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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics holds that political parties exist to advance the material self-interest of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, then as Democrats became the party of high-earning college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten the pocketbooks of those voters. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard on the right, where the phrase ‘ awake capital has become a slur to describe Democrats’ supposed loyalty to corporate America; the Republican vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, has done so argued that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.
But as wealthier and better-educated voters have shifted toward Democrats, the party and its voters have become more economically progressive, not less. They have largely coalesced around an economic agenda that emphasizes helping the poor and middle class, and around messages that center that agenda. The wealthiest Democrats have become as economically left-wing as their less affluent party members, and much more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. American politics seems to have entered decisively into what one might call a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.
From the New Deal through the George W. Bush era, the Marxist view of politics largely survived. The wealthy and well-educated voted overwhelmingly for Republicans, who sought tax cuts and deregulation, while the working class voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, who expanded the social safety net.
However, over the past fifteen years, the dynamics have changed dramatically. In 2008, the top fifth of incomes favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; in 2020 they were the group most is likely to vote for the Democrats by a margin of almost 15 points. (Democrats won the poorest (one-fifth of voters with an equal margin). Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the 50 largest counties by economic output. A similar strong shift has occurred when you look at university education rather than income. Perhaps the most dramatic of all was the change among rich white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, the richest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, this dynamic reversed itself: the top 5 percent became the group most likely to vote Democratic.
This newly educated and prosperous Democratic Party did not move to the right on economic issues. On the contrary. After the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued a comprehensive economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and the poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K), and major investments to create good-paying jobs in underserved places. If this policy had been fully implemented, it would have meant a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would be financed by a wave of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and redistributive than anything Democrats have pursued since the 1960s or 1970s,” said Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale and co-author of a recently published book. paper about the Democrats’ changing coalition, told me. “This is not a party thatBrahmin leftagenda. It is pursuing an incredibly progressive economic agenda.”
Despite its ambition, this agenda did not provoke anything resembling an uprising from the party’s wealthy, educated base or from the politicians who represent them. (One of the biggest obstacles to its enactment was Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who represents a much more blue-collar state than most of his Democratic colleagues and who this year switched his affiliation to an independent state.) Kamala Harris is now run on many of those same policies, and according to the polls, her support among college-educated voters is even greater than Joe Biden’s in 2020.
A common complaint from the center and right is that the influx of affluent, highly educated voters to the Democratic Party has caused it to focus primarily on culture war issues rather than wallet economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980, they found that since the early 2000s, the share devoted to economic issues has steadily increased and that economic issues take up twice as much space as cultural issues. They came to a similar conclusion when they looked at Twitter, where you would most expect party elites to pander to the cultural tastes of their base. They looked at the tweets of high-ranking Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the ten most tweeted statements focused on economic issues, such as Better build back, Affordable Care ActAnd American Rescue Plan; was the only non-economic problem in the top 10 Roe v. Wade. (By contrast, only three of the top 10 phrases used by Republicans referred to economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts actually talked about pocketbook issues like the economy and health care slightly more often than members from poor districts.
The policies and rhetoric of party leaders reflect the fact that the prosperous liberal voters have moved significantly to the left in economic terms. A major questionnaire Surveys after the 2020 election found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the top fifth of the income distribution supported raising the federal minimum wage, raising taxes on individuals making more than $600,000 a year, making universities debt-free and implementing Medicare for All. That’s similar to or slightly higher than support for these policies among poor and middle-income Democrats, and somewhere between 20 and 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.
None of this means that material self-interest doesn’t matter at all to affluent liberals. There is evidence that while wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that directly affect them; They are also known to oppose the construction of new housing in their own neighborhoods, which would make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they seem. According to the survey cited above, a narrow majority of the wealthiest Democrats support raising taxes on individuals making more than $250,000. And this campaign season, Democratic Party leaders — including both Harris and former President Barack Obama — have made their voices heard support for building more homes.
The leftward shift of high-status voters is partly a story of genuine ideological conversion. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics and the media have paid much more attention to how the existing economic system has created inequality and hardship. Highly educated, affluent voters, who also tend to be the most connected to national politics, appear to have responded to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.
The story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, many Democrats became convinced that the best way to win back disaffected working-class voters was to enact policies that would help them. Surveys consistently show that middle- and low-income Republicans strongly disagree with their own party leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.
The Biden agenda shaped by these views has largely delivered its intended economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has narrowed, and hundreds of billions of investment dollars have flowed into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are to make a strong comeback. Politically, however, the attempt to win back working-class voters appears to have flopped: If the polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging working-class support worse than in 2016 or 2020.
Part of that failure appears to be because, when it comes to the economy, many voters are primarily concerned about high prices and see Democrats as responsible for that. But there is also compelling evidence that Republican voters are not particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. That is, even though they disagree with Republican politicians on health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t do much about it. concern about that disagreement. A recent one paper by political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions dating back decades and found that in the 1980s and 1990s, non-college-educated white voters were more likely to vote in accordance with their economic views, leading them to support Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, that dynamic has reversed: Non-college-educated white voters now place a much greater emphasis on culture war issues than on economic issues, pushing them to support Republicans.
That realignment leaves both parties in a strange place in November. Voters consistently say the economy is the most important issue of the 2024 election. And yet the wealthy support Kamala Harris, whose administration favored bold redistribution and big government spending, while a critical mass of working-class voters favor Donald Trump, whose economic agenda has largely consisted of cutting taxes for the wealthy and trying to destroy the affordable healthcare sector. Action.
The irony is that the Biden administration’s economic populist stance implicitly assumed that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats embraced an agenda that largely ran counter to the immediate material interests of their voters, hoping that they could convince less wealthy voters by appealing to their material interests. But working-class Trump supporters, like liberal elites, appear to have other things on their minds.