The stories white guys tell themselves
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/the-stories-white-guys-tell-themselves/1245017
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think the author has some valid points to make.
The fable of the 'self-made man' is just that. A fable, and a fluke these days. The reality that women and people of color have (on the whole) never bought into the concept so we are less apt to fall under its spell makes sense.
Your theory that "Obama and liberals insult lower class whites far more than they serve them, might have something, at least a little bit to do with lack of support among lower class whites." doesn't make much sense to me.
Would you make the same claim about evangelical 'christ'ians as well?
The differential is staggering. Non-college-educated white men give Romney a 37-point advantage over President Barack Obama according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll. Why would struggling wage earners support a candidate who would give tax cuts to the top 1 percent, a group that controls 43 percent of the wealth in the country, while adding to the tax burdens of people at the lower end of the income scale? Racial issues aside — and I'm not discounting the significant "black president" factor, it comes down to the power of myth and story.
White men have been fed the myth of the rags-to-riches, self-made man, the quintessential American narrative that says hard work and perseverance will equate to success. The idea cemented in the male cerebral cortex is that people who start from nothing can work themselves from the Horatio Alger mailroom to the corner office.
The unflattering flip side of this is that failure is a character flaw. If you don't succeed, you didn't work hard enough. As the story goes, anyone who takes government help falls into this category.
Just to make it a bit easier to lure people to read it in its entirety.
Here is a little more sophisticated analysis..
http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/03/23/voting-patterns-of-americas-whites-from-the-masses-to-the-elites/
What does this say about America’s elites? If you define elites as high-income non-Hispanic whites, the elites vote strongly Republican. If you define elites as college-educated high-income whites, they vote moderately Republican.
There is no plausible way based on these data in which elites can be considered a Democratic voting bloc. To create a group of strongly Democratic-leaning elite whites using these graphs, you would need to consider only postgraduates (no simple college grads included, even if they have achieved social and financial success), and you have to go down to the below-$75,000 level of family income, which hardly seems like the American elites to me.
The patterns are consistent for all three of the past presidential elections. (The differences in the higher-income low-education category should not be taken seriously, as the estimates are based on small samples, as can be seen from the large standard errors for those subgroups.)
for posting the OP- I for one, would never have stumbled upon it otherwise, and it did offer an interesting perspective and something to seriously consider.