Recent political discussions often focus on working-class voters moving away from the Democratic Party, but a new analysis provides evidence that the last four decades, high-income, highly educated, and white-collar White voters have steadily moved toward the Democratic Party.
Four decades of data show high-status voters, not the working class, are reshaping American politics
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-Recent political discussions often focus on working-class voters moving away from the Democratic Party, but a new analysis provides evidence that a different shift is actually driving modern political divides. Over the last four decades, high-income, highly educated, and white-collar White voters have steadily moved toward the Democratic Party. These findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers Karyn Vilbig and Paula England conducted this study to examine popular narratives about voting behavior in the United States. Following the 2016 presidential election, many political commentators suggested that Donald Trump won because the White working class abandoned the Democratic Party. Some analysts argued that Democrats lost these voters by failing to offer strong economic solutions for lost manufacturing jobs. Other commentators proposed that the shift was related to racial status threats following the election of Barack Obama.
Vilbig and England noticed that many of these past analyses only looked at recent elections and treated socioeconomic status as a simple binary concept. They wanted to evaluate a much longer timeline to see exactly which groups of voters had changed their political preferences. To do this, the researchers analyzed data from 1980 to 2020 to map out the voting habits of different socioeconomic groups over time. They aimed to see if the changing political gaps were caused by lower-status voters moving to the political right, or higher-status voters moving to the political left.
Poor whites **really don’t like** to be reminded that they’re in the same socioeconomic condition as poor blacks. Americans never point this out but it’s the reason why everything sucks.
I don’t think that was ever the question. It’s less educated working-class people in question. The answer presented shows a misunderstanding of the question.
The danger of becoming the party of the educated and socioeconomic elite is that this cohort is outnumbered.
So education makes a difference? This is my shocked face.
It’s because highly educated people living in urbanized areas see little appeal in the Republican platform.
It helps that the Democratic party is a big tent party with basically everyone that’s “left of hard right”. Suburban Democrats in places like Long Island or Orange county are often fairly ideologically different than Democrats you meet in Portland or many major cities.
Just look at Long Island Democrats fighting New York City Democrats on whether they should build denser housing on Long Island or preserve their “suburban character”.
Yas. Clinton (Bill) was the first democrat to compete with the republicans for wall street money. During his ’92 campaign, the Ds out-raised the Rs, which was unusual for democrats during that period.
Clinton marked the end of a long shift away from the working class and towards the business community.
This was evident to people like Ralph Nader 35 years ago. Its funny we now have studies showing what contemporaries could tell you was happening as it happened.
This isn’t science. It’s not social science. It’s just politics.
I wish people would say “middle-low income white people” instead of “working class.” Other working class demographics already lean heavily democrat.
It’s that certain people don’t understand “penny wise pound foolish”. Or more relevant, when a company chooses immediate and short term profits at the cost of long term losses. Cutting taxes and services might get you a lower tax bill and put a few more dollars in your pocket but the social cost will far exceed it. Or that you pay more in another area.
Democrats have become a suburban soccer mom party
So….dems lose working class voters and is now the party of rich people?
Yea, it’s called white guilt.
That’s because the Democrats have moved towards them
Hence why they want us poorer than ever before. It’s a direct attack at trying to gerrymander without having to follow the rules, at least that’s my hypothesis, could just be incompetence as well.
I would argue that these phenomena are related and in fact reinforce each other.
Why did they need to look back 40 years when they were exploring behavior from 2016 onwards? Seems disingenuous.
This headline is so dumb. There is discussion about the working class leaving the democrats but we found that the rich are actually joining the democrats!
Like why is it like this.
The problem is that most of the country is not highly educated and wealthy. The GOP has done a great job appealing to the disenfranchised blue collar workers of the Midwest and south, but unfortunately their appeal lies in stoking the flames of hate.
I hate to be that guy but political science isn’t science.
New? This is all anyone has been talking about since Trump won.