Quote Originally Posted by Casualbets View Post
No doubt, but still there's not many urban Fine Gael TDs who are taking roughly half their vote from working-class areas.
That's because many urban Fine Gael TDs in working-class constituencies were the only Fine Gael candidates on their ballot papers, e.g. Paschal Donohoe, Terence Flanagan, or got weak running-mates selected to protect their seats, e.g. Leo Varadkar. And that, in turn, is a function of rational candidate choices to maximise the seat/vote ratio. So those people get the whole Fine Gael vote, or at least a large proportion of it with similar characteristics to the whole. Like the total DSW FG vote, their vote will be biased towards well-off people.

I still don't see anything unusual about Hayes's vote. When you impose a geographically-skewed social class map on geographically-determined candidate bases, you will sometimes see a pattern linking class to candidates. But social class isn't the cause - geography is.

A good test of this debate would be to check the individual Hayes/Keane maps.