It's a difficult comparison to make. A job that commands a $53,000/yr salary in rural Arkansas might merit $80,000/yr in Connecticut. I note that Arkansas ranks 49th in the US for internet access so a job like mine that requires dependable connectivity from home might not even be an option. The most common job in either place is a fast food worker but if I take a job flipping burgers at McDonald's in Arkansas, I'll start at $7.50/hr and work my way up to an avg $8.48/hr ($16,960/yr). If I take the same job in Connecticut, I'd start at $13.75 and average $15.26/hr ($31,732/yr). The most telling statistic might be cost of living vs median household income.
In 2018, a living wage in Arkansas was estimated at $44,571/yr whereas
a living wage in Connecticut was estimated at $59, 502/yr BUT
In 2018, the median household income in Arkansas was $44,334 whereas
the median household income in Connecticut was $73,433
So- while it costs $15,000/yr more in Connecticut to maintain the same basic standard of living, the median family income in Arkansas falls a couple hundred dollars short of meeting that basic standard while the median family in Connecticut has almost $14,000 more to spend beyond the basics per year.
It IS a difficult comparison to make. So difficult that it's basically futile. You're proving my point, which is that cost of living differences between 435 different congressional districts make broad comparisons untenable. Do you have the numbers for a living wage in Republican districts vs. Democratic ones so we can compare who is poorer, adjusted for COL? Since poor people are icky, and winning them is bad right?
POST #16 this thread "Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy." The economic gap widened significantly to the credit of counties voting for Biden.
Three points:
1) Look at who is voting for who within those counties Biden won. I'll focus on Texas because it's what I know the best. Biden won Tarrant County (Fort Worth) by 0.2%, by winning places filled with poor minorities such as inner city Fort Worth and Arlington while losing incredibly rich suburbs like Southlake and Colleyville handily. Focusing simply on who won overall misses a lot of nuance (
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html). Again, Trump won voters making over $100k by 12 points and lost those making below by 13 points (
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results). This Republican advantage has been dwindling, as has the Democratic advantage with the poor as American politics becomes less polarized by income and race and more by culture. But the economic divide is still very much there.
2) Counties won by Trump and CD's won by Republicans aren't quite the same thing. Trump is basically a textbook example of how to alienate upper middle class white sensibilities, which is why congressional Republicans outperformed him pretty much across the board in suburban areas. Take a look at the CD's Republican's flipped in 2020, and most of them have household incomes comfortably above $53k:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections#Democrats_3
The two that don't are very rural (so lower cost of living) with a high minority population. Your source is comparing the Democratic high water mark in low cost of living areas with their high water mark in high cost of living areas. Yah, the average income they represent is gonna go up lol.
3) This entire thing really is classist af. I hate to act like an SJW but it makes me uncomfortable even arguing about it, as if the votes from the poor whites or poor minorities who moved towards Trump are dirty and the Republican party should be ashamed for winning more of them. Poor people have interests and are generally capable of figuring out with politicians are best representing those interests. Winning more of them is a good thing.
I can't find hard data on this but that's certainly the popular perception. To my mind, the education trend is the most telling. College degree is the most important class and income divider in the US and both 2016 and 2020 saw significant swings in college educateds away from the GOP and toward Democrats. The fact is that college degrees increased 25% over 10 years in blue counties but not at all in red counties. The fact is that income and productivity is rising fast in blue counties and declining in red. Even if the average Republican voter's income was greater than the average Democrats in 2020 (I am skeptical but that basic number breakdown is hard to come up with), that advantage seems to be reversing quickly.
It's actually trivially easy to find the data on this. The data on voting behavior by income comes from the exact same sources where the data on voting behavior by education comes from, so I'm surprised you haven't seen it before. Affluent whites without college degrees were by far Trumps staunchest supporters. I have a few ideas about why that is but nothing concrete.
Ultimately, I view such statistics as more data refuting Friedman and Republican "trickle down" economic policy generally. The Keynesian public-private partnerships modeled by the more progressive urban areas have proved more efficient and more sustainable.
Yeah I'm going to press X to doubt that your interest in this subject is purely academic and not at all motivated by a desire to see your opponents as poor, uneducated rubes.
But we agree that old school Republican economics are a joke. Hilariously, a lot of the much vaunted suburban, college educated new supporters Dems are so proud of were all for supply side and trickle down economics, while many of those dirty poor rural whites and minorities were deeply skeptical. This is why Romney and Bush cleaned up in the suburbs but had surprisingly poor showings across rural America compared to Trump.
