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Comment by _a3nw | Hacker News Reader

If this had an actual impact on the election you would see one side push for changing the day as a strategy if they are more popular in the poorer populations than their opponent. Republicans would definitely want this more now considering Donald Trump's voter base was mostly lower income people. Same could be said for Barack Obama during 2014.

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The GOP is run by the 1% but they need a larger base to win elections. This is why they crafted a platform catering to the pet issues of low-income conservatives. They never actually deliver on their rhetoric because it's all just an act (Still waiting on the executive branch to institute H1B reform). They don't want policies that allow masses of poorer people to influence the results for the periods they are out of power.

FYI. Trump won every income bracket above $50k, while Hillary only won those below

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/e...

That's not what the graph shows at all. The graph shows that there is no statistical correlation between income and votes, except that lower incomes slightly preferred Clinton. The problem with this data is that it doesn't appear to be weighted by electoral college result, so we don't get to actually see what the impact on the election result is. And, even worse, the survey appears to include the question "Did you vote for Clinton or Trump" yet doesn't include that answer in the graph, so we don't get to compare the relative results. I tried to extract that result by using the male/female data assuming 50/50 representation, but ended up in a tie, and we don't get to know the bias of participants vs non-participants.

Lol come on now, no need to be facetious. There are six income brackets broke down with the vote tallies for the respective candidates. The exit polling is not done for the Electoral College, and does not change the fact that every income bracket greater than 50k voted for Trump more than they did Hillary

By a single point! You're really stretching the meaning of the numbers. Compare to "Residence"; now there's a meaningful difference (Cities/Suburbs/Country.)

Per that chart, Republicans in general tend to win every income bracket above $50k. Look at the gains and losses from 2012: Trump made massive gains with lower income brackets, and lost the Republican grip on the middle and upper middle classes.

So yes, it's reasonable to say that the cohort that Trump made the largest gains with (i.e., lower income brackets) is his "voter base."

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