Anyone in the bottom third of the economy is probably disproportionately concerned with the cost of food and housing because a far greater share of their income is devoted to those categories compared to wealthier cohorts. And the last I checked food and housing were outpacing the general index for inflation.
Food inflation over the last 12 months is actually a bit lower than general inflation (2.2% vs 3.2%), but housing is quite a lot worse, at 5.7% year-over-year. Another point for "the housing theory of everything"!
Yeah housing is a killer. I’m fortunately okay on that front but the prices I see are eye bulging in most big cities and it’s only going to get worse if bad policies and NIMBYism continues.
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of the increase in housing costs in the inflation numbers is due to owners’ equivalent rents - which homeowners are not actually paying.
If you’ve locked in a long term mortgage at a low rate and don’t plan to move, your housing costs as a share of your income should go down over time.
So basically, low-income homeowners are better off than the numbers suggest, while low-income renters are possibly worse off.
An overly nerdy (and incomplete) view: I'm a homeowner with a long term, low rate, fixed mortgage who has no plans to move. You know what has gone significantly up with the significant increase in value of my home? PROPERTY TAXES as well as my mortgage and homeowners insurance.
2020 was actually worse, relative to core inflation.
Worst single month was November 2022, where food inflation was 3.9 points worse than all inflation (10.4 vs 6.5 annualized), but 2020 was 1.23 for all inflation and 3.42 for food, a diff of 2.19. 2022 had a diff of 1.9.
Yeah, but who cares about 2 points over 1.5 core. 10+ on the other hand? There's a reason people are on edge right now and it's because they've been primed by large price increases in the recent past.
I think it makes a lot more sense to divide the electorate into segments rather than treat it as a monolith. And it simply makes deep intuitive sense to me that the working poor and middle class will be far more concerned with inflation simply because they are far more impacted by inflation.
Plus it is most likely that these variables/factors aren't completely independent. Josh Kraushaar posted on Twitter something like "Inflation has been rocket fuel for the ongoing shift of Hispanic voters to the GOP".
What does "perceptions of immigration" mean? Biden has let in ~10 million illegals, many of whom are given free housing, food, and cash in Democrat sanctuary cities. Taxpaying citizens resent this along with the criminal element - a mob of migrants beating up NYPD officers in Times Square is the most prominent of many examples.
AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberals) are the cultural base of the Democrat party and vote 70% blue. Carville called them "preachy women". They are insulated from the consequences of their virtue signaling and policies. Abortion is their holy cause above all other topics like disastrous inflation, open borders, and foreign policy.
How weird that a demographic (women) would care about a policy (abortion) that deeply affects their personal lives and their future economic prospects!
This artefact of the data appears because the Deep South “red states” have extremely high black populations. The relationship between violent crime and black population is almost a straight line.
There's a strong relationship between *poverty level* and homicide rate. You can see on the maps that this includes Deep South states but also Hispanic areas like the Southwest, Native American reservations, and very white regions of West Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma. See this visual comparison: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/z9j370/race_vs_homicide_rate_vs_poverty_rate/
“Perceptions of immigration” vary because in one economic class, immigrants directly compete for you with jobs, while in another economic class, immigrants helpfully provide lower-cost labor for either your industry or your household.
The Democratic party doesn't have a base. While Republicans do, which sets activist priorities and whose loyalty can even be used to rarely pivot leftward on issues such as Trump did on abortion in the 2024 primary, Democrats really don't have that structure. It's not clear to me the cohort you described makes up even 10% of the Democratic party. Black Americans make up maybe 25% of it? They're not the party's base either. No one group is.
The suburbs are doing quite well in America. Rising property values are an underrated salve, and are partly why the exurbs on the West Coast and New England vote center-left on net like the suburbs outside major cities for the US and Canada. Property values have gone up for them, unlike most exurbs in red states. The cities can run out of money for asylum seekers, but until the local tax rates or property values change, many suburbanites will likely vote on their cultural values. While depending on the industry they work in, that is leaning Dem a little these days.
Yes, yes, yes to your first descriptor. My husband, who didn't finish high school and got his GED, had grown up in a trucking family. He knows trucks (semis) inside and out. It's skilled labor and he made it his business to be the best in the SW. He was earning close to $200,000 a year before he quit to start his own business. (I know! Everyone, including our accountant, is always SHOCKED to hear this.) So, what you have is someone without any kind of "educated" credentials earning more than most of those who have them. He only judges by his life experience. He never voted until Trump came along, but something about Trump made him feel comfortable about his less-educated status because Trump is a rich guy that doesn't sound like he hates the working class. That's the problem with the Dems. How long did they think they could trash the non-educated and not be offending their traditional bases?
Where are people getting this idea of Dems "trashing" uneducated people? Can you link to examples of speeches or statements made by prominent Democrats (governors, presidential candidates, senators, representatives etc.) who are mocking or demeaning people for not having a university education or for being working class?
The priorities are the answer to your question. If you want more examples, you can read through The Liberal Patriot substack. Most reliable Dems are now College Educated Liberal White Women who aren't married. Those people don't represent middle or working class values.
I can't read this pay walled article because I don't have a subscription. Referencing an entire blog is also very vague. Is there an article in particular with a quote like this?
From your description, it already sounds like you don't actually think they've been "trashing the non educated". All you're saying is that educated white women vote Democrat, which doesn't in any way mean they are trashing the working class. Elderly black people are also and extremely reliable demographic for the Democrats, but that also doesn't really tell me they've been derogatory to any group who is not them. If you want to argue they're not adequately catering to the white working class then that's one thing, but saying they're actively disparging them is something else entirely.
It seems to me that you don't actually want an answer. There are tons and tons of articles from Dems themselves. All you have to do is Google. Not to mention, you can actively look at policies and decide if they are aimed at the middle-class. Spoiler: they aren't. The active war against free speech, nuclear family, rural America, classification of domestic terrorists, equity over equality, etc are proof enough on their own. If I were the only person who thought this, you wouldn't have asked why everyone keeps saying this. Inflation hit the middle-class the hardest. Why? They are poor enough to get government money nor rich enough for it not to matter. They pay the bulk of taxes. Marriage is important to the middle-class. So are certain values. This isn't a me issue. This is everywhere. So, you are basically saying none of this is true while also saying everyone in the middle-class thinks it is. So, you seem to be someone who wants me to answer what you believe and I can't do that. You can look at wealth by party if you want. Exit polls. There is a shift in Dems from low income voters to high income voters. Don't take my word for it. If you want to find out, there's plenty of evidence, but I don't plan to be your researcher today. Have a good one. I'm done with this conversation because it's a waste of my time.
I'm aware it's a right-wing meme, and it obviously is perpetuated because it serves Republicans, I just haven't seen any evidence of it and it would be quite shocking to see any politician of any persuasion trashing the working class or people who do not have a university education (unlike the upper class, who are very popular to trash by all). I've heard of people who believe in Qanon or homeopathy too, but that doesn't mean they aren't baseless. Not only have you still not provided any examples (and neither did Google) of any Democrat politicians trashing the working class, you've now switched to talking about the middle class (and no, not everyone in either the middle or working class unanimously agrees with all of the things that you find important either, which is why each party gets at least 45% in every bracket in both 2020 and 2024 as per the article above).
I'm assuming you don't haves examples of anyone belittling the working or middle class, because you would have given one by now, and this is sort of just a vibe you get that can't be substantiated. That's OK, you can keep having that vibe, and I can continue not having it since I've seen nothing to support it.
Just because you label something right-wing doesn't mean it's not happening, as we've seen with the shifting in voter sentiment from 2020 to 2024. I don't know about Q anon stuff.
It's the word trashing we disagree on. I don't necessarily mean they are stupid enough to say aloud what they think very often. I mean, trashing a way of life as backward and uneducated.
I suspect campaign finance plays a large role in this shift. Each party needs enough rich guys on its side to be able to compete.
I would like to see an analysis like this one, but for the role of gender in voter preferences. That seems like one of the most important dividing lines to me.
From my perspective, what’s developing are two, distinctly different American experiences:
(1) economically stable, obsessed with esoteric gender and race ideology; and,
(2) economically unstable, without the comfort (or interest) in an ideologically driven, humanities-based alternate reality of which all the things we once knew to be “true,” have been rapidly upended.
One has the ability to concern itself with trivialities, while the other is worrying about how they can afford to live, and what kind of cultural environment do they want to live in.
our collegiate class (for lack of a better term) can view politics as entirely in the realm of the symbolic (and/or "moral"), as all their basic needs (security, health, prosperity) are met and secured;
everyone else still views politics as about resources, benefits, jobs and taxes etc, aka the traditional political concerns about the national pie and who gets a slice.
it tracks almost perfectly with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
I think this is a completely unhelpful classification. There are many people who have money and do not care about gender and race ideology, and there are people who have little but do. I'm not sure if this is part of your calculation but there are also plenty of people on the right who care very deeply about gender and race ideology, just not in a supportive way, and some of them have money and others do not. I also think there are plenty of economically unstable college graduates who are saddled with debt, but whose social groups are still interested in progressive causes around LGBT and race issues.
John, of course not everyone neatly fits into one of two camps. There a millions of people who walk through life with their faces buried in Tik Tok, wholly unaware of most of their lives.
But if you can’t see politically, how two distinct camps of American existence, priorities and “lived experiences” 🙄have developed, I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention.
Pretty good piece. And you are quite open that you are center-left and want Dems to win generally and Biden to win this year. That’s fine. But the crack about Reagan’s economics being “trickle down” is pure hard left progressive spin.
For someone who studied economics, and claims to be center-left not a leftist progressive, you should know better.
Can you explain the spin you are referring to? Are you saying that Reagan did not promote trickle-down economics (aka supply-side economics), or are you saying that supply-side economics does not primarily benefit the wealthy over the poor?
Reagan most definitely promoted supply-side economics, which emphasizes that supply creates demand.
And he certainly cut top marginal tax rates (and taxes overall), and of course that helped the wealthy. But it also helped ALMOST. EVERYONE. ELSE. TOO, in the medium run, and EVERYONE in the long run - most definitely including the poor - as was proven by the rise in GDP, average incomes and taxes collected over the last 15 years of the 20th century.
It is the use of the deliberately pejorative phrase “trickle down” that is hard leftist spin.
The use of such a term by someone who is either hard leftist or clueless about economics is both more understandable and more forgivable. But Nate explicitly claims to be neither.
Notice how you had to use rise in AVERAGE incomes? the median barely moved, because virtually all of the new wealth "created" under and after Reagan went straight to the top, the people he was benefitting. I agree that it's poor taste to call Reagan's economics "trickle down", because there was no trickle. The rich kept it and have been engorging themselves ever since.
Median incomes went up significantly from 1981 to 2000. Almost 39%, in fact. Just as I'd suggested that Reagan supply-side economic policies delivered.
Median incomes were indeed fairly flat from 2000 - 2015. They finally meaningfully increase above the 2000 number only under Trump, although they do rebound from the W Bush-Obama 2012 lows at the tail end of Obama.
Yes, in your lifetime, Izzi, you are used to relatively punk median income increases, and I can see why that might be one reason you are so far to the left. But these numbers don't lie: real median incomes went up *substantially* from 1981 to 2000.
Sorry, your statement is simply false. What I said about averages applied to the median as well, though it is of course true the average went up even more than the median.
Of course it’s also true that health insurance costs and the value of employer-provided benefits have gone up a lot more then inflation in the last 4 decades, so they became a larger part of average and median incomes, and so the cash component of income has not gone up as fast as the total.
Unlike you, I don’t subscribe to the politics of envy. I am thrilled when the Sam Waltons and Jeff Bezoses get obscenely rich when in doing so they improve the standard of living of basically everyone, and in particular of the bottom 50% disproportionately in the case of Sam Walton.
But none of that detail changes the fact that median incomes went up substantially in the 20 years after Reagan’s economic policies were put into place. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
envy? it’s not me that envies them, it’s you. I have no desire for gluttonous amounts of wealth, but you worship those that extract value from laborers. May you one day set yourself free from the economic chains that bind you
"as was proven by the rise in GDP, average incomes and taxes collected over the last 15 years of the 20th century."
What are you talking about? GDP constantly rises in basically every country in the entire world for modern history except for like, the Soviet Union when they were getting actively genocided by the Nazis. If you look at annual growth rate (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-per-capita) it actually looks really bad for Reagan, lmao.
U.S. *REAL* growth rates in the 20 years after Reagan changed public policy (and HW Bush and Clinton more-or-less maintained it) were far higher than they were for the 15 years prior, and were higher than all *large* western economies in that time period.
If you misunderstand economics and are looking at only the *NOMINAL* growth rate bars in green at the link you sent, which indeed show large nominal yearly increases from the mid 1960s through 1981, that's on you.
(If you don't quite understand the difference between real and nominal growth then just look at the dollar values in the blue dots and ask yourself: as incredibly well as the U.S. economy has done over the last 62 years, you don't *really* think that the average income is up by 25x over that time period, and 6x since Reagan first took office, do you?!? Earlier today Izzi was claiming that it had barely risen at all in the last 40 years...)
Higher inflation was a bad thing that Reagan (together with Paul Volcker) fixed, and it had stayed fixed for about 40 years until Biden and his Fed caused it to get bad again
Again, entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.
> U.S. *REAL* growth rates in the 20 years after Reagan changed public policy (and HW Bush and Clinton more-or-less maintained it) were far higher than they were for the 15 years prior, and were higher than all *large* western economies in that time period.
Nope. I just went and took the data from the Fed's Real GDP per capita (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/), the average up to 1980 was 2.4% from 1948, 2.7% from 1960, 2.6% from 1965, and 2.2% from 1970. Meanwhile, the average since 1980 was 1.7% overall and 2.1% over the whole 1980-2000 period.
As you said, entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.
You'll forgive me that I don't take seriously the guy who first showed nominal numbers to make his point about real gdp.
You can't start from 1980 - that is still a Carter year! And I further said you gotta start a couple years later than that, because Reagan and Volcker first had to create a recession to break the back of Carter's (and LBJ/Nixon/Ford's) inflation.
So I said compare 1966 - 1981 to 1983-2000 (or 1983-2002 to be true to my 20-year statement).
That said, I do acknowledge there is something weird with the real GDP growth rate published numbers under Carter. They show fairly high, and I can't explain that. Partly they are the result of a low base rate after a recession under Nixon, but it can't be just that. I *speculate* - and it is only speculation - that it is partly to do with the difficulty in making adjustments in an era of high and increasing inflation, and also has to do with skyrocketing energy prices (and oil company revenue and profits) with some Real Estate and possibly even gold sales thrown in there, but I do not actually know the answer.
I do say with 100% certainty that not even liberal economists would claim we had a good economy in the late 1970s. And that even most liberal economists now acknowledge that the economy from 1982-2000 was pretty darn good, by far the best sustained period of the last 60 years.
And see here for the median (not mean, median) per-capita income figures, and they make my point more clearly:
It shows median incomes going DOWN notably from 1974 to 1981, then up significantly from 1981 to 2000. Exactly as I'd suggested about the Reagan supply-side economic policies delivering the goods for almost all Americans.
Then median incomes are fairly flat from 2000 - 2015. They finally increase *meaningfully* above the 2000 number only under Trump, although they do rebound from the W Bush-Obama 2012 lows at the tail end of Obama.
I think it's more an example of Newspeak in action. The left has tried to completely control the words that can be used to think about a given issue. Nate using terms like this despite not being far left is like the proverbial fish who can't see the water because it's all he knows.
I think your point is very well taken in general. But Nate is both a very smart guy, and someone who has studied economics - which he repeated in this very essay! So I respectfully disagree with the fish in water analogy; imo he knew exactly that what he was saying was leftist spin.
Immigration policy or lack there of is an economic threat to traditional democratic voters as it is undocumented people who often take lower paying jobs and therefore threaten working people. A 4 year proposal by Biden will not makeup for three years of being deaf.
But Democratic voters of today are not “working people” is the point. Dem policies somewhat and rhetoric *completely* is actively agains the interests and values of what you call “traditional democratic voters”.
By numbers the white working class dwarfs the black working class, and historically has been much bigger than the Hispanic working class.
Further, by percentages, a higher proportion of lower income blacks and Hispanics are “the poor” or not working than for whites [again, looking at the bottom ~40% by income]
Finally, the poor in general and the black and Hispanic poor in particular were always and still are rock-solid core parts of the Democrat coalition. Very little has changed there. ‘Traditional democrat voters” is a phrase usually used to refer to working people *distinct from* those not working / receiving transfer payments as the large source of their income, even though if you want to be pedantic you can of course argue that technically the non-working poor have always been Democrat voters and hence can be considered “traditional” Democrat voters.
And so now having been much more explicit about terminology, the working people in the bottom 40% of incomes not getting a lot in terms of handouts distinct from the non-working people in the bottom 40% of incomes are indeed the ones where Dem policy has shifted meaningfully away from their interests, and for at least the white portion of those people where the rhetoric is completely against their values and interests.
And as Nate points out, working class blacks and Hispanics are moving away from the Dems substantially in the last 8 years, *especially* Hispanics. In fact, it’s not that much of a stretch to say that the Hispanic working class moving from Dems towards the GOP could well prove to be the difference in 2024.
Great piece. I think you can clearly see that the Democrats over the last ~20 years have become much more of a high-income party to reflect that their base is college graduates. Obama keeping the Bush tax cuts for anyone making <$400k and the student loan forgiveness being examples. I also think the GOP has shifted somewhat toward policies that are not as directed toward the middle/upper middle class, things like capping the SALT deduction in the 2017 tax cut. That is my baseline expectation for how the parties will behave going forward.
If you look at the economic policies recommended in something like Project 2025 (and those are the people Republicans will go to to staff an administration), it's strong evidence against this hypothesis.
Good question! Andra Watkins has a substack which is entirely focused on reading Project 2025, which is the most prominent blueprint of policy guidance for the next Republican administration, and interpreting it for the average American. She comes from a background of having been raised as a Christian fundamentalist, but she's covering all aspects of Project 2025, and this week she is focusing on economic policy. I recommend checking out her posts. She keeps each day's post relatively brief so they are easy to read.
It is just a series of left wing talking points with nothing substantiating her claims. Nothing in here suggests the tax policies in Project 2025 are specifically beneficial to the middle/upper middle class, which is what I said in my initial comment. I wouldn't get your information on the implications of new tax policy from this author, this post comes off as pretty unhinged honestly.
Today's post was probably her angriest one yet, the most venting, I would definitely concede, but it's not the one I would start with. She's also a CPA who used to run companies before she pursued a career as a writer. Do note that she always cites their text though.
Her logic throughout the entire post is basically "the Republican's proposed tax plan is only good for millionaires/billionaires because it is a Republican tax plan", and I don't think I need to explain why that sort of analysis is useless.
It's pretty interesting that you forwarded this author because I think she is a great example of the outdated thinking that you see among a lot of commentators on the left. There are a whole lot of people who are stuck in the Reagan-GW Bush era of thinking, when trickle-down economics and tax cuts for the wealthy was the consensus. But the makeup of the parties has changed, as Nate details here. The Democratic Party is losing lower income workers and gaining higher income works. The Republican Party has seen the opposite. That is absolutely being reflected in the policies you are seeing from both parties, which was my original point.
I know this is straying from the subject, but there is the old "With whom would you rather have a drink?" adage: Jimmy Carter (no) or Gerald Ford (no); Reagan or Carter (Reagan); Reagan or Mondale (Reagan); Bush or Dukakis (Dukakis (the exception which proves the rule?)); Clinton or Bush (Clinton); Clinton or Dole (Clinton); Bush or Gore (Bush); Bush or Kerry (Bush); Obama or McCain (Obama); Obama or Romney (Obama!); Trump or Clinton (?); Biden or Trump (Biden); Biden or Trump . . . I think things like the economy can overcome likeability, but likeability is really important.
You make a good point, and I don’t think you are straying from the subject at all.
Though for your HW Bush vs Dukakis the answer was no for both. Trump vs HRC it was ? versus no, so a (smaller) win for Trump.
Note that both my edits only buttress your case.
It also gets simpler if you clearly focus the question to be “who would the average working class or middle class person want to have a beer with”?
And I’m not sure I agree with you on Obama vs McCain. You can make the strong case that for the white working class the answer there was McCain, given that Obama talked and acted more elitist than McCain. But for that election the influx of black voters overrode. So for me it’s Obama 2008 that is the (understandable and explicable) exception to the rule.
Especially Paul Krugman. A rich bourgeois writer using voodoo charts to tell working people that all is wonderful as the stock market hits new highs and others not up on the mountain struggle with rising costs for food cars electric and debt. The underplayed issue is the Pat with college tuition skyrocketing and buying a house more difficult the feeling for many is the American Dream is slipping away.
The culture war is just the old class war wearing a fancy new coat.
On the establishment side of the class war was the educated and wealthy while the other side featured the working class -- Marx's bourgeoisie and proletariat.
One the establishment side of the culture war is the educated and wealthy while the other side features the working class.
Same lineup. Different uniforms -- the political parties have rearranged themselves. They argue about different things, but the parties in conflict (in economic terms) never changed.
Try reading the article. Nate's point is that it's not the same lineup, that rich and working class voters are distributed more evenly between the two parties than any time in the past 50 years, and you have to fine-tune economic categories with social dimensions ("white working class," "college-graduate high earners) to see strong party affiliation.
The other poster is correlating education with wealth and Nate's point is that is less true and that the former matters a lot more than the latter. Republicans like to pretend this is not true and that education = wealth = elite, because by that logic they are the party of the 'common man' (and yeah it's definitely a man).
Regardless of the correlation to wealth though, if you remove the center variable from your equation, it is completely valid today: education=elite. The path into the PMC runs through a 4-year degree. The path to the elite runs through an Ivy graduate school. Not everyone who takes on the latter secures the former (there are Ivy graduates working as baristas), but 95% of those who make it into elite-status got there by means of "the right" education.
These frustrated elite-aspirants (to use Peter Turchin's term), the college graduates stuck in dead-end jobs, are who I believe (and Nate appears to as well) will shift more conservative in the coming decade. The wealthy & educated waxing on about white-privilege and bespoke-floral-genitalia is just too disconnected from the practical concerns of someone who went to an expensive graduate school only to end up asking, "whole or soy milk?"
Of course, that's conditioned on the Bush/Cheney/Haley blueblood/chamber of commerce sect not regaining control of the GOP again.
But it has always been true that education has been necessary to enter the PMC or professions like medicine and law. Has something changed in the last 50 years either in that fact, or in the proportion of upper income Americans that are PMC? I'm not sure, would love to see data, but I'd guess it's about the same. Most of our richest people are inherited wealth or some-college entrepreneurs. So what's your point apart from you enjoy drawing spiteful stereotypes of liberals? Many wealthy people are highly educated pmc types, and many are not, same as over the past century.
There is no doubt that the proportion of upper income Americans that are PMC has increased over the last 50 years. The tech boom and the wealth it has created alone would cause that to be the case, coupled with the decline of small business retail owners, coupled with the general increase in high-paying PMC jobs - including in government and in corporate America.
By the way, a seldom-mentioned fact: a very large fraction of the so-called hollowing out of the middle class has been caused by the fact that a larger number of people are in the upper-middle class than before; comparatively little of it is folks moving from the middle class to the lower-middle class or poor class.
All that said, I make no claims as to exactly how big the increase has been, and I too would be interested in seeing the data.
You're confusing the "political parties" with the sides of the conflict. Nate admits that we're in the middle of a political party realignment, thus the political parties happen to be less correlated with economic class right now. But that won't persist if working class voters will continue to shift GOP. As he says, 2024 may well be the first year the Democrats win the wealthy and the GOP wins the working class.
So while the names of the generals have changed, and actual parties engaged in conflict are still grouped economically. The people screaming against unions in the 1920's were the wealthy and educated who called themselves Republicans. The people screaming about white privilege and trans rights and heteronormativity today are the wealthy and educated who call themselves Democrats. New label but same stuff in the can.
Brian, if you want to make it about economic class, then what you are not acknowledging is that the Democrat Party is now explicitly the party of the top 20%-30% (the elites) and the bottom 10%-15%, while the Republican Party is now the party of the broad middle.
In his otherwise very good piece, Nate often (but not always) blurs the distinction between “the poor” at the bottom and the working class / “working poor” a rung above them on the economic class ladder.
And nowhere is this shift clearer than in the very large move of working Hispanics away from the Dems and towards the GOP.
That alignment of economic “elites” at the top with the poor at the bottom is very new and very different from an economic perspective than ever before in the U.S. at least.
You may be correct about that, Andy. I am thinking of the working poor, not multigenerational welfare poverty. I'd like to think the split-tail distribution you're talking about can't hold, but it may be more stable than I realize.
If "a lot more stuff changes" is defined as "a continuation of a trend that Nate identifies as having been going on for 20 years", you are absolutely correct.
For the trend to continue, economic class would have to trump culture. Black and Latino poor and working class people would have to join team R in droves, and non-college upper income people would haveto become Democrats. This COULD happen. But, since the title of Nate's post is "How Culture Trumps Economic Class..." I'd say it's definitely misrepresenting his argument to say economic class WILL trump culture.
Let me simplify: The average person judges the economy by a very simple standard:
Has the cost of food, gas, and housing risen faster or slower than their paycheck? Those three items are both largest expenses for the average person, and they are expenses they pay for daily, weekly and monthly, so those three expenses are constantly in their faces.
And for the average person those three items have risen faster than their paychecks. Democrats quoting statistics to try to tell people they are wrong (or clueless) just makes people angry. People KNOW whether their paychecks have kept up or not.
Democrats greatest obstacle this fall will be Republicans asking the famous question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The average person will decide their answer on just those three items: Food, Gas & Housing.
I don't think the paycheck matters as much as the costs when assessing "the economy" for the average person. Someone makes more money than they did last year, and that feels like a personal achievement. They got a new job, or a raise, or whatever, because they worked hard and earned it themselves. That's a personal story, not an economic story. They're unlikely to credit politicians or the wider economy for this. But if the price of a loaf of bread went up, that's not their fault at all, that affects everybody, so that's the economy's fault, and now current politicians are going to get blamed. Even if I'm making more money accounting for inflation than last year, that just means that my individual achievements (earning more money) have been undercut by the economy (things cost more).
The theory of the "vibecession" is not about some academic numbers on a chart technically showing a good economy which is not felt by real people. Most people get that "the economy" is not about their personal situation and can parse the difference out. If I get fired and suffer an expensive injury, I know my current financial situation is bad, but I don't assume the whole economy is bad because of that. The vibecession theory is about the fact that inequality decreased and most people self-report being in a good situation personally, while also thinking the wider economy still sucks.
Low gasoline prices were one factor weighing in Hillary’s favor in 2016…except low energy costs are no longer necessarily good for America as we are the biggest energy producer in the world. So the 2016 mini recession was really an energy slowdown and even though unemployment didn’t rise at a national level the companies that supply frackers with equipment were cutting jobs. Those equipment manufacturers just happened to be in the Rust Belt.
Everyone is angry about political disfunction and corruption. Low information voters flock to the republican party whose mantra is "government is the problem". It's as simple as that.
The Supreme Court gave us this mess via Citizens United and related decisions. Big Money in politics leads to extremism via big budget negative advertising. Big Money also leads to corruption. We need to tax the rich to reverse inequality and we need to pass a Constitutional amendment that clarifies that only people have inalienable rights and money is not the same thing as speech. Easy Peasy! ;-)
I was listening to Morning Joe and he blamed Dobbs on Trump…McConnell gets credit/blame for Dobbs because he prevented Miers and Garland from being seated and he manipulated Trump to get Kavanaugh. Btw, even if Bush maybe didn’t want Roe overturned when he was president he was the individual that got Kavanaugh across the finish line by personally calling Collins and urging her to vote for his confirmation…Trump apparently wanted to pull his nomination. Also, Democrats shouldn’t have even attended hearings for Kavanaugh because of all the crazy partisan things he’s been associated with like Brooks Brothers riot and waterboarding.
Interesting observation. If Biden hangs on to WI, MI, and PA and drops NV, AZ, and GA — which doesn’t seem like a crazy scenario, then NE-02 could give him the 270-268 win.
Anyone in the bottom third of the economy is probably disproportionately concerned with the cost of food and housing because a far greater share of their income is devoted to those categories compared to wealthier cohorts. And the last I checked food and housing were outpacing the general index for inflation.
Food inflation over the last 12 months is actually a bit lower than general inflation (2.2% vs 3.2%), but housing is quite a lot worse, at 5.7% year-over-year. Another point for "the housing theory of everything"!
Yeah housing is a killer. I’m fortunately okay on that front but the prices I see are eye bulging in most big cities and it’s only going to get worse if bad policies and NIMBYism continues.
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of the increase in housing costs in the inflation numbers is due to owners’ equivalent rents - which homeowners are not actually paying.
If you’ve locked in a long term mortgage at a low rate and don’t plan to move, your housing costs as a share of your income should go down over time.
So basically, low-income homeowners are better off than the numbers suggest, while low-income renters are possibly worse off.
An overly nerdy (and incomplete) view: I'm a homeowner with a long term, low rate, fixed mortgage who has no plans to move. You know what has gone significantly up with the significant increase in value of my home? PROPERTY TAXES as well as my mortgage and homeowners insurance.
Fair point, although you can’t exactly blame that on “bad policies” in big cities.
I was simply pointing out that housing inflation also affects home owners with long term fixed mortages.
The period from the middle of 2021 through the first half of 2023 though--ouch.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/
2020 was actually worse, relative to core inflation.
Worst single month was November 2022, where food inflation was 3.9 points worse than all inflation (10.4 vs 6.5 annualized), but 2020 was 1.23 for all inflation and 3.42 for food, a diff of 2.19. 2022 had a diff of 1.9.
Yeah, but who cares about 2 points over 1.5 core. 10+ on the other hand? There's a reason people are on edge right now and it's because they've been primed by large price increases in the recent past.
I think it makes a lot more sense to divide the electorate into segments rather than treat it as a monolith. And it simply makes deep intuitive sense to me that the working poor and middle class will be far more concerned with inflation simply because they are far more impacted by inflation.
Plus it is most likely that these variables/factors aren't completely independent. Josh Kraushaar posted on Twitter something like "Inflation has been rocket fuel for the ongoing shift of Hispanic voters to the GOP".
I didn't really get into it here because article was running long, but perceptions of immigration potentially vary a lot by economic class, too.
What does "perceptions of immigration" mean? Biden has let in ~10 million illegals, many of whom are given free housing, food, and cash in Democrat sanctuary cities. Taxpaying citizens resent this along with the criminal element - a mob of migrants beating up NYPD officers in Times Square is the most prominent of many examples.
AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberals) are the cultural base of the Democrat party and vote 70% blue. Carville called them "preachy women". They are insulated from the consequences of their virtue signaling and policies. Abortion is their holy cause above all other topics like disastrous inflation, open borders, and foreign policy.
The cities and suburbs run by AWFL culture are deteriorating, yet we cannot criticize them due to woke gender and race intersectionality shielding: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/awfl-dei-karen-affluent-white-female-liberal
How weird that a demographic (women) would care about a policy (abortion) that deeply affects their personal lives and their future economic prospects!
This old canard. Red states have higher homicide rates than blue states, even when you remove large blue cities within red states. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
This is the infamous “That Map Again” issue.
This artefact of the data appears because the Deep South “red states” have extremely high black populations. The relationship between violent crime and black population is almost a straight line.
There's a strong relationship between *poverty level* and homicide rate. You can see on the maps that this includes Deep South states but also Hispanic areas like the Southwest, Native American reservations, and very white regions of West Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma. See this visual comparison: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/z9j370/race_vs_homicide_rate_vs_poverty_rate/
“Perceptions of immigration” vary because in one economic class, immigrants directly compete for you with jobs, while in another economic class, immigrants helpfully provide lower-cost labor for either your industry or your household.
The Democratic party doesn't have a base. While Republicans do, which sets activist priorities and whose loyalty can even be used to rarely pivot leftward on issues such as Trump did on abortion in the 2024 primary, Democrats really don't have that structure. It's not clear to me the cohort you described makes up even 10% of the Democratic party. Black Americans make up maybe 25% of it? They're not the party's base either. No one group is.
The suburbs are doing quite well in America. Rising property values are an underrated salve, and are partly why the exurbs on the West Coast and New England vote center-left on net like the suburbs outside major cities for the US and Canada. Property values have gone up for them, unlike most exurbs in red states. The cities can run out of money for asylum seekers, but until the local tax rates or property values change, many suburbanites will likely vote on their cultural values. While depending on the industry they work in, that is leaning Dem a little these days.
Yes, yes, yes to your first descriptor. My husband, who didn't finish high school and got his GED, had grown up in a trucking family. He knows trucks (semis) inside and out. It's skilled labor and he made it his business to be the best in the SW. He was earning close to $200,000 a year before he quit to start his own business. (I know! Everyone, including our accountant, is always SHOCKED to hear this.) So, what you have is someone without any kind of "educated" credentials earning more than most of those who have them. He only judges by his life experience. He never voted until Trump came along, but something about Trump made him feel comfortable about his less-educated status because Trump is a rich guy that doesn't sound like he hates the working class. That's the problem with the Dems. How long did they think they could trash the non-educated and not be offending their traditional bases?
Where are people getting this idea of Dems "trashing" uneducated people? Can you link to examples of speeches or statements made by prominent Democrats (governors, presidential candidates, senators, representatives etc.) who are mocking or demeaning people for not having a university education or for being working class?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/opinion/biden-trump-working-class.html
The priorities are the answer to your question. If you want more examples, you can read through The Liberal Patriot substack. Most reliable Dems are now College Educated Liberal White Women who aren't married. Those people don't represent middle or working class values.
I can't read this pay walled article because I don't have a subscription. Referencing an entire blog is also very vague. Is there an article in particular with a quote like this?
From your description, it already sounds like you don't actually think they've been "trashing the non educated". All you're saying is that educated white women vote Democrat, which doesn't in any way mean they are trashing the working class. Elderly black people are also and extremely reliable demographic for the Democrats, but that also doesn't really tell me they've been derogatory to any group who is not them. If you want to argue they're not adequately catering to the white working class then that's one thing, but saying they're actively disparging them is something else entirely.
It seems to me that you don't actually want an answer. There are tons and tons of articles from Dems themselves. All you have to do is Google. Not to mention, you can actively look at policies and decide if they are aimed at the middle-class. Spoiler: they aren't. The active war against free speech, nuclear family, rural America, classification of domestic terrorists, equity over equality, etc are proof enough on their own. If I were the only person who thought this, you wouldn't have asked why everyone keeps saying this. Inflation hit the middle-class the hardest. Why? They are poor enough to get government money nor rich enough for it not to matter. They pay the bulk of taxes. Marriage is important to the middle-class. So are certain values. This isn't a me issue. This is everywhere. So, you are basically saying none of this is true while also saying everyone in the middle-class thinks it is. So, you seem to be someone who wants me to answer what you believe and I can't do that. You can look at wealth by party if you want. Exit polls. There is a shift in Dems from low income voters to high income voters. Don't take my word for it. If you want to find out, there's plenty of evidence, but I don't plan to be your researcher today. Have a good one. I'm done with this conversation because it's a waste of my time.
I'm aware it's a right-wing meme, and it obviously is perpetuated because it serves Republicans, I just haven't seen any evidence of it and it would be quite shocking to see any politician of any persuasion trashing the working class or people who do not have a university education (unlike the upper class, who are very popular to trash by all). I've heard of people who believe in Qanon or homeopathy too, but that doesn't mean they aren't baseless. Not only have you still not provided any examples (and neither did Google) of any Democrat politicians trashing the working class, you've now switched to talking about the middle class (and no, not everyone in either the middle or working class unanimously agrees with all of the things that you find important either, which is why each party gets at least 45% in every bracket in both 2020 and 2024 as per the article above).
I'm assuming you don't haves examples of anyone belittling the working or middle class, because you would have given one by now, and this is sort of just a vibe you get that can't be substantiated. That's OK, you can keep having that vibe, and I can continue not having it since I've seen nothing to support it.
Just because you label something right-wing doesn't mean it's not happening, as we've seen with the shifting in voter sentiment from 2020 to 2024. I don't know about Q anon stuff.
It's the word trashing we disagree on. I don't necessarily mean they are stupid enough to say aloud what they think very often. I mean, trashing a way of life as backward and uneducated.
What about mocking and goading Christianity with Transgender Day?
How about the new book White Rural Rage that has been disavowed by the people whose quotes were used?
https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2020/cnn-anchor-don-lemons-unprofessional-laughing-fit-draws-president-trumps-ire-the-post-reverses-a-contentious-suspension-buzzfeeds-editor-leaves-for-nyt/
I suspect campaign finance plays a large role in this shift. Each party needs enough rich guys on its side to be able to compete.
I would like to see an analysis like this one, but for the role of gender in voter preferences. That seems like one of the most important dividing lines to me.
From my perspective, what’s developing are two, distinctly different American experiences:
(1) economically stable, obsessed with esoteric gender and race ideology; and,
(2) economically unstable, without the comfort (or interest) in an ideologically driven, humanities-based alternate reality of which all the things we once knew to be “true,” have been rapidly upended.
One has the ability to concern itself with trivialities, while the other is worrying about how they can afford to live, and what kind of cultural environment do they want to live in.
#1 is the perfect example of what Rob Henderson's book identifies as luxury beliefs.
And worried about quality of life aspects such as crime or what is being taught in their kids schools since they can’t afford private schooling
exaclty.
our collegiate class (for lack of a better term) can view politics as entirely in the realm of the symbolic (and/or "moral"), as all their basic needs (security, health, prosperity) are met and secured;
everyone else still views politics as about resources, benefits, jobs and taxes etc, aka the traditional political concerns about the national pie and who gets a slice.
it tracks almost perfectly with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
I think this is a completely unhelpful classification. There are many people who have money and do not care about gender and race ideology, and there are people who have little but do. I'm not sure if this is part of your calculation but there are also plenty of people on the right who care very deeply about gender and race ideology, just not in a supportive way, and some of them have money and others do not. I also think there are plenty of economically unstable college graduates who are saddled with debt, but whose social groups are still interested in progressive causes around LGBT and race issues.
John, of course not everyone neatly fits into one of two camps. There a millions of people who walk through life with their faces buried in Tik Tok, wholly unaware of most of their lives.
But if you can’t see politically, how two distinct camps of American existence, priorities and “lived experiences” 🙄have developed, I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention.
Good article and analysis. Also:
"You’d expect them to be a strongly Democratic voter with lefty politics and a Mastodon account."
Killed me.
Pretty good piece. And you are quite open that you are center-left and want Dems to win generally and Biden to win this year. That’s fine. But the crack about Reagan’s economics being “trickle down” is pure hard left progressive spin.
For someone who studied economics, and claims to be center-left not a leftist progressive, you should know better.
Can you explain the spin you are referring to? Are you saying that Reagan did not promote trickle-down economics (aka supply-side economics), or are you saying that supply-side economics does not primarily benefit the wealthy over the poor?
Reagan most definitely promoted supply-side economics, which emphasizes that supply creates demand.
And he certainly cut top marginal tax rates (and taxes overall), and of course that helped the wealthy. But it also helped ALMOST. EVERYONE. ELSE. TOO, in the medium run, and EVERYONE in the long run - most definitely including the poor - as was proven by the rise in GDP, average incomes and taxes collected over the last 15 years of the 20th century.
It is the use of the deliberately pejorative phrase “trickle down” that is hard leftist spin.
The use of such a term by someone who is either hard leftist or clueless about economics is both more understandable and more forgivable. But Nate explicitly claims to be neither.
Notice how you had to use rise in AVERAGE incomes? the median barely moved, because virtually all of the new wealth "created" under and after Reagan went straight to the top, the people he was benefitting. I agree that it's poor taste to call Reagan's economics "trickle down", because there was no trickle. The rich kept it and have been engorging themselves ever since.
Here is the data for you on *median* per capita income figures:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Median incomes went up significantly from 1981 to 2000. Almost 39%, in fact. Just as I'd suggested that Reagan supply-side economic policies delivered.
Median incomes were indeed fairly flat from 2000 - 2015. They finally meaningfully increase above the 2000 number only under Trump, although they do rebound from the W Bush-Obama 2012 lows at the tail end of Obama.
Yes, in your lifetime, Izzi, you are used to relatively punk median income increases, and I can see why that might be one reason you are so far to the left. But these numbers don't lie: real median incomes went up *substantially* from 1981 to 2000.
Sorry, your statement is simply false. What I said about averages applied to the median as well, though it is of course true the average went up even more than the median.
Of course it’s also true that health insurance costs and the value of employer-provided benefits have gone up a lot more then inflation in the last 4 decades, so they became a larger part of average and median incomes, and so the cash component of income has not gone up as fast as the total.
Unlike you, I don’t subscribe to the politics of envy. I am thrilled when the Sam Waltons and Jeff Bezoses get obscenely rich when in doing so they improve the standard of living of basically everyone, and in particular of the bottom 50% disproportionately in the case of Sam Walton.
But none of that detail changes the fact that median incomes went up substantially in the 20 years after Reagan’s economic policies were put into place. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
envy? it’s not me that envies them, it’s you. I have no desire for gluttonous amounts of wealth, but you worship those that extract value from laborers. May you one day set yourself free from the economic chains that bind you
"as was proven by the rise in GDP, average incomes and taxes collected over the last 15 years of the 20th century."
What are you talking about? GDP constantly rises in basically every country in the entire world for modern history except for like, the Soviet Union when they were getting actively genocided by the Nazis. If you look at annual growth rate (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-per-capita) it actually looks really bad for Reagan, lmao.
U.S. *REAL* growth rates in the 20 years after Reagan changed public policy (and HW Bush and Clinton more-or-less maintained it) were far higher than they were for the 15 years prior, and were higher than all *large* western economies in that time period.
If you misunderstand economics and are looking at only the *NOMINAL* growth rate bars in green at the link you sent, which indeed show large nominal yearly increases from the mid 1960s through 1981, that's on you.
(If you don't quite understand the difference between real and nominal growth then just look at the dollar values in the blue dots and ask yourself: as incredibly well as the U.S. economy has done over the last 62 years, you don't *really* think that the average income is up by 25x over that time period, and 6x since Reagan first took office, do you?!? Earlier today Izzi was claiming that it had barely risen at all in the last 40 years...)
Higher inflation was a bad thing that Reagan (together with Paul Volcker) fixed, and it had stayed fixed for about 40 years until Biden and his Fed caused it to get bad again
Again, entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.
> U.S. *REAL* growth rates in the 20 years after Reagan changed public policy (and HW Bush and Clinton more-or-less maintained it) were far higher than they were for the 15 years prior, and were higher than all *large* western economies in that time period.
Nope. I just went and took the data from the Fed's Real GDP per capita (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/), the average up to 1980 was 2.4% from 1948, 2.7% from 1960, 2.6% from 1965, and 2.2% from 1970. Meanwhile, the average since 1980 was 1.7% overall and 2.1% over the whole 1980-2000 period.
As you said, entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.
You'll forgive me that I don't take seriously the guy who first showed nominal numbers to make his point about real gdp.
You can't start from 1980 - that is still a Carter year! And I further said you gotta start a couple years later than that, because Reagan and Volcker first had to create a recession to break the back of Carter's (and LBJ/Nixon/Ford's) inflation.
So I said compare 1966 - 1981 to 1983-2000 (or 1983-2002 to be true to my 20-year statement).
That said, I do acknowledge there is something weird with the real GDP growth rate published numbers under Carter. They show fairly high, and I can't explain that. Partly they are the result of a low base rate after a recession under Nixon, but it can't be just that. I *speculate* - and it is only speculation - that it is partly to do with the difficulty in making adjustments in an era of high and increasing inflation, and also has to do with skyrocketing energy prices (and oil company revenue and profits) with some Real Estate and possibly even gold sales thrown in there, but I do not actually know the answer.
I do say with 100% certainty that not even liberal economists would claim we had a good economy in the late 1970s. And that even most liberal economists now acknowledge that the economy from 1982-2000 was pretty darn good, by far the best sustained period of the last 60 years.
And see here for the median (not mean, median) per-capita income figures, and they make my point more clearly:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
It shows median incomes going DOWN notably from 1974 to 1981, then up significantly from 1981 to 2000. Exactly as I'd suggested about the Reagan supply-side economic policies delivering the goods for almost all Americans.
Then median incomes are fairly flat from 2000 - 2015. They finally increase *meaningfully* above the 2000 number only under Trump, although they do rebound from the W Bush-Obama 2012 lows at the tail end of Obama.
I think it's more an example of Newspeak in action. The left has tried to completely control the words that can be used to think about a given issue. Nate using terms like this despite not being far left is like the proverbial fish who can't see the water because it's all he knows.
I think your point is very well taken in general. But Nate is both a very smart guy, and someone who has studied economics - which he repeated in this very essay! So I respectfully disagree with the fish in water analogy; imo he knew exactly that what he was saying was leftist spin.
Immigration policy or lack there of is an economic threat to traditional democratic voters as it is undocumented people who often take lower paying jobs and therefore threaten working people. A 4 year proposal by Biden will not makeup for three years of being deaf.
But Democratic voters of today are not “working people” is the point. Dem policies somewhat and rhetoric *completely* is actively agains the interests and values of what you call “traditional democratic voters”.
Wait what, African Americans and Latino are not working people who are traditionally strong Democrats?
So let’s be clear.
By numbers the white working class dwarfs the black working class, and historically has been much bigger than the Hispanic working class.
Further, by percentages, a higher proportion of lower income blacks and Hispanics are “the poor” or not working than for whites [again, looking at the bottom ~40% by income]
Finally, the poor in general and the black and Hispanic poor in particular were always and still are rock-solid core parts of the Democrat coalition. Very little has changed there. ‘Traditional democrat voters” is a phrase usually used to refer to working people *distinct from* those not working / receiving transfer payments as the large source of their income, even though if you want to be pedantic you can of course argue that technically the non-working poor have always been Democrat voters and hence can be considered “traditional” Democrat voters.
And so now having been much more explicit about terminology, the working people in the bottom 40% of incomes not getting a lot in terms of handouts distinct from the non-working people in the bottom 40% of incomes are indeed the ones where Dem policy has shifted meaningfully away from their interests, and for at least the white portion of those people where the rhetoric is completely against their values and interests.
And as Nate points out, working class blacks and Hispanics are moving away from the Dems substantially in the last 8 years, *especially* Hispanics. In fact, it’s not that much of a stretch to say that the Hispanic working class moving from Dems towards the GOP could well prove to be the difference in 2024.
Great piece. I think you can clearly see that the Democrats over the last ~20 years have become much more of a high-income party to reflect that their base is college graduates. Obama keeping the Bush tax cuts for anyone making <$400k and the student loan forgiveness being examples. I also think the GOP has shifted somewhat toward policies that are not as directed toward the middle/upper middle class, things like capping the SALT deduction in the 2017 tax cut. That is my baseline expectation for how the parties will behave going forward.
If you look at the economic policies recommended in something like Project 2025 (and those are the people Republicans will go to to staff an administration), it's strong evidence against this hypothesis.
Can you give an example of what you mean? I'm not familiar with Project 2025.
Good question! Andra Watkins has a substack which is entirely focused on reading Project 2025, which is the most prominent blueprint of policy guidance for the next Republican administration, and interpreting it for the average American. She comes from a background of having been raised as a Christian fundamentalist, but she's covering all aspects of Project 2025, and this week she is focusing on economic policy. I recommend checking out her posts. She keeps each day's post relatively brief so they are easy to read.
https://open.substack.com/pub/project2025istheocracy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=l0fb9
So I just got done reading this: https://project2025istheocracy.substack.com/p/project-2025-even-more-ways-to-screw
It is just a series of left wing talking points with nothing substantiating her claims. Nothing in here suggests the tax policies in Project 2025 are specifically beneficial to the middle/upper middle class, which is what I said in my initial comment. I wouldn't get your information on the implications of new tax policy from this author, this post comes off as pretty unhinged honestly.
Today's post was probably her angriest one yet, the most venting, I would definitely concede, but it's not the one I would start with. She's also a CPA who used to run companies before she pursued a career as a writer. Do note that she always cites their text though.
Her logic throughout the entire post is basically "the Republican's proposed tax plan is only good for millionaires/billionaires because it is a Republican tax plan", and I don't think I need to explain why that sort of analysis is useless.
It's pretty interesting that you forwarded this author because I think she is a great example of the outdated thinking that you see among a lot of commentators on the left. There are a whole lot of people who are stuck in the Reagan-GW Bush era of thinking, when trickle-down economics and tax cuts for the wealthy was the consensus. But the makeup of the parties has changed, as Nate details here. The Democratic Party is losing lower income workers and gaining higher income works. The Republican Party has seen the opposite. That is absolutely being reflected in the policies you are seeing from both parties, which was my original point.
I know this is straying from the subject, but there is the old "With whom would you rather have a drink?" adage: Jimmy Carter (no) or Gerald Ford (no); Reagan or Carter (Reagan); Reagan or Mondale (Reagan); Bush or Dukakis (Dukakis (the exception which proves the rule?)); Clinton or Bush (Clinton); Clinton or Dole (Clinton); Bush or Gore (Bush); Bush or Kerry (Bush); Obama or McCain (Obama); Obama or Romney (Obama!); Trump or Clinton (?); Biden or Trump (Biden); Biden or Trump . . . I think things like the economy can overcome likeability, but likeability is really important.
You make a good point, and I don’t think you are straying from the subject at all.
Though for your HW Bush vs Dukakis the answer was no for both. Trump vs HRC it was ? versus no, so a (smaller) win for Trump.
Note that both my edits only buttress your case.
It also gets simpler if you clearly focus the question to be “who would the average working class or middle class person want to have a beer with”?
And I’m not sure I agree with you on Obama vs McCain. You can make the strong case that for the white working class the answer there was McCain, given that Obama talked and acted more elitist than McCain. But for that election the influx of black voters overrode. So for me it’s Obama 2008 that is the (understandable and explicable) exception to the rule.
Especially Paul Krugman. A rich bourgeois writer using voodoo charts to tell working people that all is wonderful as the stock market hits new highs and others not up on the mountain struggle with rising costs for food cars electric and debt. The underplayed issue is the Pat with college tuition skyrocketing and buying a house more difficult the feeling for many is the American Dream is slipping away.
Very informative article. Nate, thank you for your work on this!
The culture war is just the old class war wearing a fancy new coat.
On the establishment side of the class war was the educated and wealthy while the other side featured the working class -- Marx's bourgeoisie and proletariat.
One the establishment side of the culture war is the educated and wealthy while the other side features the working class.
Same lineup. Different uniforms -- the political parties have rearranged themselves. They argue about different things, but the parties in conflict (in economic terms) never changed.
Try reading the article. Nate's point is that it's not the same lineup, that rich and working class voters are distributed more evenly between the two parties than any time in the past 50 years, and you have to fine-tune economic categories with social dimensions ("white working class," "college-graduate high earners) to see strong party affiliation.
The other poster is correlating education with wealth and Nate's point is that is less true and that the former matters a lot more than the latter. Republicans like to pretend this is not true and that education = wealth = elite, because by that logic they are the party of the 'common man' (and yeah it's definitely a man).
Historically, wealth and education were correlated but only loosely. So you're correct that in the 1920's the establishment was more wealth than education. That correlation has tightened in recent decades not relaxed: https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017/01/03/education-income-and-wealth
Regardless of the correlation to wealth though, if you remove the center variable from your equation, it is completely valid today: education=elite. The path into the PMC runs through a 4-year degree. The path to the elite runs through an Ivy graduate school. Not everyone who takes on the latter secures the former (there are Ivy graduates working as baristas), but 95% of those who make it into elite-status got there by means of "the right" education.
These frustrated elite-aspirants (to use Peter Turchin's term), the college graduates stuck in dead-end jobs, are who I believe (and Nate appears to as well) will shift more conservative in the coming decade. The wealthy & educated waxing on about white-privilege and bespoke-floral-genitalia is just too disconnected from the practical concerns of someone who went to an expensive graduate school only to end up asking, "whole or soy milk?"
Of course, that's conditioned on the Bush/Cheney/Haley blueblood/chamber of commerce sect not regaining control of the GOP again.
But it has always been true that education has been necessary to enter the PMC or professions like medicine and law. Has something changed in the last 50 years either in that fact, or in the proportion of upper income Americans that are PMC? I'm not sure, would love to see data, but I'd guess it's about the same. Most of our richest people are inherited wealth or some-college entrepreneurs. So what's your point apart from you enjoy drawing spiteful stereotypes of liberals? Many wealthy people are highly educated pmc types, and many are not, same as over the past century.
There is no doubt that the proportion of upper income Americans that are PMC has increased over the last 50 years. The tech boom and the wealth it has created alone would cause that to be the case, coupled with the decline of small business retail owners, coupled with the general increase in high-paying PMC jobs - including in government and in corporate America.
By the way, a seldom-mentioned fact: a very large fraction of the so-called hollowing out of the middle class has been caused by the fact that a larger number of people are in the upper-middle class than before; comparatively little of it is folks moving from the middle class to the lower-middle class or poor class.
All that said, I make no claims as to exactly how big the increase has been, and I too would be interested in seeing the data.
You're confusing the "political parties" with the sides of the conflict. Nate admits that we're in the middle of a political party realignment, thus the political parties happen to be less correlated with economic class right now. But that won't persist if working class voters will continue to shift GOP. As he says, 2024 may well be the first year the Democrats win the wealthy and the GOP wins the working class.
So while the names of the generals have changed, and actual parties engaged in conflict are still grouped economically. The people screaming against unions in the 1920's were the wealthy and educated who called themselves Republicans. The people screaming about white privilege and trans rights and heteronormativity today are the wealthy and educated who call themselves Democrats. New label but same stuff in the can.
Brian, if you want to make it about economic class, then what you are not acknowledging is that the Democrat Party is now explicitly the party of the top 20%-30% (the elites) and the bottom 10%-15%, while the Republican Party is now the party of the broad middle.
In his otherwise very good piece, Nate often (but not always) blurs the distinction between “the poor” at the bottom and the working class / “working poor” a rung above them on the economic class ladder.
And nowhere is this shift clearer than in the very large move of working Hispanics away from the Dems and towards the GOP.
That alignment of economic “elites” at the top with the poor at the bottom is very new and very different from an economic perspective than ever before in the U.S. at least.
You may be correct about that, Andy. I am thinking of the working poor, not multigenerational welfare poverty. I'd like to think the split-tail distribution you're talking about can't hold, but it may be more stable than I realize.
So, if a lot more stuff changes, your statements in the present tense will, at that later point, be true.
If "a lot more stuff changes" is defined as "a continuation of a trend that Nate identifies as having been going on for 20 years", you are absolutely correct.
For the trend to continue, economic class would have to trump culture. Black and Latino poor and working class people would have to join team R in droves, and non-college upper income people would haveto become Democrats. This COULD happen. But, since the title of Nate's post is "How Culture Trumps Economic Class..." I'd say it's definitely misrepresenting his argument to say economic class WILL trump culture.
Let me simplify: The average person judges the economy by a very simple standard:
Has the cost of food, gas, and housing risen faster or slower than their paycheck? Those three items are both largest expenses for the average person, and they are expenses they pay for daily, weekly and monthly, so those three expenses are constantly in their faces.
And for the average person those three items have risen faster than their paychecks. Democrats quoting statistics to try to tell people they are wrong (or clueless) just makes people angry. People KNOW whether their paychecks have kept up or not.
Democrats greatest obstacle this fall will be Republicans asking the famous question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The average person will decide their answer on just those three items: Food, Gas & Housing.
I don't think the paycheck matters as much as the costs when assessing "the economy" for the average person. Someone makes more money than they did last year, and that feels like a personal achievement. They got a new job, or a raise, or whatever, because they worked hard and earned it themselves. That's a personal story, not an economic story. They're unlikely to credit politicians or the wider economy for this. But if the price of a loaf of bread went up, that's not their fault at all, that affects everybody, so that's the economy's fault, and now current politicians are going to get blamed. Even if I'm making more money accounting for inflation than last year, that just means that my individual achievements (earning more money) have been undercut by the economy (things cost more).
The theory of the "vibecession" is not about some academic numbers on a chart technically showing a good economy which is not felt by real people. Most people get that "the economy" is not about their personal situation and can parse the difference out. If I get fired and suffer an expensive injury, I know my current financial situation is bad, but I don't assume the whole economy is bad because of that. The vibecession theory is about the fact that inequality decreased and most people self-report being in a good situation personally, while also thinking the wider economy still sucks.
Low gasoline prices were one factor weighing in Hillary’s favor in 2016…except low energy costs are no longer necessarily good for America as we are the biggest energy producer in the world. So the 2016 mini recession was really an energy slowdown and even though unemployment didn’t rise at a national level the companies that supply frackers with equipment were cutting jobs. Those equipment manufacturers just happened to be in the Rust Belt.
Everyone is angry about political disfunction and corruption. Low information voters flock to the republican party whose mantra is "government is the problem". It's as simple as that.
The Supreme Court gave us this mess via Citizens United and related decisions. Big Money in politics leads to extremism via big budget negative advertising. Big Money also leads to corruption. We need to tax the rich to reverse inequality and we need to pass a Constitutional amendment that clarifies that only people have inalienable rights and money is not the same thing as speech. Easy Peasy! ;-)
I was listening to Morning Joe and he blamed Dobbs on Trump…McConnell gets credit/blame for Dobbs because he prevented Miers and Garland from being seated and he manipulated Trump to get Kavanaugh. Btw, even if Bush maybe didn’t want Roe overturned when he was president he was the individual that got Kavanaugh across the finish line by personally calling Collins and urging her to vote for his confirmation…Trump apparently wanted to pull his nomination. Also, Democrats shouldn’t have even attended hearings for Kavanaugh because of all the crazy partisan things he’s been associated with like Brooks Brothers riot and waterboarding.
NE-02 may be extremely important in this election. It seems to be safe blue if the wealthy are in Biden's pocket.
Interesting observation. If Biden hangs on to WI, MI, and PA and drops NV, AZ, and GA — which doesn’t seem like a crazy scenario, then NE-02 could give him the 270-268 win.