It's Economic Inequality, Stupid

Another look at the election outcome

It’s the Friday after Election Day and the recriminations have begun in earnest. Biden shouldn’t have run for another term. If he did, he should have gotten out earlier to allow a primary. Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan and done more Fox News hits. Democrats didn’t effectively promote the message of a robust economy. Harris should have responded more to the anti-trans ads.

Bernie Sanders had his own take:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Today, while the very rich as doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-adjusted weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower than they were 50 years ago.

This is the kind of rhetoric we’ve heard from Senator Sanders for decades. And it needs some qualification. For example, I’ve heard that the “60% paycheck to paycheck” statistic is an artifact of how the question is asked. But it’s still a reality for way too many families. And there are times in our past where inequality was much higher, but certainly it has been growing since the Reagan administration.

Those in the bottom quintile — maybe the bottom two — have serious struggles and little tangible resources. Given the nature of averages, it’s easy to see how nationally wages have outstripped inflation while not being true for those in the most need.

I’ve been thinking about these lower groups. In part, this results from my reading of Jessica Calarco’s Holding It Together on how (especially lower class) women make do with an insubstantial social safety net. People like those interviewed for her book have struggled not just in the current economic environment but for as long as they can remember.

I dare say that the very lower class workers who supported Trump in this election were also those who didn’t have an opportunity to work from home during the pandemic. They had the jobs that were cut when the economy shut down in the Spring of 2020. As Sanders says, they were already dependent upon food stamps and medicaid to get by. So when the inflationary surge hit in 2022, they had no reserves. A modest increase in the price of gas or eggs was a huge stressor. And because they were renters, the cost of housing hit them directly.

Here’s what E.J. Dionne wrote this morning in the Washington Post:

It shouldn’t keep surprising us that Americans without college degrees are still upset after four decades of economic change imposing its heaviest burdens on them. The outcome will be a bitter irony for Biden, since much of his program was directed to help those left behind, and real wages after inflation rose most in the Biden years for the lowest-income workers.

Most voters didn’t feel it: Sixty-eight percent of them told media exit pollsters that they rated the economy “not so good” or “poor,” and 70 percent of them backed Trump. Even accounting for some partisan bias in people’s assessments of economic circumstances, it was a deadly problem for Harris.

Brian Beutler picked up the theme in his SubStack:

Working Americans either can’t perceive the differences between Democrats and Republicans because Democrats don’t deliver enough, or workers don’t think the Democratic agenda is sufficiently better than the GOP agenda to merit partisan loyalty. The Democratic agenda lacks zhuzh or oomph, or ideal indicators of class-based solidarity. Without radical change, workers will vote on other bases.

It’s true that Democrats didn’t have the political power to directly address the concerns of those families in the lower echelons of the economic system. And they are not likely to do so in the coming congress. While Republicans will aim for tax cuts and lowering corporate tax rates which disproportionately benefit those at the top, Democrats don’t have a lot of arrows in their quiver to address these real concerns. While, as I wrote recently, I liked Harris’ proposals like the child tax credit, first child benefit, and help with down payments for first time homeowners, getting them through the legislature would be nearly impossible.

It’s no surprise that people become disillusioned and decide that there’s no difference between the parties or that there is no point to voting because it won’t matter. A government stimulus check is nice, but it doesn’t solve the longer term issues that exist once that money is gone.

In the New York Times this morning, Ben Rhodes wrote this:

We should merge our commitment to the moral, social and demographic necessity of an inclusive America with a populist critique of the system that Mr. Trump now runs; a focus more on reform than just redistribution. We must reform the corruption endemic to American capitalism, corporate malfeasance, profiteering in politics, unregulated technologies transforming our lives, an immigration system broken by Washington, the cabal of autocrats pushing the world to the brink of war and climate catastrophe.

Addressing these concerns should be a national effort. Letting inequality fester for decades is dangerous to our shared small-d democratic project.

In looking for something like the graph above, I was surprised to discover that I couldn’t really find what I wanted. We create subgroups when we analyze polls. We know about the views of men or women, or the young or the old, or college educated or not. But I couldn’t find polling that examined political attitudes or views of the economy by social class. Why don’t we do that? I think it’s because we don’t want to know.

Kamala Harris described herself as growing up middle class. Republicans are always saying that they are concerned about middle class voters.

But here’s the thing. I think I can consider myself pretty much middle class even in retirement. A couple of side gigs have buttressed social security and our retirement accounts so that things are stable. I prefer lower gas prices to higher ones. I wish my Cheerios weren’t so expensive. But honestly, we’ve managed our way through the post-Covid upheavals pretty smoothly.

It’s past time for us to put serious effort into helping improve the material conditions of those at the bottom of the economic structure. It’s not going to happen in the coming Trump administration. But between now and the start of the 2028 campaign, Democrats have some work to do to create some significant policy initiatives and communicate those to the people most in need. Ideally, by working alongside them to create the political and social organizations that can make a real difference.

Otherwise, we can expect more of the same election outcomes for years to come.