'The left is right to lament class depolarization. But some left-wing accounts of how this development came about, what implications it has for contemporary electoral politics, and how the working class can be 'brought home' are less convincing.'
What’s the matter with What’s the Matter With Kansas? Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP/Shutterstock For decades now, major left-wing parties throughout the West have been bleeding support from the working-class voters whose interests they claim to represent.
Put all these considerations together, and it seems less than coincidental that the decline of class-based voting in the U.S. has corresponded with an upsurge in income and wealth inequality. The 2020 primary — and Joe Biden’s triumph therein — has sparked a vigorous intra-left debate over these premises. For progressives partial to Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders’s failure to rouse working-class nonvoters from their apathy — or retain his white working-class support from 2016 — demonstrated the bankruptcy of “Marxist electoral theory”: Professional-class Democrats aren’t holding back the progressive movement, leftists who refuse to seek common cause with such Democrats are.
[T]he whole theory the left had was not that the primary was easy to win, but that we would win the general election, because we would be given an opportunity to court independents and the politically disaffected — the kind of people who do not vote in party primaries … We know that it’s hard for a socialist to win the Democratic primary; the open question is whether a leftist Democratic nominee would prove an effective antidote to Trump.
The results of Maine’s 2017 referendum on Medicaid expansion lend credence to this finding. Given the opportunity to expand the availability of socialized health insurance, the most highly educated parts of the Pine Tree State voted in favor, while the least well-educated regions voted against. Material interests weren’t entirely irrelevant to voting patterns: Researchers found that, if one held education constant, then areas with higher incomes were more likely to oppose Medicaid expansion.
A generation ago, college graduates were a Republican constituency. And the material basis for that affinity remains sound. There is a reason that political scientists use educational attainment as a proxy for class: The college wage premium is large. To be sure, there is a large and growing number of economically precarious college graduates in the United States, and this surely explains part of the demographic’s leftward drift.
To test these hypotheses, the researchers examined two sets of data: a 1955 survey of high-school sophomores conducted by the Educational Testing Service, and a follow-up survey with those same Americans taken by the University of North Carolina in 1970 . These questionnaires provided the respondents’ partisan affiliations as teenagers and as adults, their levels of educational attainment, their occupational statuses, and their parents’ partisan preferences.
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