The DeSantis Case Against California

Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will debate Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Fox News at 6 pm Pacific (9 pm Eastern). “DeSantis vs. Newsom: The Great Red vs. Blue State Debate,” will be 90 minutes long. DeSantis will probably say:

• People are voting with their feet. Between 2020 and 2022, the Census reports, California had a net population loss of 508,903.  Florida had a net population gain of 706,597
• When the Census takes housing costs into account, California has the highest poverty rate of the 50 states, at 13.2 percent.  Newsom will reply that Florida is close behind at 12.7 percent and by the standard poverty measure has a higher rate (13.1 percent v. 11.4 percent.).  See the Census poverty report at page 47.
• California's homeless rate is much higher: 44 per 10,000  v. Florida's 12 per 10,000.
• In October 2023, Florida's unemployment rate was 2.8 percent.  California's was 4.8 percent.  Of the 50 states, only Nevada had higher unemployment.
• In 2022, California had a higher rate of reported crime (499.5 per 100,000) than Florida (258.9 per 100,000).
• The Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index ranks Florida in 4th place among the 50 states. California ranks 48th.
• When Consumer Affairs ranked states by the condition of their roads, California was the fourth-worst, while Florida was the seventh-best.
• On education, US News ranks Florida number one.  California is in 20th place.

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.

Front Row, Back Row

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the impact of inequality on the 2016 election.

At CNN, Alexandra King reports on Brian Stelter's interview with journalist Chris Arnade:

...Arnade, a former banker who now travels across the country writing about poverty and addiction, said that his work had shown him that there are "two Americas," who look at things "really, really differently." 

It's a divide, he said, that the election of President Donald Trump had "exposed."

"The front row defines itself through its career. You can think of it that way. That's their meaning to them. Whereas the back row is somebody who if they have an education beyond high school it's been cobbled together through community colleges, through smaller state schools. And they generally work with their muscles, not their mind," Arnade told Stelter. 

Arnade said there was only one question he needed to ask during his reporting trips to tell if someone belonged to a back-row community.

"One of the biggest questions I'll ask is -- do you think your children's life will be better than yours? And is your life better than your parents'? Almost in unison, the answer is no, I don't think my children's life is gonna be better than mine," he said.

Gap Year: Clinton America v. Trump America

Danny Vinik writes at Politico:

If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes.

As a lot of political observers have noted, Trump’s grim-sounding language about a downcast America makes more sense if you realize just what’s happening for his rural base. And buried in the Census Bureau’s new report on income, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, are two piece of further bad news for rural America—trends that could keep shaping politics well after November’s election.

For Americans living in metropolitan areas, inflation-adjusted household income rose by 6 percent from 2014 to 2015—a robust bounce back from the recession. But for those living outside those areas­—totaling more than 40 million Americans—household income actually fell by 2 percent. The numbers on poverty reveal a similar trend. The number of people in poverty in rural areas did fall by 800,000, but that doesn’t appear to be because people are escaping poverty: Instead, people are simply leaving. The rural population, in that span of time, declined by five million people. Taken in total, the rural poverty rate actually rose slightly, by 0.2 percentage points. In the rest of country, the poverty rate declined by 1.4 percentage points.

Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg report at The Wall Street Journal:

Key swing states such as Nevada, North Carolina and Florida have seen some of the weakest income growth in the country since the last non-incumbent presidential contest in 2008, new census figures show.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of state-by-state income data set for release on Thursday shows that more than half of the 13 states where the presidential race appears closely contested have seen below-average income growth since 2008. Among the eight laggards, three states saw the lowest wage growth in the U.S. during that time—Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.

Pew reports:

In Pew Research Center’s August survey, registered voters with a college degree or more education favor Clinton over Trump by 23 percentage points (52% Clinton vs. 29% Trump) in a four-way contest that included Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson (supported by 11% of voters with at least a college degree) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein (4%).

By contrast, voters who do not have a college degree were more divided in their preferences: 41% backed Trump, 36% Clinton, 9% Johnson and 5% Stein.
If the gap between Clinton and Trump holds in November, it will be the widest educational divide in any election in the last several decades. And the current gap is particularly pronounced among white voters.

Sanders and White Poverty:19.7 Million Ways to Be Wrong

Ben Kasimar reports at The Hill:

Bernie Sanders stumbled on a question at Sunday's debate over whether white Americans can empathize with blacks, stating that white people don't know what it's like to be poor.

"When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car," Sanders said when asked about his personal racial blind spots. "We must be firm in making it clear that we will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system."

The poverty rate among African Americans is disproportionately high, the result of a long history of racial prejudice.  No serious person believes otherwise.  But it absurd to suggest that no white people know what it is like to be poor.

In 2014, the Census reports (Table 3), 46.7 million Americans lived below the poverty line.  Of this number, 19.7 million were non-Hispanic whites. 

Homelessness and Politics

Some have criticized Neel Kashkari for his week on the streets.  But there are precedents.

On May 13, ThinkProgress reported:

In an emerging trend, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), a longtime advocate on Capitol Hill for issues like poverty and hunger, is the latest lawmaker to leave the comforts of his home and spend a night in a homeless shelter to better understand what it’s like to live at the margins of society.
...

McGovern is the third member of Congress recently to spend an extended period of time with homeless people. In December, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) spent a vacation day shadowing a homeless man as he went about his day, and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) spent the night in a shelter in February. Speier has since started a campaign calling on her colleagues to learn more firsthand about homelessness.

On February 6, Kevin Fagan reported at The San Francisco Chronicle:

Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier is gearing up for what she hopes is the next big fight in Congress — balancing out the growing economic inequality that has ravaged the middle class for years — so she reckoned she’d do a bit of ground-level research first.

And since you can’t get much more ground level than a homeless shelter, that’s where she went last Friday — to spend the night.

The Maple Street Shelter in Redwood City was the destination. Speier had actually been there a week before to chat with the residents, and the fact that a well-off Hillsborough member of the Washington power structure was hanging out with the penniless was lost on nobody, least of all the member herself. That was the point, she said.

“I’m still kind of reeling from the experience. Every member of Congress should be required to do what I did,” Speier said this week. “It would help us appreciate who we are talking about. We rattle off numbers, but it doesn’t speak about the people themselves.”

...
Neel Kashkari, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, has also slept in a homeless shelter – in Oakland – so Speier wasn’t the first one out of the blocks on this research approach.

Kashkari on the Streets

By one measure, California has the nation's highest poverty rate. Underdog gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari is highlighting the issue in a way that's unusual for a Republican:

Reform Conservatism

At The New York Times Magazine, Sam Tanenhaus writes of Yuval Levin and other conservative reformers:

Levin and company, who do have the policy mentality, will happily fill in the blanks. In the wake of Cantor’s defeat, April Ponnuru said she was still hearing from legislators interested in connecting with the ideas of the YG Network, and she had more events scheduled to spread the word. Rubio volunteered to speak at one such event in late June. He, too, shrugged off Cantor’s defeat. “I don’t think Eric Cantor lost because he gave a few speeches advocating reforms,” said Rubio, who seems to understand that being elected as an insurgent — riding the crest of a movement — doesn’t mean he has to govern as one. American politics is the story, in large part, of outsiders who became skilled insiders, not by selling out but by growing into the demands of the office. It happened to Barry Goldwater and also to Reagan. It might happen again. When I spoke with him, Rubio also stood by his own antipoverty proposal, acknowledging it would not save any money but suggesting it might in the long run since it would lift many out of poverty. This is exactly the case Lyndon Johnson and Democrats made generations ago. “Our debt isn’t driven by discretionary spending on poverty programs,” Rubio said. “We’re not going to balance the budget by saving money on safety-net programs.”

It is hard to imagine the Republican candidate who will say this in a closely contested Red State primary in 2014 or during a presidential race in 2016. But some politicians say otherwise, including Levin’s own favorite senator, Mike Lee, the Tea Party firebrand from Utah, who stood by Ted Cruz’s side during the October shutdown but also has adopted the reformers’ middle-class agenda as well as its idioms

Upstairs, Downstairs

Lloyd Green writes at The Daily Beast about the politics of redistribution:

It’s welfare redux time. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Obamacare will cost the country the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs by 2024, as people choose not to work or work less in order to keep their Obamacare subsidy. Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution announced yesterday that Obamacare stands to shift wealth from the top 80 percent on America’s income ladder to the lowest fifth—a cash grab from most of the bottom half. President Obama and his congressional allies have sacrificed the work ethic and growth on the altar of the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition, with the emphasis on “downstairs.”
...

Against this backdrop, the political calculus for punishing the nearly 60 percent of voters with incomes above $50,000 must have stared Obama’s operatives in the face like a bull seeing red. But why tag those who make only between $30,000 and $50,000, and why throw a lead weight around the recovery?

But we do know why, and it’s called redistribution and it’s about demographics, much as the administration may half-heartedly deny it. Just ask Richard Daley, the former Obama White House Chief of Staff who helped make Obamacare the reality that it is. In Daley’s own words: “Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds. … It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.” Sometimes the truth can be so inconvenient

This brings us to demographics and the Democrat’s upstairs-downstairs coalition. It relies heavily on political contributions from the rich on both coasts; prays for the votes of enough upscale suburbanites; and is electorally wedded to Americans in the lower socio-economic tiers who are disproportionately uninsured.

Three years ago, POTUS had this exchange with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Do you deny the assessment? Do you deny that you are a man who wants to redistribute wealth? 

OBAMA: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: You deny that?

OBAMA: Absolutely. I didn't raise taxes once, I lowered taxes over the last two years.

Poverty, Social Mobility, and the Midterm

The New York Times reports:

Senator Kay Hagan, a North Carolina Democrat who is up for re-election, is admonishing Republicans back home as “irresponsible and cold-hearted” for slashing unemployment benefits. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, says that her party’s thinking is “stale and old and doesn’t really address the magnitude of the problem.”

Poverty is suddenly the subject of bipartisan embrace.

President Obama will highlight income disparity in his State of the Union address this month, part of a broader effort by Democrats to push a populist theme for their midterm campaigns against Republicans. Republicans are offering solutions that would give the states and the private sector, not the federal government, more authority to help improve the plight of the poor.

Peter Wehner writes at Commentary:

Yesterday Senator Marco Rubio delivered a major speech on poverty and social mobility. It’s impressive for several reasons.

While not ignoring the issue of income inequality, he made what I think is the correct and important point: Lack of social mobility, not income inequality, is what we should focus on. And the speech was intellectually impressive in part because it was intellectually honest. Senator Rubio explained with some sophistication the reasons for what he calls “opportunity inequality”–including long-term economic, social, cultural, and educational causes. This speech was not politically partisan or shallow; it admitted the causes of poverty and decreasing social mobility are complex. (Many European countries now have as much social mobility as, and more opportunity than, the United States; and today a child’s future depends on parental income more in America than it does in Canada and Europe.) Senator Rubio’s address deepened the public’s understanding of these issues, and that’s all to the good.

On the policy side of things, Senator Rubio’s proposals on the Flex Fund (which would consolidate many anti-poverty programs that in turn would be distributed to the states to enact their own anti-poverty agenda) and transforming the Earned Income Tax Credit into a real wage subsidy are promising steps, with more, I gather, to follow.

What Mr. Rubio unveiled yesterday merits support on federalism and subsidiary grounds, in terms of how we should think about the working poor versus those who are unable to work, because it incentivizes work and creates incentives to avoid unemployment programs, and because it makes upward mobility more, not less, likely. (For a more detailed and illuminating discussion of the merits of Rubio’s proposals, seehere and here.)

Michael Barone writes of New York Mayor de Blasio and the liberal perspective:

Liberal pundits are hailing de Blasio and his politics as a harbinger of the political future and a return to the liberal tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and his political ally New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

But in 1944, the heyday of FDR and La Guardia, the five boroughs of New York City cast 7 percent of the nation’s votes. In 2012 they cast only 2 percent of the national vote.
It’s interesting that New York, which has had more liberal and redistributionist public policies than almost anywhere else in the nation over those 68 years, also has one of the nation’s highest rates of income inequality.

High tax rates and high housing costs (exacerbated for many years by rent control) have squeezed middle-class families out of New York. They have migrated in the millions to lower-tax, lower-housing-cost places like Florida and Texas.

The Obama Democrats did reduce economic inequality somewhat by raising the top income tax rate back to 39.6 percent. The proposals they’re talking about now are either small potatoes, or moves to have the working middle-class subsidize non-workers or the young to subsidize the old — redistribution, but not very progressive.

Rubio on Poverty

Marco Rubio joins Mike Lee, John Kasich, and other Republicans talking about poverty and inequality. Mike Allen reports at Politico:

Sen. Marco Rubio, who plans to spend much of this year pushing ideas for reducing poverty and improving income mobility in America, is releasing a two-minute video in conjunction with Wednesday’s 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty: “[I]sn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure? Instead of continuing to borrow and spend trillions of dollars on government programs that don’t work, what our nation needs is a real agenda that helps people acquire the skills they need to lift themselves out of poverty and to pursue the American dream. This agenda would create an economy with more good-paying middle class jobs and a government with less debt. It would repeal ObamaCare and it would replace it with more affordable health care options. It would save and strengthen our retirement programs for future generations."

 

Rubio speaks of "an agenda to create a new opportunity society in America."  The phrase "opportunity society," along with the overall tone of the speech, comes straight from Newt Gingrich.  In To Renew America (1996), he wrote:

The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society. For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor--and particularly poor children--to being deprived of their basic rights as Americans. The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients. It breaks up families, minimizes work incentives, blocks people from saving and acquiring property, and overshadows dreams of a promised future with a present despair born of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.