Your income, my vote

A couple of weeks ago I had a post on the association between a county's income distribution and voting.   Larger numbers of poor (under $15,000 a year), and affluent (over $100,000 and especially over $150,000) people were associated with more support for the Democrats.  The distribution of incomes within a large middle range ($15,000 to $100,000) didn't make much difference.

These differences aren't just a reflection of differences between the voting patterns of low, middle, and high income people.  In 2016, they all split their votes in pretty much the same way.  That is, it's not your own income that matters for your vote, but the incomes of people around you.

Why would these relationships occur?  I think that the apparent effect of the number of low-income people is probably a proxy for race.  The counties with large shares of people earning less than $15,000 are mostly small rural ones, and judging from their locations I'd guess that most of them have large black or American Indian populations.

The reason for a relation between the presence of high income people and Democratic support is less straightforward.  I can think of two plausible possibilities, the first involving culture and the second involving economics.  First, that liberals have an affinity for the kinds of cultural amenities that are associated with large populations of affluent people--restaurants, museums, various kinds of "high culture."  Or you could put it the other way around--that high income people are attracted to the productions of "bohemian" culture.  Second, that where there are large numbers of people with high incomes, other people are more likely to think that we can increase spending on social programs without increasing taxes on the middle class.  Or you could say that concern about "inequality" will be a stronger force in places that have more inequality.  Even though people in Mifflin County, PA (where about 2.5% have incomes over $150,000) might know in principle that there are lots of high-income people in other parts of the country, they probably won't be as conscious of their existence as people in Fairfield County, CT (25% over $150,000).*

A final issue is that the NY Times article that started me on these posts said that the county-level relationship between average income had become considerably stronger between 1992 and 2016.  I think that the second story I gave would be more likely to account for that--changes in the numbers of high income people can occur faster than changes in the degree of residential "sorting."


*In addition, given the skewed distribution of incomes, I expect that the average incomes of the "rich" are higher in places where there are a lot of them--e. g., that in Mifflin County, even people who earn over $150,000 rarely earn much more than that, but that in Fairfield County, many of them earn a lot more than $150,000.