… The 2016 election and its aftermath have produced turmoil on the right while once again forcing into public view worrisome long-term trends in the Democratic electorate. … One of the mainstays of Democratic optimism is the conviction that a growing body of young voters — more liberal than their […] Read more »
The Democrats’ Pivot
… As noted in the chart below, the Democrat Party’s image among white voters has been in steep decline over the last decade. Accelerating their decline is their standing among the white working class, a group identified in numerous post mortems of the 2018 campaign as a key coalition in […] Read more »
What Determines How Americans Perceive Their Social Class?
… A focus on objective social class entails a direct determination of a person’s social class based on socioeconomic variables — mainly income, wealth, education and occupation. A second approach to social class, the one that occupies us here, deals with how people put themselves into categories. This is subjective […] Read more »
The Trumpcare Conundrum
… The paradox of the health-reform debate is that many of Obamacare’s key elements raised costs on younger and healthier people who generally vote Democratic as a means of limiting the financial exposure of older and sicker people, even as older whites have stampeded toward the GOP. Conversely, many of […] Read more »
Will Blue-Collar Whites Change Their Minds About Obamacare?
The impending Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act is crystallizing the class contradiction long embedded in the health-care debate. From the start, President Obama’s health-care reform has faced fierce opposition from working-class whites, the same constituency that anchored Donald Trump’s electoral coalition. But blue-collar whites have been among […] Read more »
How ‘Elites’ Became One of the Nastiest Epithets in American Politics
… For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own. That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the […] Read more »