Who Are The 1 Percent? Gallup Finds They're A Lot Like The 99 Percent

By Eyder Peralta

Published December 5, 2011 at 11:42 AM CST

A protestor carries a sign as she marches down Market Street during a day of action in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Dec. 2 in San Francisco.

The Occupy movement has refocused the national conversation to income inequality. As we've reported in the past, puts a face on who the 99 percent are.

But who are the 1 percent?

Today, Gallup released analysis that looked at households who earned more than $500,000 annually and found that in many cases they were a "mirror image" of the 99 percent.

Among the findings:

-- 33 percent of the top 1 percent say they are Republican. 28 percent of the bottom 99 percent are Republican.

-- 39 percent of the 1 percent say they are conservative, which is 1 percent less than the 99 percent.

-- "Gallup finds education to be the greatest difference between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and everyone else. The Gallup analysis reveals that 72% of the wealthiest Americans have a college degree, compared with 31% of those in the lower 99 percentiles." 49 percent of the 1 percent have postgraduate degrees compared with 16 percent of the 99 percent.

-- The 1 percent are whiter. 78 percent compared to 73 percent. Only 2 percent of the top 1 percent are black, compared to 10 percent of the rest of the population.

Gallup came up with these numbers by looking at 61 national surveys from Jan. 2009 to Nov. 2011.