The Wealthy Stay Woke

America’s elites are liberal, not conservative. Socialist historian Matt Karp wrote earlier this year:

[E]ven as Democrats have sought to present themselves as the party of George Floyd, it is worth knowing that Houston’s River Oaks — home to Joel Osteen and former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling — now boasts higher Democratic primary participation than the Third Ward, where Floyd was born and raised.

. . . Not only do many merchant princes of the billionaire class — perhaps a majority, outside a handful of extractive industries — already lean Democratic; their corporate vassals, in prosperous metropolitan areas from Houston to Charlotte to Grand Rapids, are now trending Democratic, too.

These areas, “across the Sun Belt, from the defense contractors of Northern Virginia to the energy corporations of Texas and California” almost all have Democrat representatives and have the same race/class mix: Mostly bourgeois Asians and whites, a sizable Hispanic underclass, and few members of other races — what I call “HiBAWs” (Hispanics and Bourgeois Asians and Whites).

Of the 14 HiBAW districts I identified last month, almost all comfortably reelected Democrat representatives. Each of the three districts I listed that are becoming HiBAWs, and flipped blue in 2018, reelected their Democrats. One of the three, Virginia’s 10th (home to American Renaissance), is particularly noteworthy. For 65 years, from 1953 to 2018, this district had only six years of Democrat representation in Congress — immediately after the Watergate scandal. But the sprawl of affluent Washington, DC has reached this area, bringing woke Asians, white government workers, and Hispanic servants. It is home to the richest county in America — Loudoun — and last night, its Democrat incumbent won by nearly 13 points.

Virginia’s Congressional Districts (Credit Image: Drf5n via Wikimedia)

Virginia’s two other northern districts, the 11th and 8th, are similar:

It’s different in the 7th Congressional district, beyond what are essentially DC suburbs. Racially, it is: 65.5 percent white, 5.1 percent Asian, 7.3 percent Hispanic, and 18.4 percent black; and the median income is $77,533. Like Virginia’s 10th, in 2018, a Democrat won the 7th, ending decades of Republican representation. But it was much closer: Democrats in the 10th won by over a dozen points — in the 7th less than two. The 2020 results still aren’t in:

Only 86 percent of the vote has been counted, and it’s neck and neck.

Due to the many mail-in ballots this year, exit polls are less accurate than usual, but nationally, it looks like Joe Biden won the rich, with people making $200,000 or more voting 47 to 43 for the Democrats. We’ll see whether Donald Trump rallied enough whites and Hispanics in the middle- and working-classes to eke out a victory.