Among the numerous College Know It All Hippie fallacies common in the #OWS movement is the apparent association between having wealth and supporting capitalistic or pro-business policies. It is true that to a point, wealthier individuals are more Republican than poorer ones in their voting habits, but this relationship starts to beak down as income increases, and at lower levels than most might think.
This graph shows the relationship between income and vote in the 2008 election:
As we can see, Republican voting peaks in the 100-200,000 a year range, and those making 200,000+ mostly voted for Obama (The actual numbers are 52%-46%, approximately the same distribution as the nation as a whole).
Although $200,000+ is the richest category in the exit polls, that group is the top 6%, not the top 1%, of the population. However, there is additional evidence (beyond just extrapolating the patterns on this data), that the richer the rich get, the more Democratic in their voting habits they become (and of course, many types of ultra rich make good anecdotes for this phenomenon – Hollywood, music, sports (in many cases), technology CEO’s, Warren Buffett, etc.)
For instance, according to leading rich people expert Robert Frank, author of Richistan and the WSJ’s Wealth Report blog, while the vast majority of those with a net worth of $1 million to $10 million were voting for McCain, those with at least $10 million in wealth were voting for Obama.
To bring this back to the world of percentages, $1.87 million is to wealth cutoff for the top 5%, and $8.272 million is the cutoff for the top 1%. Thus, unless the group between 5% and 6% has some very unusual properties, it seems likely that Obama did even better with the top 1% than the top 6%, who, as we recall, voted approximately like the general population.
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