I noticed this while traveling and driving though some of the wealthiest ares in the US. I see an ocean of Harris, Bernie, Biden, and even Clinton signs / bumper stickers. Absolutely Zero Trump.
I did some research, and if you get a list of the wealthiest zip codes and match them up with national voting results, it’s indeed a fact that the wealthy zip codes go Democrat, and have for quite a long time.
Why is this? Is it fair to say the wealthy vote Democrat, and if so why is “the right on the side of the wealthy”?
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I noticed this while traveling and driving though some of the wealthiest ares in the US. I see an ocean of Harris, Bernie, Biden, and even Clinton signs / bumper stickers. Absolutely Zero Trump.
I did some research, and if you get a list of the wealthiest zip codes and match them up with national voting results, it’s indeed a fact that the wealthy zip codes go Democrat, and have for quite a long time.
Why is this? Is it fair to say the wealthy vote Democrat, and if so why is “the right on the side of the wealthy”?
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Wealthy people tend to be more educated and educated people tend to vote Democrat. The Democratic Party doesn’t really threaten their wealth much, either.
I would say education which means they get to receive diverse perspectives and have more time/resources to do their own research
Wealthy people like democrats because democrats are good for the economy. Mega rich people like Republicans because Republicans are good for extremely specific companies and interests
The problem are more educated
Education tends to make people more Liberal and education tends to lead to better economic outcomes for people.
Democrats are good for the economy, too
Also, Liberals tend to vote for what they think is the right thing to do instead of what benefits them personally, so wealthy Liberals voting Democrat makes sense.
Please present your data. This sounds extremely suss…
Wealthy areas tend to have high levels of education and people who’ve been exposed to people of many backgrounds. Better media and less reason to be phobic would lead to voting for Democrats.
The people that benefit from Republicans aren’t the wealthy. It’s the ultra wealthy, maybe a couple of thousand families. So while muh taxes arguments work on the regular wealthy they won’t work very well and the republican party doesn’t offer them anything else to push things in their favor.
If you are researching it you can look and see that it goes beyond what you’ve observed here. Usually around 70% of the economic output of the country comes from the districts that vote for the democratic candidate.
Ask yourself why to the poorest zip codes vote Republican when their policies favor the rich
The wealthy don’t have to worry about societal trade offs.
No one is going to build affordable housing in their neighborhoods. No one is going to displace their jobs. No one is going to make them pay their fair share in taxes. And ect ect ect.
It’s easy for them to be altruistic and/or idealistic when they have no skin in the game.
Simply because people in this socio-economic group do not suffer any of the consequences that previous policies have imposed on lesser well-off folks, who may yearn for radical changes (for better or worse). When life is good (good job, good income, good neighbors, everybody is well educated, etc.), it’s easy to take the moral high grounds and start preaching… Note that I am a Democratic voter myself, although I quite dislike what this party has become or allowed itself to become in the last 20 years
Those areas tend to be just outside major cities, which lean liberal. These people are also likely to be socially progressive, so a candidate like Donald Trump would likely be off-putting them.
Also political lines have been gradually redrawn around cultural issues rather than economic ones. California’s reputation as a wealthy industrial hub made it a reliable red state all the way up until 1992. West Virginia’s proud history of labor movements made it a blue stronghold until 2000.
I’ll give you two reasons, one friendly to the right, one not. First, wealthy people are able to pay the price to have luxury beliefs. You don’t feel the effects of crime, bad public education, or formal preferences for favoured-group-status over merit when you’re rich, and those policies often feel good to have. You’re able to preference social signals and imagined moral purity over the actual concerns a lot of middle class GOP voters have. Second, contemporary American conservatism is some loooow IQ shit. It’s just plain trashy, and getting trashier. High human capital and high social status individuals are going to be repulsed by the GOP on strictly aesthetic grounds, like, even if you think the Republican program is the better one, it takes a lot to hold your nose and vote for these fucking morons.
> why is “the right on the side of the wealthy”?
Because the only policy the GOP can be relied on to actually pass is tax cuts for the rich.
One (of several) reasons is that higher income people want to live in nice places. Mass implemented a “millionaire’s tax” (a surcharge in the state income tax) which provides free community college for Mass residents. There are MORE millionaires paying the tax now, then when it was implemented a few years ago. I imagine that Arkansas or Alabama having low taxes isn’t much of a draw.
Liberal policies often create new wealth, while conservative policies often gatekeep it.
Education. Education is the biggest determinant of party affiliation now IIRC.
Also, as someone who grew up in San Francisco and lives in Oakland, a lot of these folks are still conservative on certain issues. They absolutely do not want housing built in their neighborhoods (I mean neither do the progressives though tbh), they would probably say their taxes are too high, and they are much more likely to send their kids to private or religious schools. They can also be very snobby and judgmental toward those who are below their tax brackets. Or very patronizing.
Just some thoughts:
Democrats are good for the economy long term.
Democrats are good for the long term health of the country. A country wealthy people want to live in.
Wealthy people tend to live in cities. Like city dwellers, Democrats value the arts.
Another city things is you tend to see a lot of people from different cultures, races, sexual orientation, etc, in the city. Democrats are not the most tolerant, but they are 1000x more tolerant and welcoming than Republicans.
Wealthy people are educated and have the bandwidth to pay attention to politics. So they are less likely to be taken in by the “both sides” argument that conservatives constantly make.
It depends on where you are. The business owners and landlords in cities tend to vote Republican while the average and poor people vote Democrat.
I can imagine the opposite is true in a hyper religious, less populated areas where there’s a poor zip code next to a wealthy one.
The correlation between wealthy and voting definitely leans Republican, especially in 2024. The richest people not only voted for Trump, they did media rounds expressing support and donated millions to his campaign and inauguration.
However, among middle class people, more educated people vote for Democrats and less educated people vote Republican. More so because of social policy and rhetoric than anything.
> Why is this?
Education level mostly. And education level is closely tied to wealth in the US. The singled best indicator of who you voted for in the last election was whether you went to college or not. Which acts as both a proxy for education level but also life experience, world experience etc.
> Is it fair to say the wealthy vote Democrat, and if so why is “the right on the side of the wealthy”?
I think traditionally it was more accurate to say that the right is on the side of business, rather than the wealthy.
All that is a bit out the window now with MAGA as the Republican party has moved from its core base being the business owning elites (aka country club Republicans) to being the conspiracy brained rural ‘left behind’ (aka the Fox News viewers).
Trump has alienated a lot of wealth people, particularly women, who have college level education.
This has actually caused some what of a headache for the Democrats as the party of slip between the centrists who think those people are up for grab, and the more left wing side of the party which think they shouldn’t be pandered to and the Democrats should focus on improving the working class and expanding those who vote.
Yeah so when people say Republicans are the party of the wealthy, what they actually mean by that is a very small group of individuals who are not influential enough to actually change electoral outcomes simply by voting. Billionaires are very Republican, but as you start climbing down the income ladder to just normal wealthy people, you increasingly get into highly educated people who earned their wealth by being smart, and those people are likely to be democrats
Guilt.
Education, Republican candidates trend to be anti-intellectual freaks who actively and vehemently attack medical and climate science as well as vomit caveman nationalism. Their current economic policy is also batshit crazy to anyone who has basic understanding of economics
Republicans politicians however better serve the wealthy because their platform is of an upwards transfer of wealth away from the poor and middle classes and towards. At least historically, because MAGA has embraced stupid policies that lead to instability and chaos while Democrats stand up for stability and order.
Has more to do with level of education than income, though progressive leanings are associated with both up to a point.
It’s a lot easier to push for diversity and inclusion, illegal immigration etc…when you don’t interact with any those people. I remember when George Floyd died I was out for a motorcycle ride in a ritzy wealthy area outside of Boston and saw maybe 10-15 kids 12-13 years old with their BLM signs “protesting”. As inside by I thought to myself; these kids may not have ever seen a black person.
Because dems have tried recruiting wealthy and suburban voters since Bill Clinton and have abandoned the working class message since.
Why are wealthy Democrats voting against giving themselves a tax cut, OP?
Self-interest. Mass amounts of impoverished people tend to do things like start bloody revolutions. Which is, contrary to the opinion of a lot of revolutionaries, is usually good for nobody
All those things that get branded as socialism or government messing with the economy too much are release valves that keep bloody revolutions from happening.
Do you have anything to back this up?
It really makes you wonder why, out of the top 25 richest people, only Michael Bloomberg is left of center? Maybe there’s a possibility Bezos is, although after he took out the washington post editorial staff, i don’t think it’s so cut a dry.
I’ve grown up my entire life hearing about Soros, being some behind the scenes puppet master, but I don’t see him anywhere on this list, and he definitely doesn’t seem to have DOGE status like Musk did.
I like this framing better: why are republican run cities dilapidated, stagnant, rude?
Answer is the same either way: liberals are smart and virtuous. conservatives are petty ignorant fascist morons.
Democrats are in general better at running cities and towns and creating places where the well off want to raise their kids and live their lives. There’s a reason why people who transplant themselves to red states “for the low taxes” tend to move back after a few years. Turns out all those taxes they didn’t like pay for essential services they rely on and plenty of other things they do like like a high standard of living, a low rate of crime thanks to better education, better economic opportunities and cleaner and safer streets. Higher minimum wages increase the quality of life and lower the rate of crime and fuel more economic growth which is beneficial for local communities and leads to more businesses offering more services the rich can patronize.
It turns out the system works better and people all benefit when money flows though the working class cyclically like its supposed to instead of just collecting in the bank accounts of the mega rich under taxed
Because they’re in or near cities.
Those who have actually researched the facts for themselves know that the economy performs better inder Democrat administrations. And while it’s true taxes are higher under those administration, so are wages. Goods and services are historically cheaper for obvious reasons. But my point is, when the economy is good, the wealthy will make money. Enough to offset higher taxes and still make money.
The wealthiest zip codes are highly urbanised, and the most urbanised zip codes vote Democratic while the most rural zip codes vote Republican. But if you look at the average income of individuals, instead, you’ll see that the average Republican voter has a higher income than the average Democratic voter. So “do the wealthy vote Democratic”? No.
As for the right being on the side of the wealthy: rather than trying to infer the policies from voting blocs, it’s much simpler to just look at the policies directly.
metropolitan cities always lean blue.
higher wealth, higher crime, lower religion, more diversity.
don’t get fooled by manipulated statistics. correlation does not equal causation. IE this does not mean that rich people vote democrat.
They are probably urbanized which I think has more to do with it than being wealthy.
Because wealthy people, by and large, tend to invest in a strong education for their children, including liberal arts education that emphasizes critical thinking and broad literacy as key components of education.
It’s not simply a coincidence that we are dealing with a rapidly rightward trend in politics right as those that were caught up in the right’s attack of educational attainment in the 1990s and early-2000s (see no child left behind, as an example) are coming into their own within politics.
The impact of no child left behind effectively began a shift away from critical thinking based curriculum and into curriculum focused around ‘core competencies’ within narrow subjects (math, science, and literacy) through the establishment of benchmarks that were largely unrealistic. As schools and school systems chased these ever-changing metrics, the quality of the educational program slowly diminished, with subjects outside of these ‘core competencies’ losing funding and support in lieu of continued investment not in providing a well-rounded education, but rather in memorization and testing output.
This failing public education system was compounded in the late-2000s and early 2010s by the ‘STEM revolution’ when largely right-leaning think tanks and actors started to push STEM as being the penultimate subjects, building into recent graduates’ struggles to find gainful employment in a post-2008 economy to further delegitimize liberal arts and social studies curriculum. Underwater basket weaving – a course that I’m sure is offered somewhere – overnight became the butt of every joke, and whining about having to take a few elective classes as part of an engineering degree became a legitimate gripe.
At the same time, education at a local level was pressured to devote more and more resources towards science and math classes while simultaneously cutting funding from social studies and English curriculum. Parents at school board meetings were going on lengthy screeds about how if the school system didn’t pump more and more money into the math/science budget, their kids were being left behind.
This all came together to support conservative interests in providing an electorate educated primarily in hard sciences and mathematics, but largely ignorant toward the soft sciences, humanities, and critical thinking, all while simultaneously depriving students a well rounded education beyond those specific subjects that they considered amenable to their cause.
And of course, the wealthy always has a second option. Many of their children already went to private schools, but as public schooling continued to be devalued and defunded, more and more chose alternatives. Additionally, even as the STEM craze sent millions of young men and women towards the hard sciences as they sought out the education they were told was necessary to build a successful life, wealthy students largely ignored such arguments, as they had financial support.
So it’s not just that wealthy people tend to be more educated, it’s that the education provided to them generally was much broader and of a higher quality than those less well off.
I would also like to point out that talking about the ‘most wealthy counties’ in the country is not exactly a good representation of the wealthy as a whole. These Counties are generally clustered in certain portions of California, New York, DC, and similar regions where there is a clear purpose for such a high concentration of wealth, and also in regions with high educational attainment to begin with. Their experience, and political views, are likely different then wealthy individuals living in less wealth-dense areas, and as such are not necessarily representative of wealthy people as a whole.
Pew research seems to indicate that the the highest income earners have a very, very slight democratic bias, but for everyone else support for democrats increases as incomes go down, and support for Democrats is highest (58%) with the lowest income quintile.
I think it is that the income effect on partisanship is very small, so what it boils down to is that you probably just drive nearer to cities, period, and when you drive through rural areas you’re not going to get much access to people to get evidence of their lean save for the ones willing to put up literal billboards and such.
Probably just easier to explain it that way: the wealthiest zip codes are urban.
Honestly, that question makes me want to research how many people still think a bumper sticker tells you anything meaningful about voting. Because, using a zip code’s overall wealth as a sole indicator for voting demographics is about as insightful as trying to determine it by looking at a ‘sea of bumper stickers’ in an urban area.
You’re missing the entire story. Zip codes, especially urban ones, are far more diverse than they appear on the surface, financially and culturally. Rural areas, for instance, tend to be less diverse, which just highlights this point even more.
Let’s break down the financials in an example to show why. Imagine a rural area with 500 people, all around a $40,000 annual income. An urban area with 1500 people. Within that urban area, despite being called ‘wealthy,’ the income breakdown is actually quite varied:
Only 300 people (20% of the population) earn around $500,000. It’s the presence of these high earners that qualifies this area as ‘wealthy.’
But the overwhelming majority 1200 people (80% of the population) have incomes that range from $100,000 down to under $20,000.
So, while those 300 high earners might lean conservative because that best aligns with their $500,000 income, their numbers are easily outweighed by the majority. If people largely vote with their wallet, then the sheer number of voters with more modest incomes means the overall political lean of this ‘wealthy’ zip code will be far more mixed.
This is just one example; there are plenty of others. I would recommend learning how to analyze data before you do any research that leads to assumptive questioning like this. But to be clear, even if an urban area typically leans more Democratic, the income diversity and the reality that not everyone has the same experiences or financial interests guarantees a much broader range of political leanings within that single zip code.
Care to share your research?
It doesn’t surprise me that Democrats have made inroads with the wealthy because the wealthy can spend more of their time staying informed on the political state of the country. Anyone who is informed will naturally vote Democrat.
It hasn’t always been this way. You said the wealthy have been voting for Democrats a long time and I guess that depends on what you consider a long time. It correlates with education levels and the educated favored Republicans in the 90s. I suspect the wealthy did too.
The super wealthy have always favored Republicans, though. It’s the most consistent association in politics. As Warren Buffett once said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”.
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The Democratic Party is currently catering to kings and serfs. Rich credentialed whites in blue cities, and their low wage serfs (illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees etc)
They are educated
IDK, why do you think right-libertarians argue as if “liberal” and “leftist” mean the same thing?
The biggest misunderstanding is that the wealthy are all alike. “Wealthy” is a huge range. My household makes 1% for the state, we live in a large estate and pay ungodly amount of taxes, we also have some capital making passive income.
That being said, our personal capital is not enough for both of us to quit working and live on that alone. When my family trust is finally passed down, we probably will be, but that’s not happening for a while. We don’t have maids or nannies, we still buy our own groceries most of the time. But some.of that is on principle. Like, we moved to the best public schools specifically because we believe in public schools (albeit for pretentious reasons – I believe kids grow the best when placed against the best competition and I don’t think Daddy’s money necessarily means a child is better competition. In fact, I believe that wealthy private schools specialize in instilling unearned confidence which is ultimately harmful for lifelong achievement.)
What I’m trying to say is that “wealthy” working class may have a lifestyle the average working class couldn’t imagine but they are, at the end of the day, still working class. We live among you (sort of – wealth segregation is a thing, but my kids’ friends’ houses are normal houses with regular subdivisions without gates).
I want my kids deeply embedded in our community because that’s how you raise non-sociopaths imo. But at the same time, I don’t want my kids exposed to bad parts of society. Therefore, in order to both raise a normal kid and to raise a kid in a good society, you have to raise the baseline of what “normal” society is, which means solving the addiction crisis, improving material conditions to reduce desperation crimes, improving mental health systems to reduce erratic crimes, and reducing systemic prejudices to reduce violent and hate crimes. It means funding public schools to a level where my child receives a private school education for free, alongside every other child. It means funding public pools and libraries so that my child can have the experience of loving sunshine and books with other kids without having to invite the neighborhood over to ours.
I want the best for my kid. But I believe that you only get the best when everyone plays on equal ground and everyone plays to win. Republican policies make sure the wealthy get a head start, which does a disservice to kids. Just like crops grown indoors are weaker, kids need the wind to beat their stalks in order to grow hearty and strong. Kids need to be given a charcuterie board of ideas to learn from, to compete against everyone, to struggle, but this theory doesn’t work unless everyone has a fair baseline to start from.
Tl;Dr – the wealthy working class know that life is a struggle and want their kids to be able to survive on their own merits should life take a turn and we aren’t there to provide for them. The capital owning class knows their children will never have to work and their focus is protecting the estate they have, which will provide for their children forever, provided the right tax code is implemented. Their focus on their children is networking and sheltering them from people that might take advantage of their wealth/estate. It produces pretentious and useless nepo-babies. This is primarily the philosophical difference between wealthy Republicans and wealthy Democrats.
Because Economic Liberalism is what generates wealth.
Because Republicans aren’t actually good at capitalism and the highest human capital of the nation does not endorse the libertarian fantasies of the right wing. US left wingers have a very balanced view of capitalism whereas Republicans see it as something dystopian and crony, while pretending that’s the reality.
The wealthiest zip codes are populated primarily, with the upper middle class, which primarily votes Democrat.
Don’t confuse that with the wealthy, which almost exclusively votes Republican. There aren’t enough wealthy to tip voting when you are looking at a zip code.
You have just rediscovered how averages work.
So you believe Covid downturn was within Trumps control? If Dems had been in charge it wouldn’t have happened? And the methods of softening impact of Covid are the skills needed for operating a healthy economy? I acknowledged that both Obama and Biden were handed tough conditions, and why I don’t think you can blame them for not turning them around.
That’s not mental gymnastics, that’s being reasonable.
Saying inflation is bad under Trump because last month it went +3%, and is sharpe to his previous months of negative, 0, or +1%, while in turn +3% would of made for a great month under Biden – that’s mental gymnastics.
I worked in private art club in a major blue city and the overwhelming majority of generational wealth made the families more socially conscious and philanthropic. They would set up scholarships and charity funds. I would argue it was not for the good of society but they enjoyed the prestigious awards and status associated with being seen as a hero.
So yeah, the vote blue for optics maxing and they have so much FU money that the concept of more of it seems obscene.
Reasonably intelligent people being against Trump mystifies you?