Raw Data: We Have Met the Meritocracy, and It Is Us

Via Tyler Cowen, here are a couple of interesting charts from Thomas Piketty about voting patterns in the US. Generally speaking, poor and working-class folks vote for Democrats, while more affluent people vote for Republicans. But 2016 was an odd outlier:

There’s a big range here, but in general the richer you are the more likely you are to vote for a Republican. That’s held true in every single presidential election since 1948—until you get to 2016. In that year, the top two income deciles (D9 and D10) suddenly diverged from their usual historical pattern and voted for Democrats by about 30 points more than they should have.

30 points! That’s a huge divergence from the norm, and it holds up even at the very tippy top of the income ladder. The upper middle class and the rich like Donald Trump way, way less than they like the average Republican.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, aside from the fact that maybe this is the wrong time for Democrats to suddenly decide they don’t want to fundraise from rich people. But it’s worth pondering.

And as long as we’re looking at this stuff, here’s another chart showing one of the ways that voting patterns have changed:

As you can see, high-income voters have historically favored Republicans by about 12 points, and that’s remained constant until very recently. The big change has been education. In 1948, highly-educated voters preferred Republicans by 16 points. That’s changed pretty steadily, and in the 2016 election highly-educated voters preferred Democrats by 24 points. That’s a swing of 40 points.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are having a meritocracy moment right now, and it’s a bit of a paradox. The consensus among liberals is that the meritocracy is bad, but increasingly liberals make up most of the meritocracy. I have a football game to watch right now,¹ so I’ll leave comment on this for later. But it’s worth thinking about.

¹A very egalitarian sport! OTOH, I’ll be rooting for USC, a very elite school. Contradictions and paradoxes are everywhere.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate