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Fun With Maps: Electoral Poverty |
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Here’s the electoral map from Tuesday night’s presidential election:
Now here’s a map showing how many people live in poverty around the United States:
Finally, here’s one displaying income inequality:
See any patterns? It appears that, for the most part, the areas that voted for Obama are also the areas that have the lowest poverty rates and the smallest gap between rich and poor. And conversely, the areas that went for McCain tend to have more poverty and show a greater disparity bteween rich and poor.
All of which seems to indicate that the places suffering the most during this economic crisis are the ones that continue to vote for the party whose economic policies favor well-heeled, corporate interests - and that the areas that are not quite so bad off are going for the party that historically has been on the side of the poor and the working class, and that has promised to do more directly for working people in this election.
Go figure.
Great post, and some of us have been figuring.
If you overlay an education map with the rates of high school graduations and the numbers who pursue and graduate from post secondary school educations, you will get a fairly close correlation with the poverty and income inequality maps.
The worse off people are in the areas of meeting basic needs _ adequate and consistent/reliable nutrition, clean water, safe and comfortable shelter, safe and reliable transportation, competent schools and education, the more likely it is that people will not have developed even basic competencies in critical thinking, using evidence in order to make decisions and being able to have and to make choices which are based on long term goals.
People who are impoverished in one or more essential survival needs must think only in the immediate short term. They can’t think long term as they have no or inadequate control over the chaos that rules and defines their lives.
They don’t envision an American dream. They (we are trying to simply survive an ongoing nightmare of hunger, want, joblessness, societal condemnation, inadequate or no housing, and no ability to envision a future any different.
The stressors of this are so many and so great that students don’t spend time learning when they are in school - they spend time feeling hunger pangs, trying to stay awake after nights of sleeplessness in overly cold or hot places - often on floors or the ground, often avoiding rats and bug bites. They are worried about who will be there when they get out of school. They are worried to the extent that it would be an ABNORMAL response if they didn’t attend to the stressors. They experience perpetual chaos and unpredictability to a degree that no one should even have to imagine, let alone experience.
The same goes for adults who manage to obtain jobs. They are so stressed at all times that their productivity lags.
Add to that the health care that they can’t and don’t access. They hurt, and eventually they die of preventable deaths.
Drinking, addictions and smoking may well be attempts to self-medicate and dissociate themselves from the unrelenting oppressive stressors. But of course, there aren’t adequate resources for them to get the care and support they need to stop these self-destructive habits and to continue to have enough supports to permanently change their behaviors and to engage in lower stress activities.
That’s the fundamental reason they vote against their interests. Republicans messaging plays directly into fears (of hell, and fire and brimstone, if you understand the coded messaging). The conservative fundamental religions provide substituted judgment, intangible support, comfort, and structure and predictability, and so when they are told to get themselves into heaven (and out of their real lives of hell) by rejecting abortion, by rejecting rights for GLBT people, and by supporting Republicans so that they can “create jobs”, they fall for it every time.
It’s not a mystery at all. What your post indirectly says is that you aren’t close enough to the phenomenon to have either seen it first hand or have experienced poverty (and not just a one week experiment to live on a food stamp budget, either).
You are still seeing this as an abstract instead of a concrete reality. My advice (free, of course and worth the same) is to hie thee to an impoverished area, attend a church service or two, shadow a school nurse in a school with predominantly impoverished students, and sit in on municipal court sessions to get a feel for the total absence of basic resources that people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system have.
And after you have observed, then engage. Talk to people who are impoverished. ASK them what their concerns are. Find out what their dreams and hopes are. Many have none at all. Can you imagine? If not, then you aren’t yet close enough to the situation. Keep exploring….
US policy is to isolate, segregate and incarcerate its vulnerable and whisk them out of sight and out of mind.
You have to search to find the suffering, but there (we) are out here hiding in plain sight.
Agreed, great post. And yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying, Annie. It’s pretty hard to believe in a bright future when you’ve never known one. And lots of folks are simply hanging on the best they can, and so they are very skeptical of change. While big changes might make their lives better, they are already in a precarious situation and they are very reluctant to let anything upset that balance.
Right Annie,
Except you said all that and didn’t name the big elephant in the room. Wealthy Caucasians, especially in the South are bred to limit the resources of others. What allows this to succeed are the poor, ignorant caucasians who continue to vote them into office, thinking that “we’re all in this together”. No, the rich are rich. They want to get richer at everyone else’s expense, and they’ll use whatever it takes to do so. This map also highlights that the rich are selfish bastards.
Correlation is not causation. Maybe the poorest states vote Repubican because they are tired of government meddling that causes the poor education and low income levels (not that Republicans are necessarily advocating that, but they are at least ostensibly the party of smaller government)? No, I guess that doesn’t fit with your tired populist narrative.
These maps have turned out to be a bit of a Rorshach test. If you look at the post, you’ll see that all I did was point out the correlation. I included no theories on causation amd said nothing about why certain states vote certain ways. Any narrative you see is one that you have added yourself.
“All of which seems to indicate that the places suffering the most during this economic crisis are the ones that continue to vote for the party whose economic policies favor well-heeled, corporate interests - and that the areas that are not quite so bad off are going for the party that historically has been on the side of the poor and the working class, and that has promised to do more directly for working people in this election.”
Dumb red staters vote for corrupt Republicans; smart blue staters vote for the party who cares about the common Joe.
That’s a populist narrative.
I never said “dumb”, “corrupt”, or “smart”. Those are judgmental words that you have added. My piece was non-judgmental - just presenting facts and inviting the reader to make the judgment.
I don’t know how reliable the source was, but I saw a list correlating the average IQ of a state with who they voted for, and the low IQ states almost exclusively went for McCain and the High IQ went all for Obama…
Probably wishful thinking, but there is no doubt that the school systems are better in the Northeast than the South (I have lived in both).
I believe that list was a hoax.
Your post has generated much more discussion. LarryE at Lotus is writing about a similar theme, and I riffed quite a bit on this (link at my name).
Sideshow linked to me which linked to you, so I hope that this is the beginning of much more in depth and broader discussions about how these people have been left behind and how we can help them catch up and regain their stride.
Thanks again for writing this!
It would also be interesting to see the correlation between turnout and poverty levels. I would suppose that its not that a lot of poor people are voting for Republicans, its that a lot of poor people just arnt voting. Poorer communities tend to have higher rates of incarceration, and higher populations of non citizens. Also, on purly political grounds, why would they? I will accept that Obama will probably be better than Mccain would be for the poor, but how many times did you hear Obama or Biden talk about the poor, the working poor or the working class? how many times did you hear them talking about the middle class? Who was there to talk for the poor?