DKos Polling Aggregate: Unions and Support for Obama

The 2008 exit polls showed Obama receiving 59% of the vote among union households, and 51% among non-union households. While certainly an advantage, that doesn't seem like a huge difference, at least not enough to justify the Republican party's all-out political war on unions.

But if we filter out some more variables we can get a clearer picture of the link between unions and voting behavior.

In the last post I showed you the strong relationship between education and support for Obama among white voters older than 30 (we can't look in depth at minority respondents because too many of them aren't actually minorities). These numbers come from the aggregated data of the summer DailyKos/SEIU/PPP polls. A white voter over 30 with a postgraduate degree is ~55-65% more likely to vote for Obama than a white voter over 30 with a high school degree only. That's a huge difference, and it's pretty impressive.

But somebody who's white, over 30, with only a high school degree, and who lives in a union household is ~50-90% more likely to support Obama than someone with the same demographics who does not live in a union household. In other words, a union's (probably) better than a graduate degree, as far as a marker of political behavior.

Now, of course, this doesn't necessarily show cause and effect, although we have the correlation, and we have a reasonable mechanism (union education efforts). We could still have self-sorting going on (hmm, would a conservative turn down a union job just because it's a union job?) or demographic monkey wrenches. The demographics, at least, we can look into. Join me below.