This article went missing from the front page of the New York Times after only 60 comments. Makes you wonder, why?
A Key Divide Between Clinton and Sanders Supporters: Income
This is a class-based split. The Powers that Be never ever want us to unite around our class interests. That is why they work so hard to keep us divided by race and religion. That is the main reason why the candidacy and campaign of Bernie Sanders so deeply alarms them that they bury a perfectly good article just deep enough so that most people will never see it. They didn’t count on me finding it. Heh heh.
In 2008, Mrs. Clinton was pummeled among affluent voters. She lost voters earning more than $100,000 by 41 to 19 percent, according to entrance polls.
This time, she won big among voters making more than $100,000 per year, by 55 to 37 percent.
Mrs. Clinton’s strength among affluent voters is partly because of age: Affluent voters tend to be older, and Mrs. Clinton excels among older voters.
Yes, age is a factor merely because people tend to accumulate assets and bank accounts as they get older.
But that’s not the whole explanation: Among voters over age 30, she won those making more than $100,000 by a 31-point margin, more than twice her 14-point lead among those making less.
In homage to a great scholar named Howard Zinn, I share the story of Bacon’s Rebellion. The reason for the rebellion is the side story. What really tore up the Pilgrims was the coalition of people of color, frontiersmen and sharecroppers who rose up against the governor because he wouldn’t murder enough Native Americans to suit them.
It was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part; a similar uprising in Maryland took place later that year. The alliance between indentured servants (slaves for 5 to 7 years, if they survived) mostly Caucasians and Africans (most enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class, who responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705[4][5][6] . -Wikipedia
This natural split in the vote will of course be decried as class warfare by the right. And just ask us. We Americans all think we are middle class unless we are millionaires. I was driven to wry laughter by a comment in the Times by a man who made $250,000 a year. He felt put upon by the burdens of living in New York City and maintained that his suffering from the high cost of living was equivalent to a worker making $8 an hour.
Here’s another article, published a few days earlier, January 31, that was also shut down after 60 or so comments. You have to give the reporter Nate Cohn props for trying to get out the message.
This comment under the message leads to a fuller explanation of the income gap phenomenon.
Important for this story to be told but for more details, and a better analysis, see the Jacobin article athttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/bernie-sanders-democratic-president-primary-new-hampshire-iowa-caucus/
Of course, Bernie’s campaign message cuts across race, religion, gender and class. In the town next door, the UC Berkeley Bernie Sanders Club has 200 members. I saw a picture of the Berkeley people at a phone bank last Saturday. The room is alive with energy. Despite that, this class-based split is a new development and one that the DINOs and Republicants cannot tolerate. It has the potential to destroy the Faustian bargain that keeps them in gridlock, and in power, together.