America’s Class Politics Have Turned Upside Down

Opinion by Rogé Karma, The Atlantic, November4, 2024

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 the Democrats became the party of high-earning college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten those voters’ pocketbooks. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard fare on the right, where the phrase woke capital has become a slur to describe the Democrats’ supposed fealty to corporate America; the Republican vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has argued that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street. Over the past decade and a half, however, the dynamic has dramatically shifted. In 2008, the top fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; by 2020, they were the group most likely to vote for Democrats and did so by a nearly 15-point margin. (Democrats won the poorest fifth of voters by a similarly large margin.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 counties by economic output. A similarly stark shift has occurred if you look at college education rather than income. Perhaps most dramatic of all has been the change among wealthy white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 until 2012, the richest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by the 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 affluent Democratic Party did not swing to the right on economics. Quite the contrary. Following the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued an expansive economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K), and large investments to create well-paying jobs in left-behind places. These policies, if fully enacted, would have represented a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would have been funded by a spate of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and redistributive than anything else pursued by Democrats since the 1960s or ’70s,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale and co-author of a recent paper on the Democrats’ changing coalition, told me. “This is not a party pursuing a ‘Brahmin left’ agenda. It’s pursuing an incredibly progressive economic agenda.”

Despite its ambition, this agenda did not provoke anything resembling a rebellion from the party’s rich, educated base or the politicians who represent them. (Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to its enactment was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who represents a much more working-class state than most of his Democratic colleagues and who switched his affiliation to independent this year.) Kamala Harris is now running on many of those same policies and, according to the polls, her support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s was in 2020.

A common complaint from the center and the right is that the influx of affluent, highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has caused it to focus primarily on culture-war issues instead of pocketbook economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980, they found that since the early 2000s the share dedicated to economic issues has steadily increased and that economic issues take up twice as much space as cultural issues. They reached a similar conclusion when looking at Twitter, where you’d most expect to see party elites pandering 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 10 most frequently tweeted phrases were focused on economic issues, such as Build Back Better, Affordable Care Act, and American Rescue Plan; the only noneconomic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (By contrast, just three of the top 10 Republican-used phrases referred to economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts were actually slightly more likely to discuss pocketbook issues such as economics and health care than members from poor districts.

The policies and rhetoric coming from party leaders reflect the fact that affluent liberal voters have moved well to the left on economic issues. A major survey conducted after the 2020 election found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats in the top fifth of income distribution favored raising the federal minimum wage, hiking taxes on individuals earning more than $600,000 a year, making college debt-free, and enacting Medicare for All. That’s similar or slightly higher than the support for those policies among poor and middle-income Democrats and anywhere from 20 to 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.

None of this means material self-interest doesn’t matter at all to affluent liberals. Some evidence suggests that although wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that affect them directly; they are also known to oppose new housing construction in their own neighborhoods that would make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they may appear. According to the survey cited above, a bare majority of the richest Democrats support raising taxes on individuals making more than $250,000. And during this campaign season, the leaders of the Democratic Party—including both Harris and former President Barack Obama—have trumpeted their support for building more housing.

The leftward drift of high-status voters is partly a story about a genuine ideological conversion. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics, and the media have paid far more attention to how the existing economic system has produced inequality and hardship. Highly educated, affluent voters, who also tend to be the most plugged-in to national politics, seem to have responded to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.

The story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, 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 find 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 that was shaped by those views has largely produced its intended economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has shrunk, and hundreds of billions of investment dollars have poured into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are making a strong comeback. Politically, however, the effort to win back working-class voters appears to have flopped: If polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is bleeding working-class support more badly than it did in 2016 or 2020.

Part of that failure seems to be because, when it comes to the economy, many voters are concerned about high prices above all else and view Democrats as responsible for them. But there’s also compelling evidence that Republican voters aren’t particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. That is, although they disagree with GOP politicians about health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t much care about that disagreement. A recent paper by the political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions going back decades and found that in the 1980s and ’90s, non-college-educated white voters were more likely to vote in accordance with their economic views, causing them to support Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, that dynamic has inverted: Non-college-educated white voters now place a far greater emphasis on culture-war issues over economic ones, pushing them toward supporting Republicans.

That realignment leaves both parties in a strange place heading into November. Voters consistently say that the economy is the most important issue of the 2024 election. And yet the affluent overwhelmingly 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 consisted largely of cutting taxes for the rich and trying to kill the Affordable Care Act.

The irony is that the Biden administration’s economic-populist push implicitly assumed that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats embraced an agenda that largely went against its voters’ immediate material interests in the hopes that they could win over less-wealthy voters by appealing to their material interests. But working-class Trump supporters, just like liberal elites, turn out to have other things on their mind.