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.
.. 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.
.. Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. 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
.. 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.
Marriage as a Matter of Social Justice
Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution and Adam Thomas of Georgetown University have found that much of the growth in child poverty from the late 1960s to the 1990s can be attributed to the growth in single parenthood, and that “child poverty rates would drop substantially” if more low-income parents were married. My research with the Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman suggests that about one-third of the growth in family-income inequality can be linked to declines in marriage since the 1970s. Economic stagnation among ordinary American families would also be lower were it not for the retreat from marriage: We estimate that the “growth in median income of families with children would be 44 percent higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married parenthood today.”
.. At least in the United States, Francis is indeed right to argue that the “evidence is mounting” that the retreat from marriage is “associated with increased poverty and a host of other social ills.”
.. The figure above shows that Catholics without a college degree are about one-fourth less likely to regularly attend Mass, compared to Catholics with a college degree.
Trump’s appeal to a declining middle class
Israel told me that most voters see their own position as fragile, vulnerable to collapse in hard times. People who in the past blamed structural forces for their difficulties, including globalization and trade, now “blame politicians.”
.. Members of the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck, they are anxious about terrorism coming to their own backyard, and they believe that the rule of ‘if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead’ is in danger of disappearing from the American ethos. Most important, the middle class believes that the rich play by a different set of rules and just get richer, but they also believe that the poor get all the programs and benefits, and all they get is the bill.
.. The American dream used to mean something – that you could count on good American wages and benefits for a hard day’s work. But that’s changing as big corporation have been shipping our jobs overseas and lobbyists have been rewriting all the rules. In just the last eight years, the average white family has lost about one-eighth of its wealth and seen its income drop for the first time in 80 years. If you were African-American or Latino just starting to catch up through hard work and determination, you’ve lost more than half of everything you put away. Ordinary people, whether white, black or brown, shouldn’t be paying for a crash they didn’t cause. We can’t afford to be a nation of haves and have-nots, where young people can’t find their first job and middle-aged construction workers may have seen their last. We can’t afford to be a nation where white kids are living in their parents’ basements, where too many young men color are living on the streets. It’s time to return to America where everyone willing to work and play by the rules can count on a fair shot. Opportunity should knock on every door no matter how humble the home, or who lives in it. That’s what I promised my children, that’s the American dream.
.. The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.
Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay
Since 1973, hourly compensation of the vast majority of American workers has not risen in line with economy-wide productivity. In fact, hourly compensation has almost stopped rising at all. Net productivity grew 72.2 percent between 1973 and 2014. Yet inflation-adjusted hourly compensation of the median worker rose just 8.7 percent, or 0.20 percent annually, over this same period, with essentially all of the growth occurring between 1995 and 2002. Another measure of the pay of the typical worker, real hourly compensation of production, nonsupervisory workers, who make up 80 percent of the workforce, also shows pay stagnation for most of the period since 1973, rising 9.2 percent between 1973 and 2014. Again, the lion’s share of this growth occurred between 1995 and 2002.