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Are poor people likely to be liberals? There had always been a trope about poor conservatives that probably has some truth to it. And now that liberals have aba

Are poor people likely to be liberals? There had always been a trope about poor conservatives that probably has some truth to it. And now that liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite, I'm not sure why anyone would think that the poor would lean liberal. While I imagine that there are lots of rich old people who are Democrats that perpetuate and exacerbate inequality. The article is a bit Orwellian.

Georgelemental 3y ago
Poorer whites (and Latinos, and East Asians to a lesser extent) have moved to the right. Other demographics lean heavily left at all income levels
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  The "latinos" who live in the USA, it seems so. At our own countries it seems the tendency has shifted to the left side of the spectrum - Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil had recently elected left-wing governments.
  - smt88 3y ago
    The US conception of "left" and "right" doesn't map neatly onto other countries to begin with, but there's still some clarification needed. Latino Americans are still overwhelmingly left-of-center (though perhaps not likely to be left enough to be "leftist"). The shift to the right has been relatively small (though consequential due to geography) and limited to certain groups. For example, Cuban Americans in Miami are much more likely to have moved to the right.
    - over_bridge 3y ago
      It always amuses me to see how left and right differ between nations. US conservatives are protesting and restricting immigration when in New Zealand, the conservatives are wildly pro immigration. Their argument is that it drives house prices up and wages down when you've got more people flooding in. If you're a land and/or business owner, that's what you vote for. The left wants less immigration so workers and renters have more negotiating power.
      - muststopmyths 3y ago
        Maybe just a reflection of where they are in their political evolution. Once the population becomes more diverse from immigration, they will perhaps become nativists because their base will drift that way.
      - pcthrowaway 3y ago
        In Canada I think it's pretty even split; as much as we have a "left" and "right", I don't think the left or the right have strongly different views on immigration. We are bringing in immigrants at a massive clip though, and progressives are noting that the cost of living keeps increasing while wages stay the same, leading to a lot of hardship for people who haven't already accumulated wealth. There may be conservatives who oppose immigration out of xenophobia, but there are many conservative business owners who see immigration as a way to keep paying a less than living wage, and landlords who see it as a way to keep the demand for rentals (much) higher than the supply
      - _delirium 3y ago
        There is still some of that alignment in the U.S., but it’s not the dominant one currently. Wealthier & business-oriented conservatives tend to be pro-immigration, e.g. the influential conservative think-tank Cato Institute is solidly pro-immigration [1,2]. But the more nativist Trump-style conservatives clearly have more power than them post-2016. On the left, the AFL-CIO labor federation has historically been skeptical of immigration (and free trade) for basically the same reasons the businesspeople support them (belief that it will push down wages). Though the labor movement is somewhat more supportive of immigration in recent years. [1] https://store.cato.org/collections/frontpage/products/the-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-and-why-theyre-wrong https://store.cato.org/collections/frontpage/products/the-mo... [2] https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-u...
        willcipriano 3y ago
        Obama was big on deportation. So was Clinton. Bush talked tougher than he was in practice.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    There’s some self selection to the ones who live in the US. The Cuban community in Florida, for instance.
- throwaway33381 3y ago
  The irony to call Asians white when most Asians that have migrated recently come from predominately South Asia and are dark/darker skinned.
  - tabtab 3y ago
    The whole classification system in current use is very lossy.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    I think their intention was to list 3 distinct categories, not 1 category with 2 subcategories.
- cj 3y ago
  Do you have a source? Here are a few sources I found but they don't segment income level. 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-... 2015: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-... https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/2020/05/the-demographic-profiles-of-democrats-and-republicans/ https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/2020/05/the-demographic-pro...
Convolutional 3y ago
Income does not corollate exactly to relations of production, but it is a decent enough independent variable. CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden. https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio... With regards to liberals abandoning the working class - this did not happen because liberals were never for the working class. Nor were conservatives.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden. I wonder if there is a sampling issue with the data. At $200k, the Biden/trump votes are equal.
JohnFen 3y ago
> now that liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite, Liberals are not a political party. You're talking about the Democrats, which as a party isn't really all that liberal.
- version_five 3y ago
  That's an interesting point. Maybe I'm missing the idea that no party cares much about the poor / working class.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    There are differences between the two parties in terms of how (and how much) they care about the poor and the working class. But both parties have priorities they hold more dear. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans are champions of the poor and working class, but they are also not equally neglectful of them.
- USB5 3y ago
  The Democratic Party is neoliberal by every imaginable definition of the term, and so-called "classical liberalism" was abandoned with the onset of WW2. Which liberalism are you referring to?
  - over_bridge 3y ago
    People seem to falsely equate liberal with leftwing. They are very different. In fact no one hates liberals quite like left wingers. Democrats are liberal, not leftist (though they have adopted some leftist bits) Liberals (and neoliberals) want everything controlled by markets. The government should butt out and collect no more taxes than is reasonably needed to set and enforce the market rules. Everything else should be private. Not too different from libertarians except that they have more common sense. Leftists want the government to have an opinion and directly act and spend money in order to achieve specific outcomes. If there are many homeless, don't try to influence the market to increase supply or drop price, just directly go and build houses. If we need clean energy, don't dick about with carbon credits and incentives, just go and hire some engineers and build wind turbines. Liberals and leftists are opposites not synonyms.
petsfed 3y ago
Democrats (and liberals in general) are overwhelmingly urban (red/blue county maps are basically population density maps), especially living in major cities. But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0]. I wonder which is the larger contributor there: is it income or geography that most drives the poor towards liberalism? I don't really want to engage with your claim re: abandoning the working class, as I fully endorse the mindset that breaking the rail worker strike was anti-worker. But concurrently, the change of regulation that eventually led to the rail worker strike was a Republican/conservative policy. I will say that very few on the Democrat/liberal side talk openly about e.g. falling birth rates as an economic problem for the adoption industry, so I'm inclined to say that the condescending liberal elites are still better at pretending the poors are actual people who can hear what's said about them. 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/09/26/161841771/how-income-divides-democrats-republicans-and-independents https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/09/26/161841771/how-...
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  I feel quite strongly that workers are still weakly affiliated with democrats because there is literally no other politically credible force in american politics that even pretends to care about workers.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0] That graph defines "low income" as less than $20,000/year, but 75% of the people who make less than $20,000 also make less than $15,000, i.e. less than minimum wage. This implies that it's less people who make low wages and more people who don't have full-time employment. Moreover, one of the largest populations of people who typically don't have full-time employment are... college students. This is also affected by the age distribution between the parties (older people tend to be Republicans and to make more money than they did when younger). It would be much more interesting to see the graph organized by lifetime earnings at a given age.
  - 3y ago
pasquinelli 3y ago
both parties are of the establishment elite.
green_man_lives 3y ago
The answer is "it depends" First, liberal doesn't really mean much in America. Liberal for a lot of people just means "those people I disagree with". For others it means people who uphold property rights and American global dominance to be sacred. In the north and midwest you have a lot of poor people who are still voting Democrat because their state legislatures have vestiges of union-affiliated Democrat traditions. We see the Democrats in Minnesota being much more pro-worker than in New York or California, places we traditionally think of a "liberal". These people are probably registered democrats for this reason, even though at the national level the democrats are almost as hostile towards labor as the republicans. In the south you had southern Democrat politicians or Dixiecrats, whose constituents got pulled into the Republican party under Nixon. He used blue collar aesthetics to bring them in under the same umbrella as the wealthy. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that in the south, race and culture is a greater source of identity than class for many people, especially the poor. People will see Joel Osteen as being cut from the same cloth as them because they think that they share the same values. Lastly, there are a lot of single issue votes in the Republican party on guns and abortion. I don't think that there are as many single-issue Democrats.
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
> liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite Things like this are just stated as fact around here while any criticism of conservatives is immidiately flagged. HN, like Twitter, has been taken over by rightwingers.
culebron21 3y ago
I think it matters more on local-level elections. Some candidates will propose shelters and affordable housing policies, the other wants to ban them and plow highways. This is where voters demography and their representation matters.

Georgelemental 3y ago

Poorer whites (and Latinos, and East Asians to a lesser extent) have moved to the right. Other demographics lean heavily left at all income levels

Gualdrapo 3y ago
The "latinos" who live in the USA, it seems so. At our own countries it seems the tendency has shifted to the left side of the spectrum - Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil had recently elected left-wing governments.
- smt88 3y ago
  The US conception of "left" and "right" doesn't map neatly onto other countries to begin with, but there's still some clarification needed. Latino Americans are still overwhelmingly left-of-center (though perhaps not likely to be left enough to be "leftist"). The shift to the right has been relatively small (though consequential due to geography) and limited to certain groups. For example, Cuban Americans in Miami are much more likely to have moved to the right.
  - over_bridge 3y ago
    It always amuses me to see how left and right differ between nations. US conservatives are protesting and restricting immigration when in New Zealand, the conservatives are wildly pro immigration. Their argument is that it drives house prices up and wages down when you've got more people flooding in. If you're a land and/or business owner, that's what you vote for. The left wants less immigration so workers and renters have more negotiating power.
    - muststopmyths 3y ago
      Maybe just a reflection of where they are in their political evolution. Once the population becomes more diverse from immigration, they will perhaps become nativists because their base will drift that way.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      In Canada I think it's pretty even split; as much as we have a "left" and "right", I don't think the left or the right have strongly different views on immigration. We are bringing in immigrants at a massive clip though, and progressives are noting that the cost of living keeps increasing while wages stay the same, leading to a lot of hardship for people who haven't already accumulated wealth. There may be conservatives who oppose immigration out of xenophobia, but there are many conservative business owners who see immigration as a way to keep paying a less than living wage, and landlords who see it as a way to keep the demand for rentals (much) higher than the supply
    - _delirium 3y ago
      There is still some of that alignment in the U.S., but it’s not the dominant one currently. Wealthier & business-oriented conservatives tend to be pro-immigration, e.g. the influential conservative think-tank Cato Institute is solidly pro-immigration [1,2]. But the more nativist Trump-style conservatives clearly have more power than them post-2016. On the left, the AFL-CIO labor federation has historically been skeptical of immigration (and free trade) for basically the same reasons the businesspeople support them (belief that it will push down wages). Though the labor movement is somewhat more supportive of immigration in recent years. [1] https://store.cato.org/collections/frontpage/products/the-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-and-why-theyre-wrong https://store.cato.org/collections/frontpage/products/the-mo... [2] https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-u...
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        Obama was big on deportation. So was Clinton. Bush talked tougher than he was in practice.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  There’s some self selection to the ones who live in the US. The Cuban community in Florida, for instance.
throwaway33381 3y ago
The irony to call Asians white when most Asians that have migrated recently come from predominately South Asia and are dark/darker skinned.
- tabtab 3y ago
  The whole classification system in current use is very lossy.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I think their intention was to list 3 distinct categories, not 1 category with 2 subcategories.
cj 3y ago
Do you have a source? Here are a few sources I found but they don't segment income level. 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-... 2015: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-... https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/2020/05/the-demographic-profiles-of-democrats-and-republicans/ https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/2020/05/the-demographic-pro...

Convolutional 3y ago

Income does not corollate exactly to relations of production, but it is a decent enough independent variable. CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden. https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio... With regards to liberals abandoning the working class - this did not happen because liberals were never for the working class. Nor were conservatives.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden. I wonder if there is a sampling issue with the data. At $200k, the Biden/trump votes are equal.

JohnFen 3y ago

> now that liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite, Liberals are not a political party. You're talking about the Democrats, which as a party isn't really all that liberal.

version_five 3y ago
That's an interesting point. Maybe I'm missing the idea that no party cares much about the poor / working class.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  There are differences between the two parties in terms of how (and how much) they care about the poor and the working class. But both parties have priorities they hold more dear. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans are champions of the poor and working class, but they are also not equally neglectful of them.
USB5 3y ago
The Democratic Party is neoliberal by every imaginable definition of the term, and so-called "classical liberalism" was abandoned with the onset of WW2. Which liberalism are you referring to?
- over_bridge 3y ago
  People seem to falsely equate liberal with leftwing. They are very different. In fact no one hates liberals quite like left wingers. Democrats are liberal, not leftist (though they have adopted some leftist bits) Liberals (and neoliberals) want everything controlled by markets. The government should butt out and collect no more taxes than is reasonably needed to set and enforce the market rules. Everything else should be private. Not too different from libertarians except that they have more common sense. Leftists want the government to have an opinion and directly act and spend money in order to achieve specific outcomes. If there are many homeless, don't try to influence the market to increase supply or drop price, just directly go and build houses. If we need clean energy, don't dick about with carbon credits and incentives, just go and hire some engineers and build wind turbines. Liberals and leftists are opposites not synonyms.

petsfed 3y ago

Democrats (and liberals in general) are overwhelmingly urban (red/blue county maps are basically population density maps), especially living in major cities. But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0]. I wonder which is the larger contributor there: is it income or geography that most drives the poor towards liberalism? I don't really want to engage with your claim re: abandoning the working class, as I fully endorse the mindset that breaking the rail worker strike was anti-worker. But concurrently, the change of regulation that eventually led to the rail worker strike was a Republican/conservative policy. I will say that very few on the Democrat/liberal side talk openly about e.g. falling birth rates as an economic problem for the adoption industry, so I'm inclined to say that the condescending liberal elites are still better at pretending the poors are actual people who can hear what's said about them. 0. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/09/26/161841771/how-income-divides-democrats-republicans-and-independents https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/09/26/161841771/how-...

nathan_compton 3y ago
I feel quite strongly that workers are still weakly affiliated with democrats because there is literally no other politically credible force in american politics that even pretends to care about workers.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0] That graph defines "low income" as less than $20,000/year, but 75% of the people who make less than $20,000 also make less than $15,000, i.e. less than minimum wage. This implies that it's less people who make low wages and more people who don't have full-time employment. Moreover, one of the largest populations of people who typically don't have full-time employment are... college students. This is also affected by the age distribution between the parties (older people tend to be Republicans and to make more money than they did when younger). It would be much more interesting to see the graph organized by lifetime earnings at a given age.
- 3y ago

pasquinelli 3y ago

both parties are of the establishment elite.

green_man_lives 3y ago

The answer is "it depends" First, liberal doesn't really mean much in America. Liberal for a lot of people just means "those people I disagree with". For others it means people who uphold property rights and American global dominance to be sacred. In the north and midwest you have a lot of poor people who are still voting Democrat because their state legislatures have vestiges of union-affiliated Democrat traditions. We see the Democrats in Minnesota being much more pro-worker than in New York or California, places we traditionally think of a "liberal". These people are probably registered democrats for this reason, even though at the national level the democrats are almost as hostile towards labor as the republicans. In the south you had southern Democrat politicians or Dixiecrats, whose constituents got pulled into the Republican party under Nixon. He used blue collar aesthetics to bring them in under the same umbrella as the wealthy. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that in the south, race and culture is a greater source of identity than class for many people, especially the poor. People will see Joel Osteen as being cut from the same cloth as them because they think that they share the same values. Lastly, there are a lot of single issue votes in the Republican party on guns and abortion. I don't think that there are as many single-issue Democrats.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

> liberals have abandoned the working class and become the party of the establishment elite Things like this are just stated as fact around here while any criticism of conservatives is immidiately flagged. HN, like Twitter, has been taken over by rightwingers.

culebron21 3y ago

I think it matters more on local-level elections. Some candidates will propose shelters and affordable housing policies, the other wants to ban them and plow highways. This is where voters demography and their representation matters.