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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics is that political parties exist to promote the material interests of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, as Democrats have become the party of high-income college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten the pocketbooks of those voters. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become commonplace on the right, where the expression awakened capital has become an insult to describe Democrats’ supposed loyalty to corporate America; Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance argued that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.

But as wealthier and more educated voters have shifted to Democrats, the party and its voters have become more, not less, economically progressive. They have largely united around an economic agenda that emphasizes helping the poor and the middle class, and around messages that put that agenda front and center. The richest Democrats have become just as economically left-leaning as their less wealthy members of their party, and far more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. American politics appears to have entered decisively into what might be called a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.

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

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However, over the past fifteen years the dynamic has changed dramatically. In 2008, the richest fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; in 2020, they formed the group most are likely to vote for the Democrats, by a margin of almost 15 points. (The Democrats won the the poorest fifth of voters by an equally large margin.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 richest congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 counties in terms of economic output. An equally drastic change occurred when looking at college education rather than income. Perhaps the most dramatic of all was the change among rich white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, the wealthiest 5 percent 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% became the group most likely to vote Democratic.

This newly educated and wealthy Democratic Party has not moved to the right on economic matters. Quite the contrary. After the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued a broad economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and the poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-kindergarten), and vast investments to create well-paying jobs in the regions left behind. These policies, if fully implemented, would have represented a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the proposed $4.5 trillion in new spending would have been financed by a series of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and more redistributive than anything Democrats have pursued since the 1960s or 1970s,” said Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale and co-author of a recent book. paper on the Democrats’ coalition change, told me. “This is not a party that pursues a”Brahmin is gone‘agenda. He pursues an incredibly progressive economic agenda.

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

A common complaint from the center and right is that the influx of affluent, highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has caused it to focus primarily on culture war issues rather than pocketbook economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party programs since 1980, they found that since the early 2000s, the share devoted to economic issues has continued to increase and that economic issues occupy twice as much space. more important than cultural issues. They came to a similar conclusion by looking at Twitter, where one would most expect to see party elites pandering to the cultural tastes of their base. They examined tweets from high-ranking Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the ten most frequently tweeted phrases focused on economic issues, such as Build Back Better, Affordable Care ActAnd American Rescue Plan; the only non-economic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (In contrast, only three of the ten most used phrases by Republicans referred to economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts were actually slightly more likely to discuss financial issues such as economy and health care than members of poor districts.

The policies and rhetoric of party leaders reflect the fact that wealthy liberals voters have moved to the left on economic issues. A middle finger investigation conducted after the 2020 election found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats in the top fifth of the income distribution favored raising the federal minimum wage, raising taxes on people earning more than $600,000 a year , eradicating college debt, and enacting Medicare for All. That’s 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 means that material interest is unimportant to well-off liberals. Some data suggests that while wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that directly affect them; they are also known to oppose the construction of new housing in their own neighborhoods that would make housing more affordable. But even these exceptions are less exceptional than they seem. According to the survey cited above, a slim majority of wealthier Democrats support raising taxes on people earning more than $250,000. And during this election season, Democratic Party leaders – including Harris and former President Barack Obama – have trumpeted their support to build more housing.

The leftward drift of high-ranking voters is in part the story of a true ideological conversion. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics and the media have paid much more attention to how the existing economic system has created inequality and hardship. Affluent and highly educated voters, who also tend to be most connected to national politics, appear to have responded to this shift by adopting more progressive economic views.

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The story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, many Democrats became convinced that the best way to win back disaffected working-class voters was to enact policies that would help them. Surveys consistently find that middle- and low-income Republicans strongly disagree with their own party’s leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.

The Biden program, shaped by these opinions, has largely produced the expected economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has narrowed, and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment have flowed into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are manufacturing a comeback. Politically, however, efforts to win back working-class voters appear to have failed: if polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is bleeding even more working-class support than in 2016 or 2020.

This failure appears to be partly because, when it comes to the economy, many voters are primarily concerned 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 other words, even if they don’t agree with Republican politicians on health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t see much of it. care about this disagreement. A recent paper by political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions going back decades and found that in the 1980s and 1990s, white voters without college degrees were more likely to vote in line with their economic views, which caused them to vote support the Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, this dynamic has reversed: non-college-educated white voters now place much greater importance on culture war issues than on economic issues, pushing them to support Republicans.

This realignment leaves both parties in a strange situation heading into November. Voters consistently say the economy is the most important issue in the 2024 election. And yet the wealthy overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris, whose administration has favored bold redistribution and big government spending, while a mass criticism from working-class voters favors Donald Trump, whose economic agenda was largely about cutting taxes for the rich and trying to kill affordable care. Act.

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