First, liberal doesn't really mean much in America. Liberal for a lot of people just means "those people I disagree with". For others it means people who uphold property rights and American global dominance to be sacred.
In the north and midwest you have a lot of poor people who are still voting Democrat because their state legislatures have vestiges of union-affiliated Democrat traditions. We see the Democrats in Minnesota being much more pro-worker than in New York or California, places we traditionally think of a "liberal". These people are probably registered democrats for this reason, even though at the national level the democrats are almost as hostile towards labor as the republicans.
In the south you had southern Democrat politicians or Dixiecrats, whose constituents got pulled into the Republican party under Nixon. He used blue collar aesthetics to bring them in under the same umbrella as the wealthy. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that in the south, race and culture is a greater source of identity than class for many people, especially the poor. People will see Joel Osteen as being cut from the same cloth as them because they think that they share the same values.
Lastly, there are a lot of single issue votes in the Republican party on guns and abortion. I don't think that there are as many single-issue Democrats.
Latino Americans are still overwhelmingly left-of-center (though perhaps not likely to be left enough to be "leftist").
The shift to the right has been relatively small (though consequential due to geography) and limited to certain groups. For example, Cuban Americans in Miami are much more likely to have moved to the right.
US conservatives are protesting and restricting immigration when in New Zealand, the conservatives are wildly pro immigration. Their argument is that it drives house prices up and wages down when you've got more people flooding in. If you're a land and/or business owner, that's what you vote for. The left wants less immigration so workers and renters have more negotiating power.
Once the population becomes more diverse from immigration, they will perhaps become nativists because their base will drift that way.
There may be conservatives who oppose immigration out of xenophobia, but there are many conservative business owners who see immigration as a way to keep paying a less than living wage, and landlords who see it as a way to keep the demand for rentals (much) higher than the supply
[1] https://store.cato.org/collections/frontpage/products/the-mo...
[2] https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-u...
Here are a few sources I found but they don't segment income level.
2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-...
2015: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-...
https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/2020/05/the-demographic-pro...
Liberals are not a political party. You're talking about the Democrats, which as a party isn't really all that liberal.
Neither the Democrats nor Republicans are champions of the poor and working class, but they are also not equally neglectful of them.
Liberals (and neoliberals) want everything controlled by markets. The government should butt out and collect no more taxes than is reasonably needed to set and enforce the market rules. Everything else should be private. Not too different from libertarians except that they have more common sense.
Leftists want the government to have an opinion and directly act and spend money in order to achieve specific outcomes. If there are many homeless, don't try to influence the market to increase supply or drop price, just directly go and build houses. If we need clean energy, don't dick about with carbon credits and incentives, just go and hire some engineers and build wind turbines.
Liberals and leftists are opposites not synonyms.
But aside from that, what I also mean is that the Democratic party has members from all across the political spectrum. There are even extremely conservative Democrats. So, however you define "liberal", it is not accurate to consider "democrat" and "liberal" as being essentially synonymous.
But it is also true that democratic party affiliation is higher than republican party affiliation amongst the poorest[0]. I wonder which is the larger contributor there: is it income or geography that most drives the poor towards liberalism?
I don't really want to engage with your claim re: abandoning the working class, as I fully endorse the mindset that breaking the rail worker strike was anti-worker. But concurrently, the change of regulation that eventually led to the rail worker strike was a Republican/conservative policy. I will say that very few on the Democrat/liberal side talk openly about e.g. falling birth rates as an economic problem for the adoption industry, so I'm inclined to say that the condescending liberal elites are still better at pretending the poors are actual people who can hear what's said about them.
0. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/09/26/161841771/how-...
That graph defines "low income" as less than $20,000/year, but 75% of the people who make less than $20,000 also make less than $15,000, i.e. less than minimum wage. This implies that it's less people who make low wages and more people who don't have full-time employment. Moreover, one of the largest populations of people who typically don't have full-time employment are... college students.
This is also affected by the age distribution between the parties (older people tend to be Republicans and to make more money than they did when younger). It would be much more interesting to see the graph organized by lifetime earnings at a given age.
My experience working minimum wage was that it was impressively difficult to break $15k, because the employers were hostile to the concept of consistent enough scheduling to allow a second job. I was doing 25 hours a week retail (any higher and they owed me benefits), and when I tried to adjust my availabilty to support a 2nd job, my first job cut my hours, so I was still only working 25 total hours a week (but I was spending twice as much time commuting). Anecdotally, that's pretty common.
Incidentally, if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, your pre-tax income at federal minimum wage is $15,080. 31 of the 50 states have higher (frequently considerably higher) minimum wages. So its worth wondering what fraction of the population is in that "low income" group?
Perhaps a better question would be "how does party affiliation relate to the federal 'very low income' status?" There's a strong geographic element to 'very low income', and the local minimum wage factors into that. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay area (where many hackernews readers live and work), there's a more than $20k difference between what's 'very low income' in Solano ($47.7k) county and Marin ($71.6k). You'll notice that both of those are well outside what the graph says is low income. But in terms of buying power, they're poorer than folks in rural Alabama.
Ironically this is what you get from "labor protections" from politicians. The employer would be happy to give you more hours instead of paying the same amount to two people who each work half as many hours. That's lower training and hiring costs for them. But paying one person the same amount they're paying two is illegal, so they do the second one and you get screwed into two commutes.
Then if you're working part time twice, both employers want you to be there during the busiest part of the day but you can't be in two places at once. You can avoid this by working two different kinds of jobs so the busiest periods don't overlap, but now you're forced into another inconvenience (you may like one type of work better) solely because you can't even offer to work for one employer for the same hours and compensation you get from two.
> Incidentally, if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, your pre-tax income at federal minimum wage is $15,080. 31 of the 50 states have higher (frequently considerably higher) minimum wages.
Right, so the percentage of people in the under-$20,000 group who don't have full time employment is even higher than 75%.
> Perhaps a better question would be "how does party affiliation relate to the federal 'very low income' status?"
The interesting question is the party affiliation of people who actually work for low wages, so you need something that excludes the people who have low "income" only because they're students or are living off of daddy's money. Probably wants to be something like, party affiliation of people at exactly the 20th percentile income level for the region, or say the 15%-25% range, instead of "below 20%" which includes all the people who have low income because they don't have or need a full time job.
>Then if you're working part time twice, both employers want you to be there during the busiest part of the day but you can't be in two places at once. You can avoid this by working two different kinds of jobs so the busiest periods don't overlap, but now you're forced into another inconvenience (you may like one type of work better) solely because you can't even offer to work for one employer for the same hours and compensation you get from two.
And in the perfect workers' paradise, we'd all be free to sell our labor for the market rate, and work 120 hours a week at our base rate if we wanted, because there's no meddlesome government interfering with the moral perfection of the free market? </s>
My frustration was that it wasn't until I had full-time hours that they bothered to give me even approximately consistent hours, and even then, I had to prove myself to be valuable enough that they let me keep doing my 8-hour-a-week, practically volunteer second job (a job which I really preferred, but it was at a community rec center with very limited, fixed hours).
>Right, so the percentage of people in the under-$20,000 group who don't have full time employment is even higher than 75%.
The point I was trying to make is that the "poor" stretch upwards into the higher incomes, incomes that are noticeably absent from those plots. $20k - $39k is not depicted, and that's where e.g. full-time minimum wage earners in California, Washington, and 29 other states land.
Your argument seems to be that we can just dismiss college students, and trust-fund babies, but also e.g. the disabled, etc because they're spoiled or in a passing phase. In prior generations, it might've been true that leftist, liberal, or Democratic-party leanings tended to fade with age, but starting at least with millennials, that's less and less true. In any case, the actual trend is obscured, because a survivably poor income is not reflected in the link I shared.
CNN 2020 exit poll - income over or under $100,000. The majority above voted Trump, majority below voted Biden.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/natio...
With regards to liberals abandoning the working class - this did not happen because liberals were never for the working class. Nor were conservatives.
I wonder if there is a sampling issue with the data. At $200k, the Biden/trump votes are equal.
Things like this are just stated as fact around here while any criticism of conservatives is immidiately flagged.
HN, like Twitter, has been taken over by rightwingers.