Middle class leaning Pub for economic interests -- even though data show that's wrong

[BrainGlutton]

John Judis, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority (2004), now writes about “The Emerging Republican Advantage.” Interview here. In Judis’ view, the main reason is that the Dems are losing the middle-class vote (defined as persons with college degrees but no post-graduate ed).

One of the distinctive elements of the piece is that instead of focusing as much on the white working class, which tends to get a lot of attention when it comes to Democrats’ woes, you examine the white middle class. What do their politics look like?

A lot of [the white middle class] is in the office economy. A lot of them are in the for-profit rather than the public sector. That group has historically been pretty Republican, but it started moving in the ’90s toward the Democrats … One of the things that’s happened since 2008 is that [the white middle class] really shifted sharply to the Republicans. It had a big role, those shifts, in some of the key races of 2014 — for example, the Senate races in both Colorado and Virginia, where the results really surprised people…

<snip>

Besides the obvious demographic factors, though, is there anything that distinguishes the white working class from the white middle class?

The other thing I’ll say about this group that’s different from the white working class is that there isn’t as much of a populist strain. There isn’t as much of an anti-Wall Street strain as you would find among the white working class. A lot of these voters said they liked Romney because he was a businessman and they thought he could run the economy well, for example. You wouldn’t find those kind of sentiments as much among white working-class voters…

Even though we’re talking in both cases about people who work for wages and salaries — who don’t own the means of production, who are dependent upon the companies — what you find more among middle-class than among working-class voters in an identification with the company, with business, and with the profit motive … This is a growing part of the electorate. They also vote; they vote 10 percentage points more than the white working class.

Funny thing, though – if the middle class votes Pub because of economic self-interest, that means they are misperceiving their economic self-interest, as economic data show.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Republicans are trying to position themselves as the party of the middle class. In a recent essay, Thomas Edsall writes, “The Republican appropriation of leftist populist rhetoric (and even policies) poses a significant threat to liberal prospects in 2016.” It may well work, but not because Republicans are in fact reformist, but rather because voters and pundits eschew data and instead focus on rhetoric. When it comes to actual empirical evidence, the answer is indisputable: Democrats preside over far more income growth for the middle class than Republicans.

Princeton University’s Larry Bartels has two studies on politics and income distribution, and together they encompass almost a century. His finding: under Republicans, the poor and middle class see almost no income growth, while under Democrats, they see dramatic growth (see charts). As he notes elsewhere, even after numerous controls, these partisan differences remain. “Every Republican president in the past 60 years has presided over increasing income inequality, including Dwight Eisenhower in the midst of the ‘Great Compression’ of the post-war decades,” Bartels writes. “And every Democratic president except one (Jimmy Carter) has presided over decreasing or stable inequality.”

<snip>

In another recent study, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson find that on a number of economic indicators, the country fares far better when a Democrat is in office. GDP growth is 1.8 point higher under a Democratic presidency, unemployment is lower, corporate profits are higher, the S&P grows faster and wages grow faster. This difference is not found in other countries, suggesting that the particularly rabid nature of American conservatism may be an important factor. It could also be that the effect is purely luck (although there is evidence to suggest that left-wing governments can facilitate growth). But the fact that the economy grows faster under Democrats is not enough to explain why the middle-class fares better. As the chart below shows, much of the distribution leg-work occurs after taxes and transfers. This isn’t to say Democrats don’t shape the pre-tax distribution (they do), but rather that simple differences in market distributions of income can’t explain the difference.

What can the Dems do about that?

[The_Joker_and_the_Thief]

Or perhaps they vote for the America they want to live in one day, and haven’t given up on their dreams of becoming successful.

ETA: The democrats would do well to pivot away from the the academia-style policies (LGBT issues, discrimination, everything you hear Fox news screaming about) and double down on policies that actually help middle class and working class voters.

[Darth_Panda]

It seems kind of silly to look at growth rates under presidents - I don’t think they have nearly the influence over economy, taxes, and policy as people seem to assume they do.

As far as what the Dems need to do, it’s the same as always: explain why your policy is superior to the other guy’s. Basically, you need a good policy, a good speech-writer, and a lot of charisma. And the policy is probably the least important of the three.

I don’t think you want to get into a debate about whether the data your using is the relevant metric. That just doesn’t win votes.

[BrainGlutton]

@The_Joker_and_the_Thief

Or perhaps they vote for the America they want to live in one day, and haven’t given up on their dreams of becoming successful.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

– John Steinbeck

[Icarus]

IMHO, at a very high level (this discussion being just one example), the Republican party is more effective at “messaging”. Yes yes, we would like to think that most people use rational thought, facts, evidence, self-interest, etc., when choosing a candidate or party - but that is simply not the case. Instead, most people rely on non-rational reactions to make decisions: hopes and desires being important, but fear being most important of all. The Republican party knows better how to craft messages that resonate with the non-rational part. I’m not saying the Democratic party is completely lacking in this, just that they are less adept overall.

[CaptMurdock]

What can the Dems do about that?

Quit letting the Teabaggers set the narrative.

[BrainGlutton]

@Icarus

IMHO, at a very high level (this discussion being just one example), the Republican party is more effective at “messaging”. Yes yes, we would like to think that most people use rational thought, facts, evidence, self-interest, etc., when choosing a candidate or party - but that is simply not the case.

Still, one hopes it might be the case, to some limited extent, when addressing the college-educated middle class.

[Lamar_Mundane]

Right off the bat, he gets something terribly wrong.

It had a big role, those shifts, in some of the key races of 2014 — for example, the Senate races in both Colorado and Virginia, where the results really surprised people…

The Colorado result surprised no one. Once the campaign started to get into high gear (late summer) almost every poll had the Rep with a healthy lead, even the Democratic internals. The election pretty much matched the polling - if anything, the Dem did a little better than expected.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

John Judis, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority (2004), now writes about “The Emerging Republican Advantage.”

Meanwhile, the other author, Ruy Teixeira, writing in November 2012, feels vindicated.

[ITR_champion]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]

Funny thing, though – if the middle class votes Pub because of economic self-interest, that means they are misperceiving their economic self-interest, as economic data show.
[/QUOTE]

The economic data don’t quite show what you say they do. First of all, your source only compares economic data from Republican and Democratic presidential terms. It doesn’t look at the effects of Congressional control, or local control or anything else.

Then, if you actually click through the Salon article to the Washington Post article with the charts, you’ll see that they show growth at the 40th and 60th percentiles during all Republican administrations except Dubya’s. So the middle class did well under Nixon/Ford and Reagan/Bush; the lowest quintile maybe not so much.

It’s worth remembering that most folks don’t really care about “economic inequality”. They care about wealth and income. The average person never computes a Gini coefficient in his or her lifetime, nor has any reason to. He or she wants a good personal financial situation, not lower income inequality.

[BrainGlutton]

@ITR_champion

It’s worth remembering that most folks don’t really care about “economic inequality”. They care about wealth and income. The average person never computes a Gini coefficient in his or her lifetime, nor has any reason to. He or she wants a good personal financial situation, not lower income inequality.

OTOH, the worse off people get, the more they notice and resent the 1%. OWS didn’t come out of nothing, and no radical ideologues planned the whole thing in advance.

[Stringbean]

Middle-class Americans resent the Welfare State, because they fund it but get nothing from it.

They are the ones working full-time and being responsible. The Dems think bleeding-heart policies will win the middle class; it never well.

Thus they resort to demonizing the rich and race/gender warfare.

[adaher]

What can Democrats do? Pursue Clintonian economic policies, which have been proven to work: balanced budgets, free trade, cutting the size of the government workforce, reducing the regulatory burden, welfare reform…

Voters aren’t stupid. When the Democrats have pursued a genuine middle class agenda, as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 shellacking, they vote Democrat. When Democrats focus on special interest politics, a little for Latinos, a little for African-Americans, a little for women, a little for students, a little for unions, they tend to do pretty well among those groups but lose the broad middle class. Because all those little benefits and favors are usually paid for by the middle class.

[BrainGlutton]

@Stringbean

Middle-class Americans resent the Welfare State, because they fund it but get nothing from it.

They are the ones working full-time and being responsible. The Dems think bleeding-heart policies will win the middle class; it never well.

Thus they resort to demonizing the rich and race/gender warfare.

From the (2nd) article linked in the OP:

. . . And so, the struggle for Democrats is what Suzanne Mettler refers to as the “submerged state.” That is, the way the government actually benefits the middle class often goes unseen, while taxes, particularly the income tax, are very obvious. Mettler notes that our federal tax code is full of handouts like the Mortgage Interest Deduction, but these tax benefits primarily benefit the affluent and middle class. “Our government is integrally intertwined with everyday life from healthcare to housing, but in forms that often elude our vision,” she argues.

The implication is that many people who believe themselves independent of government support in fact rely heavily on it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 10 largest tax breaks cost the government $900 billion in 2013. But the benefits accrue to the wealthy: The top 1 percent gets 17 percent of the benefits and the bottom quintile only 8 percent. As the New York Times reported in 2012,

“The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits… The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last years.”

As Christopher Howard notes in his book, “The Hidden Welfare State,” “There is, still, a misconception that U.S. social programs primarily benefit the poor. That is not true for the visible welfare state direct expenditures, and it is an absurd claim to make about the hidden welfare state.”

<snip>

It’s clear a Democratic Party is better for middle- and low-income growth. However, while it’s entirely mythological that the poor tend to vote Republican, it is still true that Democrats have trouble with the white middle class. An important reason for this is that Democrats are often seen as the party that benefits the poor, particularly poor black Americans. My investigation of ANES data shows this phenomenon in action: Whites are opposed to welfare, but support helping the poor (see chart). A large literature shows that opposition to welfare and government is driven by racial animus. To this day, the historical portion of slaves in a county predicts Republican support and racial resentment.

[bar chart]

Because of our strange political system, middle-class white Americans can therefore believe that the government only takes from them and only helps black Americans. In fact, government programs frequently exclude people of color, and those that do benefit them are always on the chopping block. Whites, particularly Southern whites, often oppose programs that would help them simply to ensure that people of color remain in abject poverty. They see the bad parts of government in the form of taxes, but their welfare is hidden in a maze of subsidies. If you had to collect the mortgage interest deduction at the welfare office, Democrats would never lose another election.

[BrainGlutton]

@adaher

What can Democrats do? Pursue Clintonian economic policies, which have been proven to work: balanced budgets, free trade, cutting the size of the government workforce, reducing the regulatory burden, welfare reform…

“Welfare reform” has been done, under Clinton; why is any more needed? And the government workforce proportional to the population has been reduced under Obama. And there has not been a time since 2008 when balancing the budget would have been a good idea. The “regulatory burden” as it is apparently is not enough to ensure fracking will be done safely (if it even can be). As for “free trade,” less said the better, but getting it we are, good and hard.

[BrainGlutton]

@adaher

Voters aren’t stupid. When the Democrats have pursued a genuine middle class agenda, as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 shellacking, they vote Democrat. When Democrats focus on special interest politics, a little for Latinos, a little for African-Americans, a little for women, a little for students, a little for unions, they tend to do pretty well among those groups but lose the broad middle class. Because all those little benefits and favors are usually paid for by the middle class.

See post #14.

[adaher]

Your post did bring up an interesting point: the “submerged” government. People tend to notice government when it’s not working rather than when it is. The solution there is for Democrats to focus like a laser on customer service in government, rather than the callous treatment we usually get from those who supposedly serve us. Sometimes they even act like they rule us rather than serve us.

[elucidator]

Don’t squander these brilliant ideas on the Dems! Offer them amongst the Pubbies, and they will spread like mildfire!

[adaher]

The Republicans could stand to concentrate on making government work better too. Given the Democrats’ insoucience about the issue, it never hurts to be the party of effective government.

[BobLibDem]

@adaher

The Republicans could stand to concentrate on making government work better too. Given the Democrats’ insoucience about the issue, it never hurts to be the party of effective government.

Congratulations on your thesaurus purchase. Now do you have any evidence that
a) government doesn’t work
b) Democrats are indifferent to what doesn’t work