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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics is that political parties exist to advance the material private interests of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, then the Democratic Party had become the party of high-income college graduates and would have abandoned economic policies that threatened the pockets of those voters. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard on the right, where the phrase “woke capital” has become a slur to describe Democrats’ supposed loyalty to corporate America. . Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance argued that the Democratic Party has now become the party of Wall Street.
But as wealthier, better-educated voters shifted to the Democratic Party, the party and its voters became less economically progressive; They have largely united around an economic policy that emphasizes support for the poor and the middle class, and a message that puts that policy at the forefront. The wealthiest Democrats have moved as far to the left on economics as their less affluent members and have become much more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. American politics appears to have decisively entered what could be called a post-Marxist or post-materialist stage.
From the New Deal to the George W. Bush era, Marxist political views were largely maintained. The wealthy and highly educated overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, who called for lower taxes and less regulation, while most working-class voters voted for Democrats, who wanted to expand the social safety net.
But over the past 15 years, this dynamic has changed dramatically. In 2008, only a small percentage of the top five earners supported the Democratic Party. By 2020, they were the group most likely to vote Democratic, by a nearly 15-point margin. (Democrats won the bottom fifth of voters by a similarly wide margin.) Democrats now control 24 of the 25 highest-income Congressional districts and 43 of the 50 highest-producing counties. Representing. A similarly clear change is occurring when we focus on college education rather than income. Perhaps the most dramatic change has occurred among wealthy whites. Among white voters, the wealthiest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican in every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, according to an analysis by political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, this dynamic reversed, with the top 5% becoming the group most likely to vote Democratic.
This newly educated, wealthy Democratic Party never moved to the right on economics. Quite the opposite. After the 2020 election, the Biden administration announced a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of social safety nets for the middle class and the poor, including cash transfers to families and universal benefits for pre-schoolers. ), pursued a wide range of economic policies, including large-scale economic policies. Investing to create good-paying jobs in marginalized places. These policies, if fully implemented, would have resulted in a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the proposed $4.5 trillion in new spending would be funded by a wave of new taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy. “Biden’s policies have been more ambitious and redistributive than any other policies Democrats have pursued since the 1960s and ’70s,” said Roberts, a political scientist at Yale University and a recent paper on the changing Democratic coalition. Jacob Hacker, co-author of , told me. “This is not a party that pursues ‘Brahmin left’ policies. It pursues incredibly progressive economic policies.”
Despite its ambitions, this agenda did not provoke anything like a revolt from the party’s wealthy and educated base or the politicians who represented them. (In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to the bill’s enactment was West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who represents far more working-class states than other Democrats and who joined the party this year.) ) Kamala Harris is currently running. Many of these same policies are supported, and polls show her support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s in 2020.
A common complaint from centrists and the right is that the influx of wealthy, highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has caused the party to focus primarily on culture war issues rather than economics. But Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980 and found that since the early 2000s, the proportion devoted to economic issues has steadily increased, with economic issues receiving twice as much space as cultural issues. It turned out to be occupied. They came to a similar conclusion after looking at Twitter. There, you can most expect to see party elites pandering to the cultural tastes of their constituencies. They looked at tweets from Democratic officials from 2015 to 2022 and found that 9 of the 10 most frequently tweeted phrases were about economic issues like Build Back Better, the Affordable Care Act, and the American Rescue Plan. It turned out that the focus was on The only non-economic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (In contrast, only three of the top 10 phrases used by Republicans mentioned economic issues.) The authors also found that legislators representing wealthy districts were more likely to represent wealthy districts than those in poor districts. They also found that people were actually slightly more likely to discuss financial issues such as the economy and health care.
Party leaders’ policies and rhetoric reflect the fact that wealthy liberal voters lean far to the left on economic issues. A large-scale poll conducted after the 2020 election found that Democrats in the top five of the income distribution overwhelmingly supported raising the federal minimum wage, increasing taxes on individuals making more than $600,000 a year, and eliminating college debt. , was found to support enacting Medicare for All. . This is the same or slightly higher than support for these policies among poor and middle-income Democrats, and 20 to 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.
None of this means that material self-interest is completely unimportant to wealthy liberals. Some evidence suggests that while wealthy Democrats tend to support tax increases in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that directly affect them. They are also known for opposing new housing construction in their neighborhoods to make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they seem. According to the survey cited above, a slim majority of the wealthiest Democrats support raising taxes on individuals earning more than $250,000. And throughout the campaign, Democratic leaders including Harris and former President Barack Obama have touted their support for expanding housing construction.
The leftward shift among high-status voters is partly a story about a genuine ideological shift. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics and the media have focused more attention than ever on how the existing economic system has created inequality and hardship. Educated and wealthier voters also tend to be the most interested in national politics, and appear to be responding to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.
This 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 to help them. Research shows that low- and middle-income Republicans strongly disagree with their party leaders on most economic issues, creating an opportunity for Democrats.
Biden’s policies, shaped by these views, have largely had their intended economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has narrowed, and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment money have poured into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are making a strong comeback. Politically, however, efforts to win back working-class voters appear to have failed. If polls are to be believed, Democrats are losing support among the working class even more severely than they did in 2016 or 2020.
Part of that failure appears to be that when it comes to the economy, many voters are more concerned about high prices than anything else, and they believe Democrats are to blame for that. But there is also strong evidence that Republican voters are not particularly motivated by economic policy to begin with. In other words, even though they disagree with Republican politicians on health care, taxing the wealthy, and the minimum wage, they don’t really care about their differences. A recent paper by political scientist William Marble analyzes nearly 200 survey questions dating back decades and finds that in the 1980s and 1990s, white voters without a college education were more likely to vote according to their economic views. It turned out that this was a cause they supported. Democratic Party. But since the early 2000s, the dynamics have reversed: White voters without a college education now care far more about culture war issues than economic issues and lean toward the Republican Party.
The realignment leaves both parties in a strange situation heading into November. Voters consistently say the economy is the most important issue in the 2024 election. But while the wealthy overwhelmingly support the administration of Kamala Harris, which supports bold redistribution and big government spending, a significant number of working-class voters support Donald Trump. is supported. The main contents of Donald Trump’s economic policy are tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in health care costs. Activities.
Ironically, the Biden administration’s push for economic populism implicitly assumed that Marxist political views were correct from the beginning. Democrats have embraced an agenda that is deeply contrary to voters’ immediate material interests, hoping that by appealing to their material interests they can win the support of less affluent voters. But it turns out that working-class Trump supporters, like liberal elites, think otherwise.
