I don’t really want to go on and on about this, but since it’s a current research topic of ours . . .

Michael Barone (link from Newmark’s Door) writes,

But of course it’s up to citizens themselves to determine what their interests are. “People of fashion” vote Democratic primarily because of the liberal stands on cultural issues, and they should not be puzzled when “the common people” vote Republican because of their conservative stands on those same issues. If it’s OK for rich people to vote on cultural issues, why isn’t it OK for ordinary people to do the same?

And maybe these “common people” have some inkling of what the “people of fashion” are empowering by their votes. They are empowering the teachers’ unions to drain the public treasuries and to insulate themselves from any accountability for the poor job their members are doing of educating the poor. They are empowering the transfer of billions of dollars of assets from large publicly held corporations and their shareholders—who include, through personal holdings, mutual funds, or pension plans, many ordinary citizens—to a small gaggle of trial lawyers. They are empowering trade unions who represent a shrinking segment of the labor force to block free trade agreements that make possible cheaper goods and services for us all.

Sophisticated Democrats will admit that their party truckles to the interests of teachers’ unions, trial lawyers, and industrial unions because it needs their support in order to win, and they will argue that Republicans truckle to similarly nefarious interest groups for the same reason. I put that argument aside for another day. I bring it up only to suggest that, on economic matters as well as on cultural issues, the common people may have a lot more common sense than the people of fashion who revel in looking down on them.

Without commenting one way or another on his policy arguments, let me just say that all the evidence shows that the richer voters support the Republicans and the poorer voters support the Democrats. See more here. This is not to say that Barone’s policy arguments are wrong–he’s just not right about the party and income. He seems to see this as an ideological issue–for example, he writes, “It evidently irritates many liberals to point out that their party gets heavy support from superaffluent ‘people of fashion’ and does not run very well among ‘the common people.'” Well, in 2004, the exit polls found Kerry getting 63% of the vote of the people making less than $15000, 58% of the vote of those making $15-30, and 51% of the vote of those making between $30-50. I’m sure the Democrats were upset about this–they lost the election, after all! but they did better among the commoners than the superaffluent.