Bad News, Good News for GOP

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem:

Alex Isenstadt:

Republican operatives and lawmakers are increasingly anxious about how inflation could affect the GOP in the 2026 midterms, and want President Trump to take more aggressive steps to address rising prices.

Why it matters: GOP insiders and lawmakers believe the cost of drugs and consumer items — and how the White House deals with Trump's tariffs potentially turbocharging prices and creating shortages — will be key to whether the GOP keeps control of Congress next year.

Zoom in: Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond praise Trump's recent focus on crime, but many are alarmed by internal polls and focus groups showing persistent — and increasing — concerns about prices.

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

For the American middle class, it has been a summer of cooling confidence.

Consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Pessimism about the job market increased, with more people surveyed saying they expect their income to decline, according to polling done by think tank the Conference Board.

The middle class—generally considered to include households making roughly $53,000 to $161,000 a year—is playing an outsize role in that waning optimism. After months of tracking high-income earners’ increasing confidence about the economy, households making between $50,000 and $100,000 made an abrupt about-face in June. They now more closely resemble low-income earners’ gloomier views, according to surveys done by Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm.

“There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world,” said John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. “Then things fell off a cliff.”

But....

At Politico, Lisa Kashinsky, Elena Schneider and Nicholas Wu write that Democrats are "hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats. Florida’s constitution has language restricting partisan gerrymandering, though its conservative-majority state Supreme Court recently upheld a GOP redraw."

Nate Cohn at NYT: "[If] the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results."

Coming Apart, Falling Behind

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. Class and education are part of the story.

Vice President Kamala Harris is counting on record support from college-educated voters to help propel her candidacy across the finish line. https://t.co/noqrlhDt2V

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 26, 2024

Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Aatish Bhatia at NYT:

Take white men working without a college degree. In 1980, they made more than the average American worker.

But over 40 years, even as their inflation-adjusted income has remained relatively flat, they’ve fallen well below the average income.

In the reordering of the U.S. economy since 1980, white men without a degree have been surpassed in income by college-educated women.

What this captures is a sense of relative standing — not just how well you do on your own terms, but how you fare compared with everyone else. In short, a sense of status.

As the American economy has shifted over the past 40 years away from manufacturing and toward services and “knowledge” work, this less visible hierarchy within the economy has shifted, too. Jobs that helped build the nation, like the machinists and metalworkers who were mostly white men without college degrees, today make a shrinking share of what the average American worker does. Newer kinds of work, like financial analysis and software development, have come to pay much more.

The economy has effectively devalued the work and skills of some Americans, while delivering mounting rewards to others — reordering the status of workers along lines that increasingly shape the country’s politics too.

Class and 2024

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. Class is part of the story.

Ruy Teixeria at The Liberal Patriot:

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today.

Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.

The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

Diploma Divide and Democratic Brahminization

Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voter demographics and the diploma divide.

 Michael Baharaeen at The Liberal Patriot:

College-educated white voters have been trending more Democratic with little interruption since the 1970s. And while both parties were competitive with non-college whites through the latter half of the 20th century, this group began to definitively break toward Republicans around 2000:

While the Democrats’ losses among white voters without a college degree are well documented, it’s also worth noting that their slide over the past decade with the non-college demographic disproportionately came from non-white voters. This bloc moved toward Republicans by a whopping 19 points between 2012 and 2020. In other words, Democrats have been losing ground with non-college voters of all races.

It is possible that these trends will work out for Democrats as more Americans graduate college. As things currently stand, however, non-college voters make up a far greater share of the presidential electorate (62 percent) than do college degree-holders (38 percent). Though it’s difficult to know for sure which party will ultimately benefit the most from this widening “diploma divide,” it’s likely to continue molding both our politics and the culture in profound ways in the coming years.

Also at The Liberal Patriot, Ruy Teixera writes of the "Brahminization" of the Democratic Party:

Another indicator of the Brahminization of the Democratic Party is the current distribution of congressional seats. Democrats now dominate the more affluent districts while Republicans are cleaning up in the poorer districts. Marcy Kaptur, who represents Ohio’s working-class 9th district and is the longest-serving female member of the House in American history, has said of this pattern:

You could question yourself and say, well, the blue districts are the wealthiest districts, so it shows that the Democrats are doing better to lift people's incomes. The other way you could look at it is: how is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle? How is that possible?

How indeed. Kaptur has a two-page chart that arrays Congressional districts from highest median income to lowest with partisan control color-coded. The first page is heavily dominated by blue but the second, poorer page is a sea of red. You can access the chart here. It’s really quite striking. Overall, Republicans represent 152 of the 237 Congressional seats where the district median income trails the national figure.

In light of all this, consider how Democrats are proposing to run in 2024. First, they are not going to back down an inch on the party’s commitment to cultural leftism, a key marker of the party’s Brahmin turn. Indeed, they believe the abortion issue currently gives them cover in this area due to the Dobbs decision, where the party has been able to occupy center ground in opposition to significant parts of the GOP who wish to ban the procedure. But crime isn’t the abortion issue. Immigration isn’t the abortion issue. Race essentialism and gender ideology aren’t the abortion issue. Even the abortion issue isn’t the abortion issue once you get past opposing bans and start having to deal with the nitty-gritty of setting some limits on abortion access (as the public wants).

The fact is that the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working class voter (including the median nonwhite working-class voter). These unpopular views are further amplified by the Democrats’ “shadow party” (as John Judis and I put it in our forthcoming book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?), the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors, and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of official party organizations, as well as within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the cultural left.

 

The Zoomer Trump Effect

Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voter demographics .

Greg Sargent at WP:

New data supplied to me by the Harvard Youth Poll sheds light on the powerful undercurrents driving these developments. Young voters have shifted in a markedly progressive direction on multiple issues that are deeply important to them: Climate change, gun violence, economic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.

John Della Volpe, director of the poll, refers to those issues as the “big four.” They all speak to the sense of precarity that young voters feel about their physical safety, their economic future, their basic rights and even the ecological stability of the planet.

“This generation has never felt secure — personally, physically, financially,” Della Volpe told me.

Here’s a chart showing how opinion among 18-to-29-year-olds has shifted on those issues, according to data that the Harvard Youth Poll crunched at my request:

Those numbers — which come from the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).

They are not enthusiastic about Biden. 

Yet national developments could continue exerting a powerful pull on these voters. For example, the chart above suggests that Trump’s rise to the presidency might have accelerated their progressive evolution. The former president continues looming over our politics and will likely be the GOP nominee.

“That data clearly shows a Zoomer Trump effect,” Della Volpe, the author of a book about Gen Z, told me. “Every single variable has gotten more progressive.”

Mixed Red: WWC Down, Hispanics Up

Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voter demographics and the diploma divide.

 Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.

Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.

These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump. President Biden won whites with college degrees in 2020, 51-48, but Trump won by a landslide, 67-32, among whites without degrees, according to network exit polls.

...

From 2006 to 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute found, the white evangelical protestant share of the population fell from 23.0 percent to 13.9 percent. Over the same period, the nonreligious share of the population rose from 16.0 to 26.8 percent.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, found that the nonreligious can be broken down into three groups: atheists, who are the most Democratic, voting 85-11 for Biden over Trump; followed by agnostics, 78-18 for Biden; and those Burge calls “nothing in particular,” 63-35 for Biden.

Ruy Teixera at WP:

Catalist data confirm a nationwide shift among Latinos in 2020. The Democrats’ overall margin among this group dropped by 18 points relative to 2016. Cubans had the largest shift of 26 points, but Puerto Ricans moved by 18 points to Trump, Dominicans by 16 points and Mexicans by 12 points. An overall weak spot for Democrats was among Latino men who gave Trump a shocking 44 percent of their two-party vote in 2020.

The unusually broad shift raised the question: Could the trend continue? Since then, the 2022 election contained both good and bad omens for Democrats. The good news is that, with the exception of Florida, they did not lose any further ground among Hispanics. The bad news is that they didn’t win back the ground they lost.

Since then, polls consistently find that Hispanic voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on inflation and handling the economy. Nearly all — 86 percent — Hispanics say economic conditions are only fair or poor and about three-quarters say the same thing about their personal financial situation. By 2 to 1 they say President Biden’s policies are hurting, not helping, them and their families. In a just-released 6,000 respondent poll from the Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) on evolving party coalitions, almost two-thirds believe Biden has accomplished not that much or little or nothing during his time in office.

Six years ago,at TNR, John Judis wrote that Democrats cannot count on a nonwhite majority to bring them back into the majority:

Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it’s a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as whites. “This town has 8,000,000 people,” a young Harry Truman wrote his cousin upon visiting New York City in 1918. “7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” But by the time Truman became president, all those immigrant groups were considered “white.” There’s no reason to imagine that Latinos and Asians won’t follow much the same pattern.

In fact, it’s already happening. In the 2010 Census, 53 percent of Latinos identified as “white,” as did more than half of Asian Americans of mixed parentage. In future generations, those percentages are almost certain to grow. According to a recent Pew study, more than one-quarter of Latinos and Asians marry non-Latinos and non-Asians, and that number will surely continue to climb over the generations.

Diploma Divide and 2024

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Doug Sosnik at NYT:

The impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.

According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.

Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.

This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.

This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.
The diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).

This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).

In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.

Cutting Programs for Low-Income Americans is Bad Politics for the GOP

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

House Republicans want to cut the budget without cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and the military.  David Leonhardt at NYT:

The largest remaining category involves health care spending that benefits lower- and middle-income families, including from Medicaid and Obamacare. Hard-right Republicans, like some in the Freedom Caucus, have signaled they will propose reductions to these programs. Party leaders, for their part, have said they would eye cuts to anti-poverty programs such as food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a big potential downside for Republicans: The partisan shifts of recent years mean that Republican voters now benefit from these redistributive programs even more than Democratic voters do.

As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently wrote, “The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the G.O.P. wants to cut.”

Almost 70 percent of House Republicans represent districts where the median income is lower than the national median, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. By contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent districts more affluent than the median.

The politics of class, as Brownstein puts it, have been inverted.

Democrats and Factory Towns

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Mike Lux at American Family Voices:

Hard times, effective right-wing messaging, the demise of local news, and sometimes the Democratic Party itself have led to big changes in the voting and opinions of people living in small and midsized towns that have been most impacted by deindustrialization and increased Big Business power in the economy. But these Factory Towns voters are not lost causes to the Democratic Party, and we cannot afford to write them off. They comprise 48% of the voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and if we continue to lose ground with them, the entire region will become more and more like Iowa and Missouri – tough states for the foreseeable future. However, if these counties start to move back toward the Democrats, that kind of progress could be the linchpin to building sustained Democratic majorities that can usher our country into a more progressive future.

This report is part of a continuing effort by American Family Voices to do on-the-ground research and data analysis to understand the thinking and motivation of working-class voters, and to recommend strategies that can begin to rebuild the Democratic Party’s and progressive movement’s historic connection to America’s working class.

The project focuses on voters in “Factory Town” counties in six key states: Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states were Ground Zero in 2016, breaking down the “Blue Wall” critical to Democratic victories. Joe Biden did just enough better in 2020 to help win back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but these communities in all six states remain very tough for Democrats and will be among the most highly competitive counties for 2024.

Despite the challenges, this is a moment where Democrats have an opportunity to make more gains. Biden and the Democratic Congress have passed substantial legislation that can bring progressive change, all the way down to the community level, over the next two years. The president’s policies, background, and genuine affinity for these working-class communities make him an ideal leader for this effort.

This report combines data from our most recent polling, Facebook and digital analytics, and comparisons of county-by-county elections results in 2022 to the past decade of state election results. The report closes with recommendations on how Democrats and progressive issue advocates should move forward with Factory Towns voters and counties.

Here is the bottom line in our findings:

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years

College America, Non-College America, and Shifting Party Bases

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

“The GOP is trading soccer moms for Walmart dads.” https://t.co/CgHv5h3YyU

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) July 14, 2022

 Nate Cohn at NYT:

For the first time in a Times/Siena national survey, Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters — a striking indication of the shifting balance of political energy in the Democratic coalition. As recently as the 2016 congressional elections, Democrats won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters while losing among white college graduates.

What is your preference for the outcome of the 2022 congressional elections?

Which Party Different Groups of Voters Support

For the first time in a Times/Siena national survey, Democrats won a larger share of white college graduates than nonwhite voters.

Gender

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
Female 52% of RVs	44%	34%	21%
Male 46%	38%	47%	15%

Race

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
White 65% of RVs	37%	47%	17%
White, no coll. 39%	23%	54%	23%
White, coll. 26%	57%	36%	7%
Black 10%	78%	3%	19%
Hispanic 13%	41%	38%	21%
Other 8%	34%	39%	27%

Age

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
Age 18 to 29 16% of RVs	46%	28%	26%
Age 30 to 44 22%	52%	31%	18%
Age 45 to 64 32%	35%	50%	15%
Age 65+ 24%	39%	45%	16%

Education

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
College grad. 35% of RVs	56%	32%	12%
No four-yr. deg. 63%	33%	45%	22%

Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 849 registered voters from July 5-7. All figures are rounded. Some respondents did not provide demographic information.