How Democrats Became the Party of the Upper Middle Class

When House Democrats introduced what they call the Heroes Act this month, they described it as “a bold and comprehensive coronavirus response bill that will meet the challenge this pandemic poses to our nation.” Among its provisions: restoring the full deductibility of state and local taxes, which the Republican tax legislation of 2017 had limited.

The issue doesn’t have much to do with the coronavirus. There’s only a loose relationship between the states hardest hit by it and the states whose residents have faced the most tax increases because of the deductibility limit. Liberal think tanks have criticized the idea of raising the cap, noting that 56% of its benefits would flow to the top 1% of households, and 80% would go to the top 5%.

Repealing the cap is nonetheless a party priority. After House Democrats impeached President Donald Trump on Dec. 18, it was the first order of business they took up. They passed full deductibility on Dec. 19.

As Democrats have kept raising the issue, Republicans have taken pleasure in pointing out that the politicians who usually decry budget-busting tax cuts for the rich were in this case demanding some.

Most observers treated this inversion of the usual partisan rhetoric about the rich as an anomaly. Democrats are, after all, willing to raise taxes on high earners and the wealthy in other ways. Some of the same people who would benefit from a bigger deduction for state and local taxes would get hit by the higher capital-gains taxes that Democrats seek.

But the Democrats’ solicitude for the interests of the affluent in this case may not be the aberration it appears to be. It reflects the party’s long-term movement up the socioeconomic ladder — and shows why Democrats may find it impossible to reclaim their historical identity as a working-class party.

In U.S. politics today, class is more a function of formal education than of income. The two are of course linked. College graduates on average earn more than those who attended college but received no college degree, and they in turn make a little more than those who never went. Over time, schooling has become relatively more important in voting behavior and money less so.

In the 2008 election, Republican John McCain did 11 points better among voters making more than $50,000 a year than among voters making less than that. He did one point better among those with college degrees than those without. By 2016, education had become a sharper dividing line between the parties. Trump did seven points better among those making more than $50,000 than among those making less. He did nine points better among those who lacked college degrees than among those who have them.

Most nonwhite Americans vote for Democrats regardless of diploma (or income). What underlies the new educational divide is a marked change in the preferences of white voters.

In exit polling from 2008 to 2016, the Republican advantage among white voters without college degrees widened greatly. McCain won them over Barack Obama by 58% to 40%, while Trump won them over Hillary Clinton by 66% to 29%.

White voters with college degrees, meanwhile, have moved toward the Democrats. They used to be a reliably Republican group. In the 2018 House elections, they voted for Democratic candidates, 53% to 45%.

The Trump presidency is both an effect and a likely accelerant of this trend. It goes far beyond him. The French economist Thomas Piketty has documented that in the U.K. and France as well as in the U.S., the same pattern has held. After World War II, the voters without college degrees voted to the left of voters with them. Over time, though, voters with degrees have become the more left-wing group.

This swap of voters poses several problems for the traditional left in the U.S. The most basic is that the resulting coalition for relatively left-wing parties is not large enough. The support of the working class allowed the New Deal coalition to dominate American politics. These days, even when the Democratic Party attains a majority, it is a thin one that is clustered in large cities in a way that reduces its political power.

The changed class basis of the party also constrains it on economic policy: Many of the upper-middle-class suburbanites who are an increasing share of its voters recoil at the prospect of tax increases and losing their private health insurance. Less concretely but perhaps more distressingly for the left’s true believers, the shift erodes the moral credibility of their historical self-presentation as the champion of the downtrodden.

One Democratic response to declining support from the white working class has been to write it off. The rationales for this choice are varied. These voters might be impossible to win back. Trying might require compromises on issues of race and sex that progressives would find intolerable.

And they are a shrinking proportion of the overall electorate. Better, many Democrats thought during the Obama years, to pin the party’s hopes on a “coalition of the ascendant” or “rising American electorate” of nonwhites, who were growing in numbers, and young college-educated whites, who were growing in liberalism.

Other Democrats have tried a different tack: attempting to appeal to working-class whites by moving left, and populist, on economics while sidelining social issues. The theory here, tracing back to Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, is that Republicans have used abortion, guns, immigration and other divisive issues to distract working-class voters from pursuing their economic interests.

According to this line of thinking, Republicans since the 1970s have also shrunk the power of unions by changing labor laws and weakening their enforcement. As union membership has dwindled, so has the class consciousness needed to sustain a working-class Democratic Party.

Neither strategy — abandoning the white working class or using economics to court it — has proved notably successful. The first one led to what was arguably the central mistake of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign: banking on the hypothetical voters of the future at the cost of not winning enough of the actual voters of the present. When you write a group off, it starts to write you off, too.

The second one was undermined by the failure of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. If he had consistently won large majorities among white working-class voters, it would have vindicated the left-populist theory behind his candidacy. In the end, he did worse than former Vice President Joe Biden — as establishmentarian a figure as imaginable, with a long record of chumminess with corporations — in several states. Nor did the Vermont senator generate the increased turnout that his allies predicted.

As Eric Levitz pointed out in an incisive analysis of the class dynamics of the Democratic Party, Sanders’s socialist profile didn’t improve his standing among working-class whites in the general electorate, either. They rejected him by roughly the same margins they reject other Democrats.

The assumptions behind the Sanders political strategy lend themselves to pessimism about its future. Take the view that the decline of unions has been a disaster for the left. Unions and their supporters are too quick to blame that decline on changes in labor policy. The percentage of American workers who belong to a union peaked in the 1950s, and there is some evidence that much of the decline was the result of non-unionized companies outperforming their unionized competitors in creating or keeping jobs.

Whatever the explanation for the decline, though, it is not at all clear how to reverse it. The last time the Democrats made a big push to make it easier for unions to organize, when they had both houses of Congress and the presidency a decade ago, they failed. Republicans said the unions were trying to abolish secret-ballot elections, and they do not appear to have paid any electoral price for opposing the pro-union legislation.

It is probably also correct to say that left-wing economics has wider potential appeal than cultural progressivism. But it’s not as though Democrats can simply flip a switch and make U.S. politics once again turn on economic rather than cultural and moral issues.

To the extent we still think of a politics based on economic interests as the “normal” state of American life, and a culture-based politics as strange, it is because the middle of the 20th century still looms so large in our imagination. But that period was an unusual one in American history. Over its full course, cultural affinity and moral views have often come before economic motivations for voters.

Economics was already starting to fade as a dividing line in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson explicitly attempted to reorient government toward the subtle ailments that came along widespread abundance. The Great Society, he explained, is “a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Johnson would surely not have predicted that in American politics decades later, views on abortion would be a better predictor of voting behavior than views on the minimum wage. But as the destitution of the Great Depression and the unity of World War II receded into memory, politics would become less materialistic and more divisive.

The cultural issues are what interest and excite a lot of today’s Democrats. It’s why they’re Democrats (just as it’s why many Republicans are Republicans). A Democratic Party organized around left-populist economics would have to tolerate, even nurture, a socially conservative wing. It is not at all clear that Democratic activists and voters would put up with one.

Sanders’s own evolution over the course of his presidential campaigns suggests that he did not believe that a heavily economics-based message was capable of winning the nomination given the Democrats’ current coalition. He switched his position on immigration, making peace with the party’s current hostility to enforcement. Early overtures toward Democrats who were left-wing on economics but opposed to abortion went nowhere. Racial justice became a more prominent theme.

Some of these moves were surely designed, in part, to increase Sanders’s anemic appeal to African-American Democrats. But they also reflected the truth that the progressive Democrats a left-wing candidacy would need tend to be white. The “awokening” of white Democrats is in part a consequence of the realignment of white voters along cultural lines. Socially conservative whites have largely left the Democratic Party and socially liberal whites joined it, while nonwhites of varying views on social issues are mostly Democrats.

The result is that today’s white Democrats routinely register more progressive views, even on racial issues, than blacks or Hispanics do. The audience within the party for a politics that mutes or moderates on social issues keeps dwindling. So does the proportion of Democratic politicians who represent places where that kind of politics would work.

Which is not to deny that voters’ economic interests have their effect, too. One reason Democratic voters’ views have shifted on immigration is that fewer of them regard themselves as potential competitors with immigrants and more of them as potential employers of immigrants.

Here we come to one more barrier between working-class whites and the Democratic Party: The party’s economic agenda, even on its left wing, increasingly reflects the priorities of its new upper-middle-class supporters.

It’s not just the state-and-local tax deduction. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has been trying to assure America’s middle class that it has no plans to raise taxes — and the definition of the middle class has kept climbing the income ladder just as the Democratic base has become more upscale. In 1993, President Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress raised income taxes on married couples making the equivalent of $245,000 today. Biden is now pledging not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000.

Proposals for free college would primarily benefit students from high-earning households and those who are likely to be high earners themselves. Two-thirds of the benefits of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student-loan forgiveness plan — and remember that her platform was widely described as the cutting edge of progressive policy thinking — would go to the highest-earning 40% of households.

As Brian Riedl explains in an analysis for the conservative Manhattan Institute, much of today’s Democratic agenda serves to redistribute income from the very richest Americans to the merely affluent. Even Medicare for All is less progressive in economic terms than one might think. While its precise impact would depend on the choices made to fund it (a topic about which its backers have been notoriously coy), the Committee for a Responsible Budget has concluded it “would increase transfer payments to all income groups but more for individuals higher up the income ladder … This is likely driven by the fact that many of those lower on the income spectrum already have access to taxpayer-financed or subsidized health coverage.”

It cannot be a coincidence that this agenda lines up so neatly with the emerging shape of the Democratic voting base. It may not drive working-class whites further away from the party, as it rarely imposes direct harms on them. But it seems unlikely to do much to attract them, either, and especially to get them to overlook their objections to Democratic positions on other issues. The party’s platform, in other words, is at least as likely to accelerate as to limit the existing trends among white voters.

It is entirely possible, of course, that by next year the U.S. will have a Democratic president and Congress — just as a rebound in white working-class support for Democrats this fall is easy to imagine, based on the current weakness of the economy and Trump’s persistent unpopularity. What looks unlikely is a large and lasting movement by this group of voters toward the Democrats, or anything like a return to class politics.

Hillary Clinton has boasted that in 2016, she won the places in America that produce two-thirds of our economic output. It’s not a boast that previous generations of Democrats could have made, or would have thought to make. It is a far cry from Hubert Humphrey’s mantra that Democrats represented those at the dawn, in the twilight, and in the shadows of life. The Clintons’ presidential aspirations may be over. It is still very much their party.