How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?OCT. 7, 2015
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An apartment served as the setting for a $28,500-per-couple fundraising event with Barack Obama in New York in 2008. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Thomas B. Edsall
Voters on both the left and the right often claim that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties, and of course that isn’t true. There’s a big difference between Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia, for one thing. But there may be more to this argument than you think.
Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters. Democrats represent a majority of the richest congressional districts, and the party’s elected officials are more responsive to the policy agenda of the well-to-do than to average voters. The party and its candidates have come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another quarter.
The gulf between the two parties on socially fraught issues like abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage and voting rights remains vast. On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.
In this respect, the Democratic Party and its elected officials have come to resemble their Republican counterparts far more than the public focus on polarization would lead you to expect. The current popularity of Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to time limits on welfare for the poor.
“Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,” the political scientists Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal write in a 2014 essay titled “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?”
Different Parties, Same Trend
In 1980, political giving by the superrich and large donors made up less than one-quarter of all contributions to both parties’ candidates. Now these are the majority of contributions.
Sources: Adam Bonica, Stanford University; Nolan McCarty, Princeton University; Keith T. Poole, University of Georgia; Howard Rosenthal, New York University
“Superdonors” are the top individual donors in each election cycle, accounting for just 1 in 10,000 voters. In 2012 they each gave $25,000 or more, up from $5,616 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). “Large donors” are individuals who gave more than $1,500 (in 2012 dollars) but less than each cycle’s superdonors.
Sources: Adam Bonica, Stanford University; Nolan McCarty, Princeton University; Keith T. Poole, University of Georgia; Howard Rosenthal, New York University
By The New York Times
The authors, from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Georgia and N.Y.U., respectively, go on to note that
the Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
The structural forces changing the character of the Democratic Party appear in voting patterns and in the altered partisan allegiance of the professional classes and of the very rich.
Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the changing pattern of campaign contributions. In September, Bonica and Rosenthal completed an additional study, “The Wealth Elasticity of Political Contributions by the Forbes 400,” that demonstrates a substantial increase in campaign donations from the very wealthy to Democrats.
Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate because new members are more likely to direct their money to Democrats than the old members are, Rosenthal wrote me in an email: “Larry Page and Sergey Brin — co-founders of Google — are quintessential new money Democrats.”
In their 2014 paper, Bonica, McCarty, Rosenthal and Poole tracked the sources of money flowing to Democratic candidates and parties from 1980 to 2012. As the accompanying charts show, they found that the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.
The kinds of congressional districts Democrats are now winning also tilt toward the well-to-do. Data on the median household income of congressional districts provided by ProximityOne, a company that specializes in the analysis of geographic, demographic and economic data, shows the following:
In 2014, the median income of households in Democratic districts was higher than in Republican districts, $53,358 to $51,834. Democrats represent seven of the 10 most affluent districts, measured by household income (four in California, two in Virginia and one in New York). Democrats also represent a majority of the 100 most affluent districts, 54-46.
Democratic victories in wealthy districts reflect the gains the party is making among high-income voters generally.
In 1988, support for the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis fell as income rose. Those making less than $12,500-a-year backed him 63-37, while those making more than $100,000 voted against him 67-33.
In 2012, by contrast, Obama won low-income voters, those making less than $30,000, decisively, 63-35, but also did far better than Dukakis among those making more than $100,000, winning 44 percent of their votes. Four years earlier, in 2008, Obama won among voters with the highest incomes, above $200,000, 52-46, and nearly tied among those making $100,000 to $200,000, 48-50.
Because high-income voters turn out in higher percentages than low income voters, even in presidential years when turnout rises generally, exit poll data underestimates the importance of high end support for Democratic presidential candidates. Because of this higher turnout, the top two income quintiles of the electorate contributed the same number of votes to Obama’s victory in 2012 as the bottom two income quintiles, according to American National Election Studies data provided to me by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory.
In other words, upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.
“The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.
They cite the crucial role of congressional Democrats in enacting the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which eliminated past restrictions on interstate banking; the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act separating commercial banking from other financial services; and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which restricted government oversight of most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps — all of which played a role in the financial crisis of 2007-2009.
The critique of the increased Democratic dependency on the rich by Bonica and his co-authors is modest in comparison to that of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude that
The majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.
“These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:
In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.
Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:
On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.
Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment:
The majority are redistributive policies including raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, or cutting payroll taxes on lower income Americans.
Conversely, policies opposed by the middle-class but backed by the affluent include “tax cuts for upper-income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and roll-backs of federal retirement programs” – policies that have been adopted.
All these findings raise questions for those who would like to see the Democratic Party return to its more populist roots. Such a development faces two major obstacles.
The first is exemplified by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent-socialist senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sanders is running on an explicitly left-populist platform. It includes taxation of overseas corporate profits, a progressive estate tax, an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, the investment of $1 trillion in infrastructure, withdrawal from Nafta and other trade agreements, free tuition at public colleges, a single-payer health care system, and more.
The problem is that the core of Sanders’s support, according to an October 2 Pew Research Center survey, is more concentrated among the college-educated than among those without degrees, and stronger among middle-class and affluent Democrats than among low-income Democrats. For now his messages appear to have caught on primarily among ideologically liberal voters, although there is an argument that it will resonate with others as they learn more about it.
Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.
Democrats in recent years have done well in presidential years with an agenda focused on “values conflicts” and cultural liberalism. But the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.
An April 2013 General Social Survey report on “Trends in Public Attitudes about Sexual Morality” found, for example, that
The largest educational differences occur on attitudes toward homosexuality. The college-educated are much less likely than those voters with high school or less to say that homosexual sex is always wrong, and much more likely to approve of gay marriage.
College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.
The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.
The Republican Party helps maintain minority loyalty to Democrats with policies opposed by blacks and Hispanics and with incendiary, biased rhetoric.
For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.
The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.
The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.
It may be that voter discontent will topple one of the parties and something new will emerge — an improbable development. As it stands, schisms that pit advocates of the lunch pail tradition against those better-off voters who are vested in social and cultural issues will continue to constrict Democratic success, particularly at the state and local level, where Republicans have now achieved substantial retrenchment of the liberal state.
