November 10, 2006
The 2006 Election II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Fred Smoler raises and answers an interesting rhetorical question: “The Republicans are the party of the rich, right? Well, they used to be, although even in 2004 the Democrats did a hair better than the Republicans with people earning over $100,000. In 2006 the Democrats did better still.” Fred’s thesis boils down to this: Republicans are losing their grip on high-income and wealthier voters over three issues: (1) culture wars, which presumably drive many pro-choice, pro-stem-cell-research, pro-privacy voters to the Democratic fold; (2) the war on terror, on which Republicans may have temporarily lost their edge; and (3) Iraq, which concerns voters from all demographic backgrounds. I’m not sure that I buy Fred’s argument that “Republicans risk becoming the party of lower-income white voters, and that is a losing strategy.” CNN’s national exit poll for House races shows that Democrats fared best among low-income voters and worst among high-income voters. How these numbers change when one controls for race, I don’t know, and perhaps Fred is working off of more sophisticated tab data.
From a historical perspective, Democrats experienced their worst postwar slump when they lost lower-income voters, not when they got trounced among high-income voters. In his 1978 study, Transformations of the American Party System, Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., found that in congressional races the Democrats’ share of “high status” white votes jumped from 48 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1974; meanwhile, the Democrats lost ground among “low status” whites, from 74 percent in 1964 to 67 percent in 1974. In presidential races, their share of low-status whites fell from 61 percent in 1960 to 53 percent in 1976.It’s not clear how Ladd defined low-status and high-status, but clearly Democrats after 1972 were appealing to more educated, higher-income voters and less to low-income voters, who had traditionally been their core base. In their influential study of post-war politics, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, Thomas and Mary Edsall cited Ladd’s study as an alarming indication that Democrats were becoming too elitist a party, and that Republicans had managed to capture the populist banner, even as their tax policies did little to benefit low-income voters. In effect, in the 1970s Democrats were at least temporarily the rich man’s party. Or, at least, the upper-middle-class party. It’s not clear that this strategy was either good or bad. They still controlled Congress by enormous margins, but they were losing their grip on the Presidency.
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