How the Other Fifth Lives

… The “truly advantaged” wing of the Democratic Party – a phrase coined in this newspaper by Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard – has provided the Democratic Party with crucial margins of victory where its candidates have prevailed. These upscale Democrats have helped fill the gap left by the departure […] Read more »

The Four Corners Of The GOP (Trump Owns Three Of Them)

… Thus far, the two best predictors of GOP voter preferences have been white socioeconomic status and an area’s partisanship. Trump has performed best among non-Hispanic whites with low socioeconomic status, especially in blue areas. Meanwhile, Cruz has fared best in more conservative areas, Kasich has run best in blue […] Read more »

These two maps are incredibly revealing about who’s voting for Trump, and why

In a detailed analysis of the geography of Donald Trump’s vote, Neil Irwin and Josh Katz of the New York Times recently wrote that geographic pockets of unhyphenated Americans — whites who define their ancestry to be “American” rather than a specific European heritage — “turn out to be the […] Read more »

Debunking the myth that poor whites vote against their interests for Republicans

Are poor whites less likely to vote correctly in presidential elections? Their voting behavior is routinely the source of consternation in American politics, as many suspect poor whites are mistakenly voting for right-wing demagogues and on conservative social issues. Our recent research uses a ‘voting correctly’ measure to better adjudicate […] Read more »