Among @electionstudies 2020 respondents, Trump replicated his (poor) 2016 performance among high income whites. pic.twitter.com/T6HSTIrMRS
— Tom Wood (@thomasjwood) March 25, 2021
Thomas Edsall has a new article on how the Democrats have abruptly been transformed into the party of upper class White professionals with woke, cosmopolitan and modernist values over the past two election cycles. As Republican establishment voters who were alienated by Trump have become Red Dog Democrats, it has shifted the internal balance of power within the Democratic Party.
“These developments handicapped Democrats in the past, but changing income and education patterns of partisanship — changes that intensified during the Trump years — will inevitably work to Democrats’ advantage.
In the past two presidential elections, Democratic gains among high income and well-educated voters — the kind of voters who benefited from redistricting in 2000 and 2010 — accelerated.
Thomas J. Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State, recently posted a chart on Twitter showing the income levels of white voters in each of the 19 presidential elections since 1948.
In the first 17 of these — through President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 — whites with incomes in the 96th to 100th percentile were consistently the strongest supporters of Republican presidential nominees among all white income groups. In 2016 and in 2020, with Trump as the nominee, that pattern abruptly shifted.
These super affluent whites not only shifted to vote Democratic, but they became the least Republican income group after decades of being the most Republican. …”
The Democrats are the party of Pete Buttigieg and wine track voters now.
“Looking over the election results for all the races in the country’s wealthy suburbs reinforces the point. America’s rich have turned to the Democrats and they aren’t turning back. Under the first definition of the country’s “rich suburbs,” Democrats will occupy 51 of the 63 wealthy suburban seats (81 percent) in the 117th Congress. Under the second definition, Democrats will hold 44 of 61 wealthy suburban seats (72 percent). In this latter version, seven of the Republicans’ seventeen rich suburban seats are in a single state, Texas. While this may make the wealthy of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio a Republican counter-elite, the Democratic party quite sensibly sees them as the last holdouts against the natural gathering of all American elites under its banner. After all, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted ten Texas Republican-held House seats as part of its 2020 “Red to Blue” campaign in the state for concentrated fundraising, organizational support, and spending. Six of those ten were six of Texas’s seven “rich list” seats. Although Democrats failed to flip a single one of these targets, it is clear that wooing the rich is the cornerstone of the party’s effort to turn Texas blue.
Democrats took the House in 2018 thanks in strong measure to the votes of rich suburbanites in places like Loudon County, VA, Hunterdon County, NJ, and Lake County, IL. Republicans’ strong showing in 2020, coming within six (and possibly five) seats of a most unlikely House majority, shows the party doesn’t need to win those seats back to win the House. The Democrats’ contradictory top-bottom coalition will eventually disintegrate of its own accord anyway, and Republicans should take a hands-off approach in letting it do so. Concentrating on winning seats from small and medium-sized cities like Las Cruces, NM, Des Moines, IA, and Bakersfield, CA, as well as from middle-class suburbs and exurbs of the largest cities, is the better path forward. …”
In spite of the laughable fantasy that Joe Biden is FDR or LBJ, this is who the Democrats are now … the people who used to be Nelson Rockefeller’s Republican Party.
This is already being hilariously exposed by the internal Democratic debates over how to pay for Joe’s infrastructure plan. Joe has already ruled out a wealth tax on ultra millionaires.
“President Joe Biden will not call for a wealth tax to help pay for his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better initiative, according to multiple people familiar with the White House’s thinking. In doing so, he will sidestep a proposal that progressive Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), say would raise trillions of dollars in revenue and narrow income inequality.
The decision comes amid intense debate in Washington over how to fund the president’s sprawling package, which could top $3 trillion. Democrats are pushing for a variety of tax hikes to fund the legislation, while Republicans are vowing to oppose any package that relies on tax increases to raise revenue. …”
Wealthy Democrats are also already saying that bringing back the SALT deduction is a line in the sand.
“A group of blue-state Democrats is pushing for its top tax priority as part of President Joe Biden’s next major legislative package — a possible voting bloc that could make or break the bill if they stay united on the House floor.
The House Democrats stepping forward want to see a Biden infrastructure package that repeals the Trump-era limit on state and local tax deductions, known as the SALT deduction. The repeal is popular among blue-state members of their party but carries a significant budgetary cost, making it one of the emerging fault lines in Democrats’ coming infrastructure talks. …”
Previously, the Democrats used to accuse Republicans of not wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy (a true charge), but now given the reality of who the Democrats have become in the post-Trump era there has been an eyebrow raising shift on that issue. Now, Middle Class Joe only wants to raise taxes on people who make over $400,000 a year, which if memory serves is quite a jump for them.
“President Joe Biden said those earning more than $400,000 a year would see a tax increase under his forthcoming economic program, highlighting the administration’s plans to address inequality in part through levies on the wealthy.
“Anybody making more than $400,000 will see a small-to-a-significant tax increase,” Biden said during an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America that aired Wednesday. “You make less than $400,000, you won’t see one single penny in additional federal tax.” …”
What did Hillary Clinton run on in 2016?
“I have said repeatedly throughout this campaign: I will not raise taxes on anyone making $250,000 or less. I also will not add a penny to the debt. I have costed out what I’m going to do. He will, through his massive tax cuts, add $20 trillion to the debt. We know how to get control of the debt. When my husband was president, we went from a $300 billion deficit to a $200 billion surplus and we were actually on the path to eliminating the national debt. When President Obama came into office, he inherited the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. He has cut the deficit by two-thirds. So, yes, one of the ways you go after the debt, one of the ways you create jobs is by investing in people. So I do have investments, investments in new jobs, investments in education, skill training, and the opportunities for people to get ahead and stay ahead. That’s the kind of approach that will work. …”
“I want to make sure the wealthy pay their fair share, which they have not been doing. I want the Buffett Rule to be in effect, where millionaires have to pay 30 percent tax rates instead of 10 percent to nothing in some cases. I want to make sure we rein in the excessive use of political power to feather the nest and support the super wealthy. I also want to create jobs and I want to be a partner with the private sector. I’m particularly keen on creating jobs in small business. …”
Having all your voters confined to a series of rich enclaves doesnt seems to be a path to long term victory it seems to me. They aren’t enough of them. Just will just tighten their control of the blue bubbles they they already live in. They weren’t us anyway.
I think that the coming years will reveal the following : that the cabal which President Biden represents will be plainly outed, totally discredited in the eyes of history, and that his presidency represents a last gasp attempt by those who, thinking themselves in charge of both this country and the world, will live long enough to see their plans go the way of Humpty-Dumpty.
I do not think that The Good Lord is happy, but, lest I am led astray by the thickness of the æther surrounding Him, one thing the evanescent mist cannot obscure, and that is how unhappy the majority of Americans are.
And this unhappiness is in the process of transforming itself into something monumental, and no manipulative sleight of hand or naked threats will put Humpty-Dumpty back together.