Wealthy West Coasters

Wow, squeaking one in after just under a whole month! Here's an interesting observation from Dan Walters of the Sac Bee about California's voting patterns. So much for Democrats being the party of the poor.

Blue counties are the greenest, as in money

State tax officials are still processing millions of personal income tax returns for 2007, but they’ve released data about California’s widely varying income levels for 2006 and there’s an interesting – and perhaps inverse – correlation with political proclivity.

The widespread assumption is that Republicans are to be mostly found in high-income communities while Democrats tend to be on the lower end of the economic scale. But mixing the Franchise Tax Board’s income data with voter registration and voting results data from the secretary of state’s office produces the opposite result.

California’s bluest counties – as in most likely to vote Democratic – are also the greenest, in financial terms anyway, while Republican-voting counties tend, with some exceptions, to fall in the lower income strata.

The five highest-income counties, based on 2006 tax returns, were found in the very Democratic San Francisco Bay Area, topped by Marin County’s $116,626 median income on joint returns, with Santa Clara ($95,457), San Mateo ($95,394), Contra Costa ($87,478) and Alameda ($83,996) following.

You have to go to sixth-place Placer County ($78,652), seventh-ranked El Dorado County ($78,489) and No. 8 Orange County ($75,537) to find strong Republican voting tendencies.

The lowest-income county, Imperial ($37,582) is Democratic, as well as being heavily Latino, but most of the counties at the lower income levels, such as No. 57 Colusa ($41,008) and 56th-place Modoc ($42,361) are solidly Republican.

For anyone who wants to make his or her own comparisons, the latest income tax data are available here while county-by-county presidential voting numbers may be accessed here and voter registration numbers are here.