This chart should tell you something. The more educated you are … the more likely you “get it”. You can be 18 years old and plenty smart and still not understand how important your vote is in the scheme of things. Usually – people get turned off by politics and lump all politicians and parties together as being “the same” even though that is simply not true.
Not only are you more likely to vote the more educated you are … you’re more likely to vote, the more wealthy you are (source). The 1% votes at a disproportionately high % compared to their numbers because they tend to be more engaged in the political process. And engagement in the political process is EVERYTHING.
Money in politics doesn’t mean much when you have an engaged, informed electorate. Too many people though have life hitting them in the face every day … working two jobs and taking care of kids. And when you’re busy trying to just enjoy life or trying to survive … few people actually participate in the political process to begin with. This lack of engagement is at the core of our problem. Casual voters tend to vote based on something they heard from a friend or the way their family votes or their historical voting patterns.
The bottom line is that you need to vote with your own interests in mind and you need to be engaged. I’ve already shared my view on the huge differences between the two parties HERE. And they are SIGNIFICANT differences.
A study by Andrew Gelman at Columbia University says the more money you have – the more likely you are to vote Republican HERE:
Richer Americans tend to vote Republican, and poorer Americans tend to vote Democratic, but the relation between income and vote choice varies by state and region of the country, as we illustrate in Figure 4 with the poorest state (Mississippi), a middle-income swing state (Ohio), and the richest state (Connecticut). To keep the graph clean, we show only three states here, but the pattern holds for the country at large: Income predicts Republican voting strongly in most of the poorest states and weakly in most of the richest states.
These systematic geographic differences provide some clue as to the media’s confusion on income and voting. If you live in Texas, say, you might directly observe conservative Republicans from wealthy suburbs. But the states in which national media figures live—New York, California, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut—are states where high- and low-income people vote similarly. A journalist who lives in Manhattan is likely to mingle with upper middle class liberals and not realize that, at the national level, richer Americans are more likely to be conservative Republicans.
Source for chart: CNN
