Footnote

The New Yorker has an article called "How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump."  It deals with an important issue--how Trump has maintained a high level of support among Republicans, even the kind of Republicans who once had doubts about him--but there's another important issue that it just mentions in passing, which is that there aren't as many Greenwich Republicans as there used to be.  Greenwich was once solidly Republican--Lyndon Johnson won in 1964, but no other Democrat even broke 40% until Bill Clinton in 1996.  But Barack Obama won the town in 2008, and Hillary Clinton won it by a larger margin in 2016.   I calculated the difference between vote in Greenwich and the national vote.  For example, in 1948 Truman got 29.8% of the vote in Greenwich and Dewey got 68.9%; in the nation, Truman got 49.6% and Dewey got 45.1%.  The difference is (29.8-68.9)-(49.6-45.1)= -43.6.  The difference from 1948 to 2016:








The shift towards the Democrats is pretty steady.  There are a few unusual elections.  One is 1964, when a lot of places broke from their traditional voting patterns.  Another is 2012, when the Democratic vote in Greenwich fell off sharply from 2008 (53.4% to 43.9%).  My guess is that was because of  financial regulation and other measures that Obama took to deal with the recession--although a lot of people on the left saw Obama as a "neoliberal" who was serving the interests of finance, the finance industry didn't see him that way.  Finally, there was 2016, when Clinton was ahead of the trend.  But those are all secondary--the big story is just the general movement towards the Democrats. 

I also remembered a post from last year, where I predicted the 2016 vote in Connecticut towns from two variables--population density and the ratio of mean to median household income.  I was primarily concerned with the urban/rural differences, and just found the mean/median relationship by experimentation.  But when I thought about it again, I decided I should control for racial composition as well.  That reduces the estimated effect of population density, but leaves the estimated effect of mean/median income almost unchanged.  In a post from earlier this year, I found that income inequality, particularly at the top end, is associated with more Democratic support at the county level.  That is the case among Connecticut towns as well.  Greenwich is an outlier here--it has the second mean/median ratio among Connecticut towns, so it's predicted to be near the top in Democratic support, but is actually in the middle.