Why do presumably economically upscale urban and coastal blue states voters vote against their economic interests (assuming that free trade, low taxes, and limited regulations tend to benefit these voters)?

You may want to take a look at some of the recent posts by Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly. Pretty much the only group that does better economically under the policies that you named are the extremely rich. Everyone else does better under Democratic policies — and even then, the extremely rich do pretty well, too, just not quite as spectacularly well as they do under Republican economic policies.

IOW, free trade, low taxes, and limited regulations only work well for a very small subset of the population, so middle- and even upper-middle-class people who vote based on those policies are acting just as irrationally as people who vote based on God, guns and gays.

Part of the answer might be something that Frank might have agreed with: the Democrats have abandoned economic and class issues for too long, such that they have little credibility left in this area on a national level, neither with the downscale red state voters to which they are trying to appeal on economic grounds nor to the upscale blue staters, who know better than to put too much stock in all that economic prolefeed (perceptions that Obama’s inclusion of “anti-trade sentiment” among the vices to which Pennsylvania’s poor and “bitter” electorate “cling”, and Austin Goolsbee’s little sojourn to Canada, do not disprove).

The other possibility, however, is that voters in general tend to be swayed more by non-economic issues rather than economic ones. The archetypical coastal blue staters in New York or California, and almost certainly a majority of the Democratic party’s major donors, probably already have jobs with benefits, household incomes within the top 2 tax brackets, and work in careers more enabled than threatened by free trade. Clearly, they don’t vote their economic interests, supporting a party that ostensibly favors higher taxes, protectionism, and an expansive welfare state. Why is it assumed that red state voters would be any different?

If you are a Democrat, ask yourself what issues tend most strongly to lead you to support the Democratic Party as opposed to the GOP. Consider an alternative. Suppose that the party divisions in this country were between one party that supported social liberalism as well as limited government and free markets (essentially Libertarians) and another party that was in favor of strict controls on the economy and an expansive welfare state, but was hard-right on social issues (in favor of criminalizing abortion and homosexuality, openly supporting public funding and promotion of Christian churches and doctrine, etc. Call them the Populist Party). Assume that the Libertarians were in favor of leaving Iraq and the Populists were in favor of staying. Which party would you be more likely to support? To what degree would each of these notional parties’ economic platforms factor into your decision?

The tendency I see is that it is far more difficult to “put oneself in another’s shoes” on the social issues. Anyone can size up their own and others’ economic interests fairly simply, by looking at whether they might have more in their wallet as a result of any particular policy or not. The economic issues are about what you HAVE or what you believe you will HAVE. The social issues cut more to who and what voters believe that they ARE and in what VALUES they hold (remember, “values” was the most significant reason that voters cited in choosing Bush over Kerry in 2004). Everyone can tend to hold their own values as the best and most correct, and to regards contradictory or divergent values as, at best, misguided (perhaps motivated by economic “bitterness”, and thus wholly correctable by improved material fortunes), or at worst, as being outright alien or evil. You can vote for someone who may or may not promote your economic interests (particularly if they can come up with a compelling rationale as to how their economic platform somehow really does help you out, such as through “enlightened self-interest” or “the rising tide lifting all boats”). It’s much harder to vote for someone or something that you believe is fundamentally morally flawed or wrong, or who claims that the values that you hold are fundamentally flawed or wrong.

I guess that’s what’s confusing me about this tempest in a teapot: what Obama said at this fundraising dinner was no different than the big public speech he made about the Rev. Wright controversy where he talked about how white people have been led to think that their problems are due to immigration instead of the economy. I really don’t see what was so new and different and secretive about saying the exact same thing twice, first to a national audience and then later to a smaller audience.

So here is my problem- each person is going to come at this from where they are at this moment in time and regardles of how the MSM or the candidates try to spin anything it all comes up against where the individual voter is at that moment.

I am the mother of a boy in the autism spectrum who is nearing puberty. Every day I have to explain social activity and social constructs to him to help him function when he is not with me. So for me and maybe only me, the social is more important than the linguistic. I made the point earlier that those same comments made in front of the people he was talking about would probably have been accepted as a sound or reasonable observation. The fact that he only made those comments in front of an audience in Indianna after he was outed for them makes me suspicious of the integrity of his message and only because I happen to be focussed on social behaviours as a habit right now.

So Stephen, where you are at right now in your life and social history, you don’t see a problem with his remarks being used in the context of fundraising in a closed meeting, I do. You don’t see how Othering a single population with the terms that he used is counter to the foundational message of his campaign, I do. We are at vastly different places in our lives and that is a part of the problem that Obama (and any candidate) faces. We won’t know how the majority of voters actually feel until the vote and no amount of bloviating by pundits and campaign supporters is going to change that.

1) Caren, if you can be bothered to tell a Polish Catholic from a Jew from an Italian, and I have seen no signs that white people have a huge amount of trouble distinguishing them from each other by their looks, clothing, and styles of speaking, then you can damn well bother to tell a Jamaican from a southern coastal plains black from New Orleans/New England creole. We ain’t that hard to tell apart! Being “colorblind” in the way you suggest is passively racist, resting on the privilege of not having to be aware of who the people you interact with are! We aren’t simply a slate of graphite!

2) I resent alot of these comments because I wasn’t kidding when I said that Obama is very much like a more liberal Colin Powell. But that says almost nothing, so I went on to explain in terms of cultural history, even though Obama is biracial, and not creole or from Africa. And it matters to me because such people can oftentimes have radically different notions of what “The American Dream” or “success” means from one another, including me. Many africans and some hispanic blacks view themselves as “white” for instance, and will call US blacks nigger with the same opprobrium as white people. West Africans like Igbos can be very similar to Chinese in some respects.

And these differences matter to me as a black person. Not so much that I won’t vote for him or dislike him. In a few key ways, he is very very liberal, but on things like affirmative action he can be too similar to Ward Connolly for my taste. I also worry that he is not particularly aware, as many recent immigrant africans and carribeans aren’t, that racism really takes place over generations–the key feature being that it is made difficult for minorities to pass along intellectual and material to their children and grandchildren. Very silent, and very effective. Social networks as a means to retain net productivity is pretty subtle, after all.

I would bet just about any amount of cash, if such a bet could be made at all, that Michelle Obama really keeps his head straight about alot of this stuff

I own 2 shotguns, one .357 revolver, one Glock 19, several rifles, and other types of weapons as well. I belong to the ACLU and NRA. I like my rights and my guns. I hate hunting but enjoy target practice at a range. I am an atheist, former military member, and a FTM.

I gave that all that info to show not everyone fits into one box as seems to be the thinking.

I’m not Barack Obama, and I can’t speak for him, but what I heard him saying was that people *vote* based upon those issues because they’ve given up on people actually trying to fix what matters most to them.

Yes, I know you can’t get that from his words; you have to be thinking about why he’s saying what he’s saying, and he’s explaining how he - one of the only people talking about trying to regenerate those areas - is going to win their votes.

They’ve voted differently, in the past, based upon these issues, because that’s what they had to base their vote upon; that’s what the politicians gave them. Now, he claims, he’s giving them something else.

Think about it from that perspective; see if it makes more sense.

“If you live in rural Bucks County, where the nearest sheriff’s office is twenty minutes away, where wild game is an important part of your diet, a gun means security. You can protect your family, you can provide for them. If you live on the south side of Chicago, on the other hand, you try and shoot someone in self-defense and you’ve got a fairly good chance of the bullet going into someone else’s apartment and hitting an innocent bystander. For a Chicagoan, you think of guns, you think of the twenty-three Chicago Public Schools students who were killed this school year because of handgun violence.”

“And I think, for some liberals, that’s a little like their relationship with religion. If you grew up gay in an intolerant church, you aren’t going to associate religion with community and security. You’re going to associate it with hate and fear. If, growing up, your parents weren’t religious, and a kid in your class, the son of a Christian minister, told you you’re going to hell, you may not believe other Christians who say their religion tells them to love thy neighbor. And if you’re a scientist, and someone uses Genesis to claim that the vocation you’ve devoted your life to is nothing but a bed of lies crafted by Satan - next time little kids start singing that song about Noah’s Ark you’re may wonder if their parents are telling them evolution is a myth.”