Poorest states have Republican legislatures, and richest have Democratic ones, by Ken Fisher.

On Oct. 4, USA TODAY published a breathtaking economic profile of all 50 states, ranked by household income. Embedded within it is arguably the greatest unseen political truth of our time. …

What you see is exactly the reverse of our cultural mythology: Heading into midterms, Republicans are very much the party of the poor and Democrats are the party of the rich. …

Conventional wisdom has long proclaimed Republicans the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor! Forty years ago that was largely true. The poor almost everywhere elected Democrats. That is how most media portray it now.

But media are almost solely big-city based, where the conventional wisdom remains true. Democrats are the party of the urban poor – from Boston to Los Angeles. But at the grassroots level, overall, it isn’t so. Republicans, overall, own America’s low-to-no income vote. Media simply don’t report what they don’t live in and see.

As we keep mentioning here at the WR, the old left championed the working class. But sometime around the 1990s the left morphed into the new left, which made much conventional wisdom obsolete.

The new left champions identity groups, stitching together an electoral coalition of “minority” groups that have little in common except envy of straight white Christian males. The new left deplores the working class as racists, sexist, whatever-phobic, nationalistic, etc. The traditional values that made the West great were abandoned by the new left, who are largely led by cultural Marxists in any case.

Contradictions abound in the new left. They are fond of the conceit that they still represent the working class, because of Marxism and history, while simultaneously deploring them as irredeemable bigots who are best ignored. Whatever. They support Islam — a totalitarian system that favors inferior status for women and death for gays — while also promoting feminism and gay rights. If you say so.

They say character is destiny. Governments run by the new left are therefore going to be particularly problematic for everyone except the wealthy urban progressives.

via Tip of the Spear