A new Wall Street Journal poll says that well-off voters are so disgusted with the past seven years of Republican misrule that they're moving towards the Democrats. There's even a poll, in helpful graphical form:
These voters, obviously, matter. They're a big funding base. They turnout in high numbers. They're influential among their peers and in their communities. And they seem, for the first time, to realize the pendulum has swung too far against taxes and investment:
"Twenty-five years ago...business could safely vote Republican and believe that their interests in business were going to be taken care of," says Neil Westergaard, editor of the Denver Business Journal. "As the Republican Party has changed, I think that became less [true]."
While business leaders still generally favor holding down taxes, he says, "Colorado already has low taxes and has always. And we began in the 1990s to start feeling the effects of limited tax support for things like higher education and transportation, which coincidentally became more important as economic-development issues for the business community."
Democrats cashed in on that shift here in 2006, when gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter won business support by opposing stringent tax-limitation measures backed by his Republican rivals. "We found a way to talk about investing in infrastructure that makes sense to the affluent and it makes sense to the business community," Mr. Ritter, now governor, says in an interview.
This may be one of those trends that shows up in pre-election polling and dissolves in the voting booth. Or it may decide the election. To end this post in the most banal way possible, I guess we'll see.
