Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series

Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?

Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes.  One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous.  Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.

That question is from Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Here is a previous installment in the series.