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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics holds that political parties exist to advance the material interests of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, Democrats would become the party of high-income college graduates while abandoning economic policies that would threaten the wallets of these voters. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard fare on the right; woke up the capital It has become a slur for Democrats’ supposed devotion to corporate America; Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance defended The Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.

But as wealthier and better-educated voters turned to the Democrats, the party and its constituents became more economically progressive, not less. They are largely united around an economic agenda that emphasizes helping the poor and middle class, and messages that put that agenda front and center. The wealthiest Democrats have become as left-wing on the economy as less wealthy party members, and they have become much more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. US politics appears to have entered a phase that you might call decidedly post-Marxist or post-materialist.

From the New Deal to the George W. Bush era, the Marxist view of politics largely survived. The wealthy and educated overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, who sought tax cuts and deregulation, while the working class mostly voted for Democrats, who expanded the social safety net.

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But in the last fifteen years the dynamic has changed significantly. In 2008, the top fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few points; By 2020 they were the band -most He is likely to vote Democratic and did so by a margin of about 15 points. (Democrats won the poorest By a similarly large margin, one-fifth of the electorate.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 districts in terms of economic output. A similarly sharp shift occurred when you looked at college education rather than income. Perhaps the most dramatic was this: to change among rich white people. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, the wealthiest 5 percent of white voters were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, this dynamic reversed: The top 5 percent became the group most likely to vote Democratic.

This newly educated and wealthy Democratic Party did not move to the right on economics. Quite the opposite. Following the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued a wide-ranging economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, major expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K), and a massive social safety net. Investments to create good-paying jobs in places left behind. If these policies were fully implemented, they would represent a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would be financed by new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “Biden’s agenda was more assertive and redistributive than anything Democrats have pursued since the 1960s or ’70s,” said Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and co-author of a recent book. paper He briefed me on the Democrats’ changing coalition. “This is not after a party”brahmin left‘ agenda. “He is pursuing an incredibly progressive economic agenda.”

Although ambitious, this agenda did not spark any outcry from the party’s wealthy, educated base or the politicians who represented them. (In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to passage was West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who represents far more working-class states than most of his Democratic colleagues and switched his affiliation to an independent this year.) Kamala Harris is now running He espouses many of the same policies, and polls show his support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s support in 2020.

A common complaint from the center 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 pocket-money economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980, they found that the share devoted to economic issues has increased steadily since the early 2000s, with economic issues taking 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 tweets from top Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the 10 most frequently tweeted phrases focused on economic issues. Rebuild Better, Affordable Care ActAnd American Rescue Plan; The only non-economic issue in the top 10 Roe v. wade. (By contrast, only three of Republicans’ top 10 phrases touched on economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts discussed pocketbook issues like the economy and health care slightly more than members from poor districts.

Policies and rhetoric from party leaders are the basis of wealthy liberals. voters They moved further to the left on economic issues. Major questionnaire A survey conducted after the 2020 election found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the top five support raising the federal minimum wage, increasing taxes on individuals earning more than $600,000 a year, making college debt-free, and enacting Medicare for All. This is similar to 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 is to say that material interests are not at all important to wealthy 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 directly affect them; It is also known that they oppose new housing constructions that will make housing more affordable in their neighborhoods. But even these exceptions are less exceptional than they seem. According to the above-mentioned poll, a slim majority of the wealthiest Democrats support increasing taxes on individuals earning more than $250,000. And this campaign season, leaders of the Democratic Party (including both Harris and former President Barack Obama) have trumpeted their own ideas. Support to build more housing.

The leftward shift of high-status voters is partly a true story of ideological transformation. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics, and the media have paid much greater attention to how the current economic system produces inequality and hardship. Highly educated, affluent voters, who are also the most engaged in national politics, appear to have responded to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.

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The story is also about political strategy. Following 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. Polls consistently find that middle- and lower-income Republicans disagree strongly with their party leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.

Shaped by these views, the Biden agenda has largely produced the 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 don’t do that A strong comeback. But politically, the effort to win back working-class voters appears to have failed: If polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging working-class support worse than it did in 2016 or 2020.

Part of the reason for this failure appears to be that when it comes to the economy, many voters are concerned first and foremost about high prices and see Democrats as responsible for those prices. But there is also compelling evidence that Republican voters are not particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. So, even though they disagree with GOP politicians on health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t have much of an opinion. care about this dispute. recently paper political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 poll questions from decades ago and found that in the 1980s and ’90s, white voters without a college education were more likely to vote based on their economic views, causing them to support Democrats. But since the early 2000s, this dynamic has reversed: Non-college-educated white voters now place greater emphasis on culture-war issues over economic issues, pushing them to support Republicans.

This realignment leaves both sides in an awkward place heading into November. Voters consistently say the most important issue in the 2024 elections is the economy. Yet the wealthy overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris, whose administration favors bold redistribution and big government spending, while a significant portion of working-class voters support Donald Trump, whose economic agenda largely consists of lowering taxes for the wealthy and trying to eliminate Affordable Care. It supports . To behave.

The irony here is that the Biden administration’s economic-populist push implicitly assumes that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats have embraced an agenda that is largely at odds with the immediate financial interests of their voters in the hope that they can win over less affluent voters. their material interests. But working-class Trump supporters, like liberal elites, turned out to have other things on their minds.