Currents
September 2018
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federal coffers and rely the most on federal services —
and of course, nearly all of those states voted for Romney.
Suzanne Mettler: Yeah, this is quite frustrating. I spent
a lot of time looking at the state of Kentucky to try to make
sense of this. Kentucky is a very poor state. And when you
look at congressional districts there, you find a bunch of
them where the average person gets more than 30 or 40
or 50 percent of their income from federal social benefits.
Yet those same districts are electing very conservative
members of Congress who promise to introduce work
requirements for food stamps and repeal the Affordable
Care Act and so forth.
I think there are a couple of things that might explain
this. One is that I found that people who benefit from more
visible social programs, like food stamps, are much less
likely to vote. We’ve known for some time that people
who are higher-income and have more socioeconomic
status tend to vote more. They tend to be mobilized more
by groups and public officials and they participate more,
and they tend to be less cognizant of the ways in which
they benefit from social services.
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