A recent study offers a new theory for why affluent Democrats vote against their economic interests. EricLevitz writes
Progressive attendees of the Met gala unite! Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images The Democratic coalition has never been wealthier than it is today. And the Democratic Party is more economically progressive than it’s been in decades.
Photo: World Inequaity Lab The erosion of traditional class allegiances in voting — a phenomenon some have dubbed “class dealignment” — has been most stark among white voters. But in 2020, the phenomenon crossed racial lines. According to the Pew Research Center, Joe Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters by 25 points more than he did non-college-educated ones.
In truth, Biden’s redistributive agenda isn’t stalling because his party is beholden to affluent voters but because it holds too few Senate seats. The president’s white-collar coalition has not stopped him from assembling the most pro-labor executive-branch policies of any modern president. And in states where the Democrats boast large legislative majorities, the party’s reliance on high-income voters has not prevented it from moving left on economic policy over the past decade.
One explanation is that these ideological tendencies are mere consequences of voters’ partisanship. If you control for party identification, voters with lower incomes tend to be more economically progressive but less socially liberal than those with high incomes. Thus it’s plausible that the typical, white working-class ex-Democrat defected to red America for cultural reasons and then, over time, began to absorb their new political community’s economic orthodoxy.
The “Morals As Luxury Goods” paper’s original contribution is to show that post-materialism can explain a wide variety of oddities in contemporary politics. From Inglehart’s basic insight, the researchers derive several corollaries: • The Democratic Party will have more internal diversity than the GOP, in terms of both its cultural views and its income levels .
Graphic: Benjamin Enke Survey data demonstrates that the Democratic coalition is more internally divided on social issues — and more socioeconomically diverse — than the Republican one.
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