Jacob Christensen

• Pew Research Center: Internet Now Major Source of Campaign News
  Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now).
  (tags: usa elections internet media)

While I’m slowly eating my way through Rune Lykkeberg’s “Kampen om sandhederne“, I stumbled across one of the latest – and most hilarious – attempts to paint the Republicans as the party of ordinary people and the Democrats as the party of the elite: Now we are told that, true, the rich vote Republican but the super-rich vote Democrat. So obviously, if you’re an ordinary Joe, you should vote with the rich.

Andrew Gelman – who has worked on destroying the myths about income and voting in US election – notes that the claim must be based on a tiny selection (as: 5) of super-rich respondents and that it also contradicts research into the distribution of political contributions.

Well, one final thing which brings us back to Lykkeberg. You see, it is perfectly possible to have several elites in a society, and one of Lykkeberg’s points is that the Danish right wing has been successful in sidelining the cultural and academic elites while mobilising administrative and economic elites. Just because John McCain can’t come up with a massive amount of Hollywood celebrities doesn’t mean that he doesn’t attract the (economic) elite.¹

1. Actually high-tech people and – gasp – investment bankers tend to prefer Democratic candidates. Oh dear. [↩]