WP's E.J. Dionne Jr: What Kind of Hater Are You? (very interesting study)

What Kind of Hater Are You?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; Page A19

-snip-
All true -- meaning what, exactly? One of the hottest political science papers floating around the political world and the Web comes close to solving the mystery of how Democrats can do so well in certain well-off places and still not be the party of the rich.
The paper has a fetching title: "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut?" Dr. Seuss, who wrote "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," meets Tom Frank, the author of the influential book "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

-snip-
Yes, Bush carried a lot of poor states -- but with heavy support from the rich people who lived in them. The class war is being waged more fiercely in the Republican states than in the Democratic states. The income divide is especially sharp in the South, where it is reinforced by a strong racial divide.

"In poor states," Gelman and his colleagues write, "rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has almost no correlation with vote preference. . . . In poor states, rich people are very different from poor people in their political preferences. But in rich states, they are not."
This suggests that our country may be even more polarized and divided than we thought. Not only do red and blue states vote differently, but they cast their votes according to different patterns.

-snip-
Gelman and his colleagues help us understand why southern Democrats such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards may be more attuned to the power of populism than Northern Democrats such as John Kerry -- and, perhaps, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Their paper also helps explain why Southern Republicans such as President Bush pursue policies that are hugely beneficial to their wealthy base even as they try to diminish the political impact of class warfare by shifting the argument to other subjects: religion, values or national security.

The divide in American politics is about more than the ideological distance between the two parties. Right now red-staters and blue-staters live in two different political universes. It's no wonder that political moderation is out of fashion -- though the winner of the 2008 round may be the person who can scramble the patterns of Dr. Seussian politics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401116.html

Has anyone heard of this study already? I'd love to figure out exactly what this means.


edit to add - I googled and found the study (pdf). http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/presentations/rbtalk.pdf

Poor states are poor because they create a few very wealthy people whose wealth comes from the hard work of the poor which is practically stolen by the wealthy, thanks to a political structure created and maintained by Republicans.