Andrew Cuomo And The Class War

Eric Alterman did a pointed Daily Beast column last week on Andrew Cuomo's flawed liberalism, noting that the hero of the fight for marriage equality isn't much of a hero of the class war. I think that to understand the way in which this does and doesn't reflect the overall national political trend, it's useful to go back to Gelman, Shor, Bafumi, and Park's 2007 article "Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What's the Matter with Connecticut?" (PDF). The basic findings of this research are as follows. One is that voting patterns, viewed nationwide, are polarized along income lines. Richer people are more likely to vote Republican. But rich states are more likely to vote Democratic. What's more, voting behavior is starkly income polarized in poor states, but only very weakly polarized in rich ones.

Here's a quick summary:

What you see here is that the political behavior of voters in states like New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York has very little linkage with income. Voters in these states are largely basing their decisions on other factors, such as gay marriage. By contrast, in a state like West Virginia or New Mexico, voting behavior seems much more strongly correlated with income. This means we might expect state politics to look very different from place to place, and for New York politics to be much more polarized around "cultural" issues than overall national politics is. National politics, by contrast, features a kind of schizophrenia. On the level of voters national politics is strongly income-linked and Barack Obama leads a political coalition based in overlapping categories of African-Americans, Latinos, single women, and young people all of whom tend to have relatively low incomes. But on the level of fundraising the primary dimension of conflict looks more like the politics of New York where the parties are clashing primarily over social issues.