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The Rich Hate the GOP
Yeah, this chart says that Mimi Walters represents the 14th richest district, but she just lost too.
Mimi Walters had the district that Congressman John Campbell of the Hugh Hewitt radio show used to represent until 2015. I think he fled to rural Kansas, a state which came within less than 5,000 votes of having a split congressional delegation to go along with the new Democrat governor.
Republicans control 7 of the 50 richest congressional districts. The chart shows nine, but Young Kim is also now behind in her race. After Thanksgiving, I guess there will be no more Republicans left in California.
The remaining Republicans in the top 50 wealthiest districts include the following:
#21 Peter King, New York 2nd, won with 53% of the vote
#22 Pete Olson, Texas 22nd, won with 51% of the vote
#25 Lee Zeldin, New York 1st, won with 53% of the vote (Led Zeppelin is in Congress?)
#26 Van Taylor, Texas 3rd, won with 54% of the vote
#38 Michael Burgess, Texas 26th, won with 59% of the vote
#42 Robert Wittman, Virginia 1st, won with 55% of the vote
#47 Christopher Smith, New Jersey 4th, won with 55% of the vote. He’s the only Republican left.
New Jersey went from having five Republicans out of 12 districts to one Republican out of 12 districts — along with re-electing Senator Bob Menendez by over 10 percent of the vote.
The biggest problem with Texas is that the state may have become too wealthy…
I think I live in something like the second-poorest congressional district that consistently votes Republican and one of the top 15 or so pro-Trump districts.
You city folk still with your fancy health insurance and stuff just live in a totally different world.
Published in General
Beat me to it. Basically, the rich can afford to vote Democrat, and it fulfills several purposes:
When Obamacare was released on the American public, Walmart, the shopping bastion of lower-middle class America, signed on early. Why? Because they were so big they could afford to follow the rules. And — even better, they know their weaker competition could not withstand the burdens of Obamacare and would possibly fold under the weight.
I agree that it is complicated, and most of the analysis above has a lot of truth to it.
But, I think it should not be underestimated how much narrow self-interest may have been a factor. Specifically, the tax cut bill, which put a $10,000 cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes. I know that for many of the nominal Republicans in VA-10 (the wealthiest district in the country) the county property tax bill alone greatly exceeds the cap. I am sure that the wealthiest voters in most of the other counties that flipped from R to D also saw a federal tax increase due to the cap. The winner in VA-10, Jennifer Wexler, used this in her advertising campaign as one of her main points of attack against the incumbent Republican, Barbara Comstock.
Those who believe in the concept of limited government may need to make decisions about whether or not to remain citizens and residents of states where the government acts as if all property or wealth is owned by the government. That would be an examination of self-interest.
How did Walmart sign up for Obamacare?
How did it increase their costs?
In my family, wealthy people vote for Democrats while middle class people vote Republican.
My uncle started a high tech firm in the 1980s and made millions of dollars. He and his wife are Bernie Sanders supporters and vote Democrat all the way. They live in California.
I have an aunt who has two medical degrees, one from Yale (she was accepted into Yale medical school when she was 19 years old after 3 years of high school and 3 years of college) and one from Duke.
She’s left of center, but not as far left as my California aunt and uncle.
As a Trump skeptic, I’d like to blame the decline of the GOP among college educated people on Trump. But while Trump might have accelerated this decline, it was happening for decades prior to Trump’s arrival into GOP politics.
Getting rid of Trump might go part of the way to stop the decline. But I think what is more likely to turn this around is if a Democrat president is in office during a recession. This really hasn’t happened since Jimmy Carter. All the recessions have happened under GOP presidents.
So, the college educated think that when they vote for Democrats, they are voting for the environment, against the gun nuts, against the religious nuts, against the warmongers and for a strong economy. After all, wasn’t it the GOP that tanked the economy in 2007-2008?
I am being sarcastic. But you can see that if there is a recession or a war every time a Republican is elected, lots of people tune out the GOP. Now, Trump hasn’t led us to war or recession. But his constant BS turns people off.
I’m not saying that an intelligent person like Paul Ryan or Mike Pence would make things better. Mike Pence would be deemed by the Left as leading a Christian Theocracy. So, it will take a recession under a Democrat to turn things around.
I’ve lived in #2, Anna Eshoo’s congressional district, for a long time.
And I can tell you that, starting in 1994, Anna Eshoo ran essentially unopposed. By that I mean the people who ran against her were unknowns, with no experience, no funding, and no campaign. Her opponent this year didn’t even bother putting together a web site.
I’ll also point out that Obama worked his way up to state senator, to senator, and to president by running essentially unopposed.
Keeping the House at 435 members just encourages this. If each member represented 100,000 or so, the power of incumbency would be greatly reduced.
Ninety percent of the Republicans would be unelectable if it weren’t for Democrats.
Rich State Poor State Red State Blue State has been out for 13 years. The basic conclusion was that rich districts vote for Democrats, but rich voters vote for Republicans. The effect is weakest in the richest districts and strongest in the poorest districts.
This is complicated a bit further in more recent research: rich districts tend to be highly unequal. That is, in areas where the very rich congregate, the very poor follow. New York City is actually, on a per capita basis, poorer than the rest of the state of New York. New York City is also the richest district in the state. Poor people flock to the wealth. Additionally, the “poor states” are much cheaper to live in, and so there is some evidence that, by consumption, the rich states are actually the red states.
Basically, yeah -it’s complicated. Because the districts aren’t homogeneous and all we have to work with are aggregated data.
And by unsealing private records.
“Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents. …
Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago. Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune… He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son. …
Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual harassment allegations all emanating from David Axelrod’s pals in Chicago. …
(Now) they’ve got to get their hands on thousands of pages of Romney’s tax filings so that the media can — as Romney says — lie about them.” — Ann Coulter, 2012
I’m inclined to agree.
Let’s not forget that when it comes to the House, we are talking about 453 separate races. Has anyone looked at the impact of the new primary system in California? What about the 40 odd Republican incumbents who chose not to run? Were any Democrat incumbents defeated? Where? What about the impact of local issues?
Trump did this is not only too easy, it has the benefit(?) of magnifying conventional Beltway wisdom.
This is a key point. Trump’s ascendance exposed something that had been going on for some time. It is a drama still playing out. Discarding Trump in a year or six will not be an automatic curative to what ails the country — no matter what anyone says. IMO fidelity to originalism in the constitution is the only cure. Trump is working on repairing the courts but that is a long term project. We do not get to live counterfactual history. Trump is the only horse conservatives get to ride, so ride we must.
Sort of. It’s a hard sell because most Americans want a government that fixes problems. IE provides for the common defense, promotes the general welfare and secures the blessings of liberty….
My hypothesis is, we do lots of arguing and a not very good job of persuading. For lack of a better summary, we don’t really do “the vision thing”.
OTOH, this does not include everything a person might think or feel is needed.
“Sign up” may have been the wrong wording. Walmart didn’t oppose it. That may be the better way of saying it. But they knew they could bear the burden and many of their competitors could not.
The rich zones and the highest cost of living zones have a lot of overlap.
The title is all wrong. The rich don’t hate the GOP. The rich hate Trump, as they recognize that he is a con man.
As long as Trump is the face of the GOP, we are going to lose the suburbs and the wealthy who didn’t inherit their money.
Like any good soldier, Walmart saluted and supported. You don’t want to get in a fight with someone who buys nuclear weapons by the barrel.
This kind of illustrates that responding to the same old line is an exercise in futility, but let’s at least recognize that many wealthy suburban districts went blue before Trump. The O/P raised an interesting point fully supported in the chart and deserves better than a glib critique.
More accurately, the 2108 election was the culmination of a 25-year trend. Prior to this year, the Democrats already held 16 of the top 20 wealthiest districts. Increasingly the Democratic party consists of three tiers: the very wealthy at top, state & local employees and federal bureaucrats in the middle, and the very poor. It’s a pretty potent combination.
Well, we just lost ##1 and 14 on the list, and every single congressional district in Orange County. But you can say that it is all a coincidence if you want to.
The conservative Detroit News has just come out with an editorial saying that the “GOP Must Dump Trump.”
“In just a few months, the 2020 presidential campaign will begin in earnest.
“Democrats who hope to replace President Donald Trump are already making their pilgrimages to the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
“But what about Republicans? Will they stick with Trump and hope the most widely despised president since Richard Nixon can repeat his improbable 2016 victory and claim a second term?
“The answer, most likely, is yes. The thumping the GOP took in the midterm election was not thorough enough to embolden them to turn their back on a president who still thrills his rabid base.
“The gain of a few Senate seats doesn’t mitigate the loss of the House, or of seven Republican governors. Nor does it change an electoral college map that shifted decisively in Democratic favor this past Election Day.
“While those Trumpites are intensely loyal to the president, there aren’t enough to re-elect him. And the midterm demonstrated that the independents who gave him a shot two years ago are now heavily against Trump.”
This news was reported in Red State:
https://www.redstate.com/tladuke/2018/11/19/conservative-editorial-page-editor-detroit-news-saysgop-must-dump-trump/
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2018/11/18/finley-gop-must-dump-trump-2020/1979101002/
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“HIAGAIWTTYFAOTTYHTHDA”
What does that mean? Is it a variation on ETTD?
“Hi, I am Gary and I want to thank you for another opportunity to tell you how Trump has destroyed America.”
I didn’t say it was a “coincidence.” I said (or implied) that blaming Trump in the same fashion as you blame Trump for everything is simplistic. I live in #4 and can hit #1 with a mighty swing of my Louisville Slugger. I believe that I know what’s going on. Upper middle class suburbanites generally do not feel the economic consequences of liberal policies and have been moving into the Democratic column for years. (See @gumbymark above as well). Sometimes flogging the same old “blame Trump” horse isn’t just flogging, it’s wrong.
I remember when the Detroit News was at least conservative-tolerant. But it was questionable how long that could last while being yoked together with the Free Press.
Thank you so much!
Nixon: 47 million votes, 520 electoral votes
McGovern: 29 million votes, 17 electoral votes
Nobody predicted that result after the 1970 Mid terms. Democrats in House +12, Reublicans/Conservative in Senate +3.
Shorter William Goldman, nobody knows nuthin.