“We are all Americans.” – whether Romney or Obama -- or both--proclaimed this, the US media coverage of last Tuesday’s elections seemed to put that to the lie. What we heard-- and what struck me-- from all commentators, on all networks, was not "American voters", or Florida, or Maine, or Utah voters, but white voters, black voters, African-American voters, Hispanic voters, Latino voters, women voters, youth voters. In the following days, analysts further divided these into Christians, Evangelicals, non-Christians.
The melting pot most definitely is not. And the media offered sheets of statistics to back that up.
The headlines on the Web in the days following the election pored over the new demographics.
- A Racially Polarized Country: White Men Lose One, claimed a blog on racismsreview.
- The New America: What the election teaches up about ourselves, said CNN Politics
- Presidential elections show we are far from being 'united' states, read analysis by AP on the pennlive.com site.
- And so on, and on, and on.
Nowhere, however, was the electorate parsed by income. The word "poverty" was not one of the factors examined. I'm willing to bet that the balkanized voters would seem a lot more homogeneous if the mean family-- or personal-- income was applied. Poorer people -- the hispanics/latinos and blacks among them-- more than likely voted for Obama. The rich white guys, well, they went the other way.
Back in 2008 journalist Bill Bishop wrote in The Big Sort that you could tell how people would vote by their zip code. This was a somewhat sophisticated version of "birds of a feather flock together" theory.
Perhaps he was right. Certainly his thesis was picked up in The Tennessean where Chas Sisk analyzed voting patterns in Nashville. He quotes Marc Heatherington, a Vanderbilt University professor, who said:
"People aren't choosing to live because of their politics, but where they are choosing to live seems to be highly correlated to their politics."
I find this worrisome, not just for the US, but for Canada. Did we not see similar patterns start to raise their heads during the last elections when candidates and parties set out to win "the ethnic vote"?
Back in 2008 journalist Bill Bishop wrote in The Big Sort that you could tell how people would vote by their zip code. This was a somewhat sophisticated version of "birds of a feather flock together" theory.
Perhaps he was right. Certainly his thesis was picked up in The Tennessean where Chas Sisk analyzed voting patterns in Nashville. He quotes Marc Heatherington, a Vanderbilt University professor, who said:
"People aren't choosing to live because of their politics, but where they are choosing to live seems to be highly correlated to their politics."
I find this worrisome, not just for the US, but for Canada. Did we not see similar patterns start to raise their heads during the last elections when candidates and parties set out to win "the ethnic vote"?
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