Have two identical cities. One adopts conservative ideas, the other adopts liberal ideas. Whichever has better a better economy, higher happiness, and lower crime etc. gets to run the country for the next 4 years.

Middle class is actually pretty much split, while the wealthy vote republican and the poor vote democrat. It depends on education and culture of the state. Generally people with high education vote democrat, though, certain educated fields don't. Engineers, for one, strongly prefer republicans.

All that being said, the reason wealthy voters and some middle class voters choose republicans isn't because republican policies "made" them. It's because republican policies allow people who already have money to expand their wealth (the more wealth you have, the better republican policies are for you). Also a lot of working class people tend to associate republicans with a "bootstraps" ideology, though republican policy itself hasn't really been supportive of rags to riches dreams for a long time.

And the reason poor people vote democrat isn't because democratic policy "made" them poor and they like it for some reason. Poor people vote democrat because social programs take pressure off them.

Funny thing is, most poor people who vote democrat don't even know the benefits of good social programs. A lot of them just vote blue selfishly, because they want more moneh on welfare checks, but it turns out that strong public programs are really really good for a middle-class economic system.

/r/CrazyIdeas Thread Parent