mentioned that exit polls showed that his support was “consistently high among all income groups.” … Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at NYU, wrote to me pointing out that the Times’s own detailed map of precinct results shows a more complex and interesting pattern. …
One of the most interesting conclusions that can be drawn from the primary results was that class trumped race, gender and sexual identity, all factors that have played strong roles in recent Democratic contests. “Any racial vote for Thompson simply disappeared,” NYU’s Rosenthal noted. “Gender and sexual orientation were of at best marginal benefit to Quinn. So I think the election was largely about redistribution,” Rosenthal said.
Rosenthal suggested that the differences in voting based on income point to internal party conflicts between what could be called the investment banker wing of the party and its less affluent counterpart, what Rosenthal calls “the tension between Steve Rattner and Citigroup (Robert Rubin, Peter Orszag, Jack Lew) Democrats and the mass of voters.” The outcome, in Rosenthal’s view, was “a repudiation of the money wing of the Democratic party.” CONT.
Tom Edsall (Columbia U.), New York Times