Pocketbook Voting

It's often been said that the GOP has convinced people to vote against their economic interest. (See, e.g., the article on Thomas Frank and What's the Matter with Kansas below.)

CNN has a set of Exit Polls as part of its extensive 2004 Election coverage. (Blog used for book-marking, 5 yard penalty, repeat 2^nd down.) One of the more interesting ones shows voting patterns versus income. I've taken the liberty of putting it in graphical form:

Each bar represents the fraction of all voters who are in a given category and voted for a particular candidate, e.g. about 13% of voters earn $50-$75K and voted for Bush. The green line is the ratio of Bush's share of the vote to Kerry's share.

So the richer you are, the more likely you were to vote for Bush. That doesn't seem to show anyone voting against their economic interest. You could argue that, possibly, Bush's handling of the economy is going drive people in the center of the graph to the left, leaving us a bimodal distribution, but it's pretty clear that those very people don't believe that's going to happen.