Income.
For the first portion on this analysis the focus was put on the income of the voters that were polled. The income criterion was put into four categories in SDA. The categories broke the income categories were as follows: under $30k, $30k-$59999, $60k-$99999 and $100k plus.
My initial thought with these categories before seeing the raw data is that Barack Obama would carry the lower to middle income bracket overwhelmingly and that Mitt Romney would do the same with the upper-middle to upper income voters. While Obama did take the $30k and under voters at a 62.7% clip Romney's 34% the other categories gave me some interesting information. While the President did win the $30k-$59999 category, the margin was much closer than I thought it would be with Obama garnering 50% of the vote to Romney's 47.2%. Given the margin for error in these types of stats this could almost be considered a victory for the Romney camp. The surprising numbers that I found came in the two upper income brackets where the numbers were a lot different than I anticipated. In the $60k-$99999 category, Romney held a 51.3% to 45.3% advantage over Obama. Again, with the margin for error this category was almost a dead heat and detrimental to Romney in trying to make up the advantage that Obama gained with the $30k and under voters. Even more alarming for the Romney camp is the fact the he did demonstrate any type of advantage with the voters who earned $100k and over. In fact Obama actually out performed him with this sector at 48.9% to 48.2%. Very interesting to say the least, so while I notions of the lower income voters was upheld it was the three higher income groups of voters who proved me wrong entirely. In the next section I believe that we will see how these numbers bear out across racial and economic lines.
Race and Income.
For the third and final section of my analysis, I broke down the aforementioned categories together.