Hey, Joe! Obama won both plumbers -- and Americans making over $200,000 a year.

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: November 5, 2008
This American Moment — The Surprises

Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote. Not Joe the symbol and unlicensed tax-dodger coming soon to a garage sale near you, but real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income for plumbers and pipefitters. Barack Obama carried hard-working Americans of that income stripe by 10 points, according to exit polls. And the only voters who were told directly that their taxes would go up under a new Democratic president? Obama took the rich as well, winning by six points that small sliver of the electorate that makes more than $200,000 year. Soak ’em.

As for the Bradley effect, there was none. Perhaps a Reverse Bradley – in which more people actually voted for the black guy than they told pollsters.

Witness Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, three prime states where working-class whites were supposed to be saving their true racial feelings for the privacy of the voting booth. Obama won Michigan by 16 points, Pennsylvania by 11 and Ohio by four. In each case, the vote was well above the election eve average of all polls. Hillary Clinton voters came home. Ditto Reagan Democrats. Did I mention that Obama won the Catholic vote — and Scranton, the iconic blue-collar town?...

***

This was the first real 21st century election — rejecting the incompetence of the Bush years, the race-baiting of Karl Rove’s majority strategy and the poison of media-driven wedge politics. As a nation, we rejoin the world community. As a sustaining narrative, we found our story again....

In losing the urban vote and the suburbs as well, the Republican party is now a shrinking regional party of older white males, represented in the media by talk-radio kooks and far-right women dressed in high couture to sell low-culture friction.

Obama won the New South of Virginia, Florida and...North Carolina. He flipped three states in the New West, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. He won the fastest-growing ethnic group, Latinos, by better than a 2-1 margin. As for the young, nobody since modern polling of age groups began has racked up a better percentage of the 18- to 29-year-old vote. Obama won 66 percent of the kids. And sure, the youth vote is only 18 percent of the total electorate, but that’s still a bigger slice than those over 65 years of age (one of the few McCain cohorts).

See the trend: new, emerging, growing, tomorrow, young. Dormant for the darkest years of the Bush presidency, the oldest strain of American DNA is evident again....

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/this-american-moment-the-surprises/