Contra Thomas Frank.
Princeton political scientist Larry Bartles has a paper using NES data since 1952 to refute the "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument. It also gives me a chance to bang on one of my how-to-win-elections hobbyhorses. Bartles writes:
I focus on four specific questions inspired by Frank's account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class "moral values" trump economics? Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is "no".
I think the paper really does pretty good evidence against Frank's "great backlash" argument, and the idea that lower-income whites form a "new poltiical coalition" with wealthy whites to elect Republicans. In fact, white people in the lower third of the income distribution vote Democrat in roughly the same percentages they always have (about 50%), which is higher than more affluent whites (around to 40%). The trend away from partisan identification with the Dems has also been slighly greater among richer than poorer whites, and among the latter group, the trend has been confined almost exclusively to the south, and has been a fairly steady process since the late 60s; there's no acceleration accompanying the rise of the DLC.
But what's most interesting to me is Bartles' measurements of the respective relevance of social and economic issues to white voters. Using a probit analysis with the dependent variable being a binary for voting Democrat, he finds that economic or material issues have trumped social issues, including abortion, as vote determinants in every presidential election in the last quarter century, for every income category of white voters, and especially for the lower third of earners. For instance, Bartles finds that beliefs about abortion were 40% less determinant of a lower-income white person's presidential vote between 1984 and 2004 than the person's support for government jobs, and 80% less determinant for a lower-income sample limited to the 2004 election. Further, though social concerns have been increasing relative to economic concerns over time, the increase has been mainly concentrated among the middle and top thirds of earners, with lower-income whites still prefering liberal economics to conservative "values".
This doesn't necessarily refute Frank's central claim that lower-income whites are voting their "social conscience" because Democrats aren't talking to them convincingly about bread and butter. It could suggest that it would be relatively easy for the Dems to sway these voters with a populist-lite message (maybe the Dems will nominate John Edwards in 2008 and we'll find out. Since I'm coming to really like Edwards, I wish I was less skeptical generally of this strategy.) But, nevertheless, Bartles' numbers do give some confirmation to my basic belief that, contra the DLC's advice, Dem candidates should not shun or pussyfoot around on social issues. They should be loudly and proudly pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-civil rights.
My reasoning is as follows: voters who might swing just don't care about these things; it's only a small hard core that base their votes on these issues, and by preaching the gospel on pluralism -- even the tougher bits like tolerance for abortion doctors -- Dems motivate their activists while not really turning anybody off who might have been tempted by their wider message. (Ross Perot, the only successful third party candidate of our era, was pro-choice for God's sake. Nobody voted for or against Perot because of his abortion views.) Abstracting from national security, what voters do care about, that the NES data Bartles uses can't capture with the specific questions Bartles pulls out, is candidate character. Voters want to trust and relate to the guy for whom they pull the lever, and Republicans can literally elect a chimp if they can drive the Democratic candidate's negatives high enough. When Dems take a stand on the issues that define them -- and pluralism is the great Democratic issue; once Tom Tancredo lunges into the limelight in the GOP primary, that will become even more so -- they explain who they are, what they stand for. They sound tough and principled. That's what everyone -- left, right, center -- seems to agree is the main thing Dems need to do to gain that little extra bit of traction that would put us over the top nationally.
When the DLC (for instance) instructs Dems to stake out the third way on abortion, they phrase it as a way of pandering to the yokels, trying to pretend we're folksy, like them. But in fact it's the relatively wealthy, who have more time and some material comfort on their hands, who get worked up over abortion and gay marriage. Pandering on these social issues is one more pander to the affluent, to the power class. It can't be defended as a sop to the long-departed New Deal base, those who really needed the transfers. (Granted, this is based on the white vote; blacks, who are the most integral component of the Dem base, are not considered here. But even if blacks are generally more culturally conservative than whites, it's hard to believe they put more weight than their white counterparts on social over economic issues, particularly at the bottom of the income distribution.)
How to frame an economic populism that sounds neither like treacly noblesse oblige (Edwards on a bad day) nor divisive interest group politics (Gore on a bad day) is still an open question, and not one I think has an easy answer. But the idea that Dems should fudge their cultural liberalism so the yokels will hear us out on the minimum wage is, in my opinion, misguided.
Note: I found this paper via Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor in Chief, and the only person I read beside Eric Alterman, at The Nation. Since this isn't the most Nation-ish study in its tone and conclusions, it's commendable that she's so positive about promoting it.
Note 2: I need to add MyDD to my blogroll since it's probably the most indespensable site for left-leaning US political junkies. Chris Bowers and Scott Shields are awesome. And Chris has a great rant on the conclusions from the Bartles study and a related one with which I wholly agree.
I focus on four specific questions inspired by Frank's account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class "moral values" trump economics? Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is "no".
I think the paper really does pretty good evidence against Frank's "great backlash" argument, and the idea that lower-income whites form a "new poltiical coalition" with wealthy whites to elect Republicans. In fact, white people in the lower third of the income distribution vote Democrat in roughly the same percentages they always have (about 50%), which is higher than more affluent whites (around to 40%). The trend away from partisan identification with the Dems has also been slighly greater among richer than poorer whites, and among the latter group, the trend has been confined almost exclusively to the south, and has been a fairly steady process since the late 60s; there's no acceleration accompanying the rise of the DLC.
But what's most interesting to me is Bartles' measurements of the respective relevance of social and economic issues to white voters. Using a probit analysis with the dependent variable being a binary for voting Democrat, he finds that economic or material issues have trumped social issues, including abortion, as vote determinants in every presidential election in the last quarter century, for every income category of white voters, and especially for the lower third of earners. For instance, Bartles finds that beliefs about abortion were 40% less determinant of a lower-income white person's presidential vote between 1984 and 2004 than the person's support for government jobs, and 80% less determinant for a lower-income sample limited to the 2004 election. Further, though social concerns have been increasing relative to economic concerns over time, the increase has been mainly concentrated among the middle and top thirds of earners, with lower-income whites still prefering liberal economics to conservative "values".
This doesn't necessarily refute Frank's central claim that lower-income whites are voting their "social conscience" because Democrats aren't talking to them convincingly about bread and butter. It could suggest that it would be relatively easy for the Dems to sway these voters with a populist-lite message (maybe the Dems will nominate John Edwards in 2008 and we'll find out. Since I'm coming to really like Edwards, I wish I was less skeptical generally of this strategy.) But, nevertheless, Bartles' numbers do give some confirmation to my basic belief that, contra the DLC's advice, Dem candidates should not shun or pussyfoot around on social issues. They should be loudly and proudly pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-civil rights.
My reasoning is as follows: voters who might swing just don't care about these things; it's only a small hard core that base their votes on these issues, and by preaching the gospel on pluralism -- even the tougher bits like tolerance for abortion doctors -- Dems motivate their activists while not really turning anybody off who might have been tempted by their wider message. (Ross Perot, the only successful third party candidate of our era, was pro-choice for God's sake. Nobody voted for or against Perot because of his abortion views.) Abstracting from national security, what voters do care about, that the NES data Bartles uses can't capture with the specific questions Bartles pulls out, is candidate character. Voters want to trust and relate to the guy for whom they pull the lever, and Republicans can literally elect a chimp if they can drive the Democratic candidate's negatives high enough. When Dems take a stand on the issues that define them -- and pluralism is the great Democratic issue; once Tom Tancredo lunges into the limelight in the GOP primary, that will become even more so -- they explain who they are, what they stand for. They sound tough and principled. That's what everyone -- left, right, center -- seems to agree is the main thing Dems need to do to gain that little extra bit of traction that would put us over the top nationally.
When the DLC (for instance) instructs Dems to stake out the third way on abortion, they phrase it as a way of pandering to the yokels, trying to pretend we're folksy, like them. But in fact it's the relatively wealthy, who have more time and some material comfort on their hands, who get worked up over abortion and gay marriage. Pandering on these social issues is one more pander to the affluent, to the power class. It can't be defended as a sop to the long-departed New Deal base, those who really needed the transfers. (Granted, this is based on the white vote; blacks, who are the most integral component of the Dem base, are not considered here. But even if blacks are generally more culturally conservative than whites, it's hard to believe they put more weight than their white counterparts on social over economic issues, particularly at the bottom of the income distribution.)
How to frame an economic populism that sounds neither like treacly noblesse oblige (Edwards on a bad day) nor divisive interest group politics (Gore on a bad day) is still an open question, and not one I think has an easy answer. But the idea that Dems should fudge their cultural liberalism so the yokels will hear us out on the minimum wage is, in my opinion, misguided.
Note: I found this paper via Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor in Chief, and the only person I read beside Eric Alterman, at The Nation. Since this isn't the most Nation-ish study in its tone and conclusions, it's commendable that she's so positive about promoting it.
Note 2: I need to add MyDD to my blogroll since it's probably the most indespensable site for left-leaning US political junkies. Chris Bowers and Scott Shields are awesome. And Chris has a great rant on the conclusions from the Bartles study and a related one with which I wholly agree.
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