If you listen to ideologues on both sides of the aisle, they will often claim that voting patterns cannot be predicted because ideas determine what people vote and ideas may change. Is that true? Not if you accept basic economic theory.
Let us start with one of the most cherished laws of economics: supply and demand. It states that when prices go up, demand will go down. Similarly, if prices fall, demand will go up. The same logic applies to suppliers as well. If profit margin goes up, supply will increase. If profit margins fall, corporations will flee the market and supply goes down until the balance is restored.
Supply and demand
This simple principle has been taught in economics since it was epitomized by Adam Smith. If we were to apply the same logic of the open border ideologues to economics, it should be impossible to make any predictions about the market. We could think of the market as a kind of voting – with dollars.
According to the theory that people are governed purely by ideas and that these may change at any time, then you would expect that sometimes increased prices leads to higher demand, and sometimes the opposite. Sometimes increased profit margin leads to businesses rushing in to fill the demand, and sometimes they would not care and stay out.
Opportunists move the market
This is evidently wrong, but why? Economists do not have to accept that everyone follows these laws. It is sufficient that a certain percentage of the population consistently acts opportunistically. This would be enough to make the market behave predictably according to the laws of supply and demand.
If you accept that a certain percentage of the voters behave opportunistically, then by the same token, you can predict voting patterns.
Predicting how people vote
Opportunism means acting in one’s immediate short-term interest with no consideration for the effect on others. Like in the market, much of the opportunistic voting revolves around money.
From opportunism, we can predict that people who pay net taxes as a group will tend to vote for lower taxes. There are individual differences, and people sometimes vote for ideological reasons against their wallet, but if a significant portion of net taxpayers is opportunistic, they will tip the balance of behavior towards voting for lower taxes.
Similarly, we can predict that people who receive net welfare benefits from the government as a group will tend to vote for higher taxes and more “free” welfare. Again, there are idealistic exceptions, but the opportunists will nudge it along in that direction.
Because of this, we can predict voting patterns from earnings. First, we predict that high earners will tend to vote more rightwing than low earners. Statistics bear this prediction out.
Second, we can predict that men as a group will vote more rightwing than women because men have a higher income and pay more taxes.
Third, we can predict that among women, married women, especially with children will tend to vote more rightwing than single women and single mothers. When the fate of the woman is linked to her husband’s income, she will opportunistically tend to vote for lower taxes – for her husband. A single woman and especially a single mother, on the other hand, will opportunistically vote for other people to pay for her welfare benefits.
Fourth, we can predict that poor immigrants from third world countries will tend to vote leftwing for multiple generations because they tend to earn less than well-established citizens with a Western background.
Indeed, statistics confirm all these predictions.
What’s in store for the future?
Low-earners from third world countries are pouring into the United States. Families are falling apart and more and more are raised by single mothers. All these trends are pushing the voting patterns further and further left.
If you love the Constitution and want to preserve America as a free country, you should be worried about this prognosis. America is turning non-American.
Can this be stopped and reversed? Possibly, but time is short. To move in the direction of smaller government and lower taxes, we must curb immigration from third world countries, and only those who have proved that they can be net contributors to society should be allowed to receive citizenship.
Finally, single parenthood somehow needs to be strongly discouraged. Those who are concerned about the future of America need to find a way to rekindle the family spirit. It may not be easy, but as John F Kennedy famously stated: “we choose to go to the moon and other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Will America live up to the challenge?
