On Income, Race and politics: Who is going to help us?

      Thoughts regarding the relationship between how one’s own race and economic status factor into voting habits.

       People are interesting. It does not matter to me if it is one person, two people or an entire society. I personally like to understand why people do certain things, what is their motivation and what do they expect to gain. Even more interesting can be the way they seek to achieve their goals, either as individuals acting alone or as a group. In society we tend organize around various things; it is a natural, biological drive. There is likely a way that humans have a higher likely hood of survival and health whilst living in a group of likeminded individuals. Which leads to my first category of organization: like-mindedness.   To be like-minded can be the most basic thing, which casts a net around almost every single human being and it can be very narrow. Some things that we all want by nature are things like material comforts, such as food, shelter, warmth and even wealth. There are other more abstract ideas such as political beliefs, religion and behavior or ethics.

Beliefs and culture creates a very clear line between groups of people. Another obvious organizational category, based not simply on ideals is race. This is especially clear in countries like those settled as colonies in the 16^th Century, such as Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Canada, Brazil, the United States, etc. In such countries, there exists, as a result of the slave trade, individuals whose ancestors were sold into slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa and brought to North America. Fast-forward 160 years. Here in the US exists an interesting situation, which seems to be clearer today than it ever was.

When using race as a category to and correlating it with the income of those very same individuals, voting behavior becomes very interesting. Why is this interesting? Countries are made up of many individuals who subscribe to the same ideals and agree to live and die by the same rules. We, in principle, all want the same thing. The reality is though, we go about it different ways, our methods differ and our opinions as to what is enough, wealth, poverty, opportunity and oppression remain elusive and subjective. Of course there are plenty of people who are more than willing to place a value on many of these things. We need values to measure, the question of poverty is often not as important as to determining what is the metric by which we should measure.

I would like to explore this theme in this blog for a little bit. I hope through the exploration, there is some truth that exists, some information or revelation that might help foster an understanding of why our society votes the way it does. Why use income and race? Simple: we are all humans, and want the same things, but why do people in two different groups vote differently, whilst in the same income bracket? Why do some tend to vote another way as income goes up and why does this change in voting behavior change at different rates? Is it that the parties or candidates for whom the groups are voting for hold similar ideas, those abstract ideas that can cause individuals to collate around one another? Why does one group hold one truth to be more valid than another? There are plenty of graphs, charts, and studies on this topic, but they all seem to be so narrow and specific that finding specific answers to questions is a quick and easy task. Connecting the dots empirically is the key; at least that is what science tells us.