Wow. Knowing that their tax cut was going bye-bye - they broke for the Democrats. Maybe they feel the future of our economy is more important than their
personal fortunes.So all those slightly upper-middle class people who are bemoaning the repeal of a tax break that they one day aspire to qualify for, are the only ones crying. Interesting.
Here's the baseline: the overall Democratic share of the congressional vote was about 5 percentage points higher than in 2004. And what you find from the exit polls is that
Dems gained 2-7 points in practically every demographic group surveyed. It was an across-the-board sweep, not a victory that depended on any single big electoral shift.<snip>
In fact, I was only able to find a grand total of seven groups that broke for the Dems by substantially more than the overall gain of 5 points. Here they are:
No high school +15%
Those rating the economy "good" +15%Latinos +14%
Jews +11%
No religion +9%
Income $200K+ +9%Independents +8%
More interesting (though less important in raw numbers) is the fact that
high-income voters broke for Democrats in large numbers. I'm scratching my chin over that one. And not only did the economy not help Bush, but apparently it actively hurt him.
Those who rated the economy "good" voted much more strongly for Democrats than they did in 2004. (Those who rated it either excellent, not good, or poor voted about the same as last time.)
In the long run, I suppose the higher totals among Latinos and independents are the big news. Beyond that, there's not much. Keep this in mind when you start reading anecdotal analyses of "what happened." Most of it doesn't hold water. Based on the exit poll data, it was just a broad-based wave of disgust against Republican rule.