Bushenfreude Prevails

Slate ran an interesting article a couple of days ago showing that in this past election the Republican party saw significant erosion in support from the wealthy, who are typically a bedrock constituency of the Republican Party. The editors at Slate envision Americans disgruntled with the Iraq war and Republican malfeasance taking their windfall taxbreak income and giving it to the Democratic Party. Oh, the beautiful irony. They have even coined a term for it: Bushenfreude (taken from the German "schadenfreude," taking pleasure in others' misfortune).

Bushenfreude prevailed in the East where individuals in households with incomes greater than $100,000 favored Democrats by large margins. This was a big shift from 2004 when Republicans the won the majority of voters in the $150k and up income range. The story was pretty much the same on the West Coast, but with slightly smaller margins of victory for Dems.

In traditionally conservative areas of the country, the South and the Midwest, the wealthy still favored Republicans by a fairly large margin, but these margins were much smaller than those in the 2004 elections. Erosion's the word.

Reading this article, I was wondering whether the swing in preference among these wealthy voters actually had an impact on the actual results of the election considering there are not that many people in the US making more than $100k a year. It turns out that wealthy people vote more than other income groups and in fact make up 23% of US voters, up from 19% in 2004.

Interesting.

Let's hope the Democrats can get something done in the next two years or we may soon be facing "Demfreude".