They don’t account for any significant portion of the income cohort making over $100,000, though. There just aren’t that many of them.

Under $15,000 went from 64% Dem to 67% Dem.
$15,000-$30,000 went from 58% Dem to 61% Dem.
$30,000-$50,000 went from 51% Dem to 56% Dem.
$50,000-$75,000 went from 44% Dem to 50% Dem.
$75,000-$100,000 went from 45% Dem to 52% Dem.
$100,000-$150,000 went from 43% Dem to 47% Dem.
$150,000-$200,000 went from 42% Dem to 47% Dem.
Over $200,000 went from 36% Dem to 45% Dem.

I’d like to see these stats. If what you say is true the working class are getting screwed. By far, most of their leaders concerns are the middle and upper classes.

The data I’ve seen splits the working class. 75k -150k veers Republican especially when employed in the private sector, 150k-300k are heavily democratic especially when in public / government sector and the filthy rich are what they are. By far most of the working class don’t waste their time on voting.

I even think the union movement is waking up and realizing money is better spent on organizing and strike funds than Democratic extortions that don’t amount to much in policy anyway.

Democratic gains occured across all class boundries too. The working class votes in far higher proportions for Democrats than does the middle class, which in turn is more Democratic than the rich. But the 4-6% gain occurred in each of the income categories in 2006.

Most Christians I know believe in the literal truth of the bible. Most of these Christians are not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is an extreme. Like fascism it is not easily definable.

My point is that societies like ours and Iran that veer towards fundamentalism do so out of a failure of liberalism. More specifically a positive, progressive, economic platform will neutralize the worst of fundamentalism.

I am a firm believer that the worst of Neo Conservatism was a byproduct of Clintonomics. Look at how Democratic bloggers are trashing some of the reforms directed towards the working class in the state senate and assembly.

We have a class not cultural war in this country. Your list says you see it in cultural terms. Conservative evangelical, libertarians, secularists may or may not be in the same economic group. What class were those 4-6% working class, middle class, or capitalist class.

There’s certainly a potential for more Democratic gains among blue-collar workers, who already vote more Democratic than their wealthier neighbors within every racial and religious cohort.

The victory in 2006, however, came not from huge gains among Reagan Democrats, but from a broad-based movement towards the Democrats among all demographic groups. We picked up an additional 4-6% of the conservative evangelical vote, but also an extra 4-6% of libertarians, and secular voters, and middle class whites, and so on and so forth.

More precisely, we won because we had good candidates who are representative of their respective districts, and some of those were certainly populists — Sherrod Brown, or Bernie Sanders, or any number of House Democrats.

I think the same could more or less be said of many countries in the middle east. It is the liberal / progressive political parties inability to address class in a meaningful way that open up fundamentalism with terrorism as one of its effects.

Most people misunderstand Marx when he said Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. Fundamentalism demonstrates the wisdom of such a statement. It does not solve the class problem or poverty in any way and creates this drug induced state amongst the masses.

I really believe that it is the Dems that hold the key here. In Wisconsin and across the nation in 06, fundamentalists voted along class lines. It was those class issues that gave Dems victories in places unexpected.

What really worries me is how the republicans have created a situation in which the danger of future terrorist attacks is increased tenfold. The chance of another attack after 2008 is higher than I like to contemplate.

As for the poverty theory, I agree it is too simplistic the reason you give being a symptom. There is a large portion of our population that deeply resents the power of corporations over the individual. It seems terrorism comes from the very countries in which our corporations appear to run the country, and have the full backing of our military. The truth behind this perception can’t be dismissed. Additionally all the protections we cling to in the US to soften corporate agression and arrogance don’t protect citizens in foreign countries.

Countries which don’t protect their people from the depradations of foreign businesses aren’t among the wealthy countries. If we really want to deflect and fight terrorism we’d have to start by requiring our corporations to behave in ways which don’t exploit people to death. Of course that would make things more expensive, and would hurt the shareholders short term gain, so the very idea of fighting terrorism by behaving ethically will be ridiculed by the fat, dumb, and blissfully ignorant who enjoy the results of consuming the fruits of the blood of faceless stranger.

PS - I liked The Princess Bride reference.

Of course, there are always good, old-fashioned resource wars, whether over oil, or water, or lebensraum, too.

Its not the Bin Laden’s but the Bush’s that keep me up at night.