In response to the debate between David Frum and Andrew Gelman about whether inequality is bad for Republicans, Jim Manzi crunches some data. Below is Manzi's chart which shows that as you increase inequality (shifting to the right) you decrease the percentage of those voting for George W. Bush (decreasing along the Y axis). Read Manzi's whole post for methods and interpretation! The only thing I would add, which Manzi alludes to, is that interaction effect between regions and inequality probably matters, tying back to Gelman's point that Frum should be cautious about extrapolating from the bi-coastal exemplars.
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At the local level, relative equality could mean a combination of not many poor and not many rich, which describes my town (which is in general lower-middle-class with a moderate number of upper-middle class and poor). Or it could mean a one-class upper-middle-class exurb. Or it could mean a one-class slum.
In general, people in relatively equal communities are not directly faced with the other class -- rich don't see the poor, the poor don't see the rich. My guess is that we have more all-well-off communities than all-poor comunities, which would account for part of the Republican bias of equal communities. (Ruy Teixera has been arguing for some time that the weakness of populism in present-day America comes in part from the fact that the poorest demographic is actually rather small, not a majority as it was during the New Deal era).
In such cases, people experience the other class mostly through TV. TV is a distorting medium, since the average TV person is better off than the average American, but the pretense is also made that they're typical and down to earth; while the bottom half is mostly portrayed in caricatures.
Another study (Rich State Poor State) shows that in generally poor states, there's a big R/D political split between the rich and the poor, but that in richer states the rich are more likely to be Democrats than in the poor states -- though everywhere the rich are more Republican. (One source of popular confusion about this is the fact that almost all of the media work in NYC or California, where many of the rich are Democrats.)
Sampling in terms of metropolitan areas or other real geographical units, thus getting rid of the Delaware/California type problems (small arbitrary states and big composite states), would give a more accurate reading, but that would be fearsomely difficult because voting is always reported by political unit. To eliminate the confusion caused by state lines, county lines, and city boundaries, you'd have to collect data at the precinct level and then re-aggregate.
I keep saying this, but this kind of correlation tends to be of the suggestive, straw-in-the-wind type. I know that there exist theoretical critiques of this kind of factor correlation, but I haven't seen them.
One of the big problems with social science is that extremely laborious data collection and highly sophisticated statistical analyses often produce valid but rather weak results.