Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The post cites 72k as an average:
“In fact, Silver parsed the data to discover the average Trump voter makes $72,000 per year — a middle-class income solidly above the typical American.”
ETA: Bizarrely, it then states the following:
“As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data.”
WTF?
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You find this baffling? Someone from USA Today was imprecise, the ambiguity of which was immediately cleared up in the latter language, which is a quote of Nate Silver, who would not be imprecise in this way, who told you that the "average" in question is median. I mean, income data is pretty much always presented as median, so that should have been your assumption as to which "average" was being referenced, but nonetheless.
Not that it makes any real difference, though, because even if the data was the mathematical mean, it still would not give you sufficient information about the distribution of incomes within the sample to conclude that the mean income is indicative of typical incomes within the group.
Anywho. No one said that Trump's supporters are all affluent. Ty said his support was not among the poorest, which is true. The available data suggests that in relative terms, Trump voters are significantly more affluent overall than the country in general, but yes, that could just be because Trump himself was part of the sample.
As a mere result of population and income distributions, of course he wasn't elected on the back of a lot of rich people's votes. His supporters are undoubtedly mostly middle and upper middle class, both because that's where his message plays and because there's a lot of people those terms apply to.
But GGG ultimately had it right. It's not income or class, its education etc.
