The Vanishing Republican Voter
7th September 2008
David Frum, a charter member of the doom-and-gloom wing of the Republican Party, doesn’t always get the right answers — but he usually asks the right questions.
Measured by money income, Washington qualifies as one the most unequal cities in the United States. Yet these two very different halves of a single city do share at least one thing. They vote the same way: Democratic. And in this, we are not alone. As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim.
And a lot of his observations are spot-on. The Democrats are the Party of Inequality, and have been ever since they found that a conspiracy of the Overclass and the Underclass against the middle class was a winning political formula.