socioeconomic status

I think mayze has it the wrong way around. You are more likely to be a Republican if you are white, Christian, and have a high socioeconomic status. This is the Republicans targeted socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is to politics what target demographics are to marketing. In the United States the Republican party goes after the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant market. They typically have more money and belong to a higher socioeconomic group. The Republicans offer tax cuts and programs aimed to benefit this group in order to win their vote. The Democrats, on the other hand, try and appeal to people of middle to lower socioeconomic groups by offering policies and programs that would benefit those groups the most. Both parties don't try too hard to market themselves to people who aren't in their targeted socioeconomic group. If you’re not in the target demo, you don't count. In the end it's not too different from corporate marketing.

Socioeconomic status classification often places people into one of several classes of society. These classes are defined by many of the factors cited above, such as income, type of occupation, education, familial wealth, habits, affectations, and, to a declining extent, ethnic, racial and religious pedigree.

In North America, Britain, and Europe, a common way of delineating socioeconomic stratification has been into the classes of:

Dependent Poor
Working Poor
Working Class
Middle Class
Upper Middle Class
Upper Class
Leisure Class
Gentry

However, as cultural differences between the various classes, especially Middle Class and above, have blurred, and because certain occupations have become relatively more lucrative in recent years while others have become less so, and because the blue collar manufacturing base has eroded in much of the western world, we seem to have collapsed the number of distinct classes into only four:

Dependent Poor
'Working People'
Middle Class
Middle Class with an excess of money