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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics holds that political parties exist to promote the material self-interest of the coalitions that support them. If that were true, when Democrats became the party of high-income college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten those voters’ pocketbooks. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard fare on the right, where the phrase awakened capital it became a slur to describe Democrats’ supposed allegiance to corporate America; the Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, has argument that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.

But as wealthier and better-educated voters shifted to the Democrats, the party and its voters became more economically progressive, not less. They have largely coalesced around an economic agenda that emphasizes supporting the poor and middle class, and around messages that put that agenda at the fore. The wealthiest Democrats have become as left-leaning on the economy as their less affluent party members and far more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. US politics seems to have decisively entered what you might call a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.

From the New Deal to the George W. Bush era, the Marxist view of politics has largely endured. The wealthy and educated overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, who pursued tax cuts and deregulation, while the working class overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, who expanded the social safety net.

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In the past decade and a half, however, the dynamic has changed dramatically. In 2008, the top fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; by 2020, they were the group most likely to vote for Democrats and did so by a margin of nearly 15 points. (The Democrats won the poorest fifth of voters by as large a margin.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 counties by economic output. An equally strong shift has occurred if you look at college education rather than income. Perhaps the most dramatic of all was change among rich white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, the wealthiest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, that dynamic reversed: the top 5 percent became the group most likely to vote Democratic.

This newly educated and wealthy Democratic Party has not moved to the right on the economy. On the contrary. After the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued an expansive economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and the poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K ) and large sizes. investment to create well-paid jobs in places left behind. These policies, if fully adopted, would have represented a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would have been financed by a series of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and more redistributive than anything Democrats have pursued since the ’60s or ’70s,” said Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and co-author of a recent study. paper about the change in the Democrats’ coalition, he told me. “This is not a party that pursues a”Brahmin left‘agenda. An incredibly progressive economic agenda is coming.”

Despite its ambition, this agenda has not provoked anything resembling a rebellion from the party’s wealthy and educated base or the politicians who represent them. (Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to its passage has been West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who represents a much more labor-intensive state than most of his fellow Democrats and who switched his affiliation to independent this year.) Kamala Harris is now FUNCTIONING on many of the same policies, and according to polls, her support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s was in 2020.

A common complaint from the center and right is that the influx of affluent and highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has led it to focus primarily on culture war issues instead of pocket economics. But when Hacker and his coauthors looked at party platforms since the 1980s, they found that since the early 2000s the share devoted to economic issues has steadily increased, and that economic issues take up twice as much space as cultural issues. They reached a similar conclusion when they looked at Twitter, where you’d most expect to see party elites pandering to the cultural tastes of their base. They looked at the tweets of top Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the 10 most frequently tweeted phrases focused on economic issues, such as Rebuild better, The Affordable Care Actand America’s bailout; the only non-economic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (By contrast, only three of the top 10 phrases used by Republicans were about economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts were actually slightly more likely to discuss pocketbook issues, such as the economy and health care health than members in poor districts.

The policies and rhetoric coming from party leaders reflect the fact that the rich liberal voters they have moved well to the left on economic issues. A major study conducted after the 2020 election, found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats at the top of the income distribution favored raising the federal minimum wage, raising taxes on people making more than $600,000 a year, getting rid of college debt, and passing Medicare for all. It is similar to or slightly higher than support for these policies among poor and middle-income Democrats, and anywhere from 20 to 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.

None of this is to say that material self-interest does not matter at all to affluent liberals. Some evidence suggests that while wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that affect them directly; they are also known to oppose the construction of new housing in their neighborhoods that would make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they might seem. According to the poll cited above, a majority of the wealthiest Democrats support raising taxes on people making more than $250,000. And during this campaign season, Democratic Party leaders, including both Harris and former President Barack Obama, have trumpeted their support for building more homes.

The leftward shift of high-status voters is partly a story of genuine ideological conversion. Since the financial crisis of 2008, politicians, academics and the media have paid much more attention to how the existing economic system has produced inequality and hardship. Higher-educated and affluent voters, who also tend to be the most connected to national politics, appear to have responded to this shift by adopting more progressive economic views.

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The story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, many Democrats became convinced that the best way to win back disgruntled working-class voters was to implement policies that would help them. Polls consistently find middle- and low-income Republicans strongly disagree with their party leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.

The Biden agenda that was shaped by these views has largely produced its intended economic effects. Unemployment fell, wage inequality narrowed, and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment poured into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are achievement a strong comeback. Politically, however, the effort to win back working-class voters appears to have failed: If the polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is bleeding working-class support worse than it did in 2016 or 2020.

Part of that failure appears to be because, when it comes to the economy, many voters worry about high prices above all else and hold Democrats responsible for them. But there is also compelling evidence that Republican voters are not particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. I mean, while they disagree with GOP politicians on health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t really care about that disagreement. A recent one paper by political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions from decades ago and found that in the 1980s and ’90s, white voters who did not have a college education were more likely to vote in line with their economic views, leading to support the Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, this dynamic has reversed: white voters without a college education now place much greater emphasis on culture war issues than economic ones, pushing them to support Republicans.

That realignment leaves both sides in an awkward spot ahead of November. Voters consistently say the economy is the most important issue in the 2024 election. And yet the wealthy overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris, whose administration has favored bold redistricting and big government spending, while a critical mass of voters from the working class favor Donald Trump, whose economic agenda has largely consisted of cutting taxes for the wealthy and trying to destroy Affordable Care. Act.

The irony is that the economic-populist drive of the Biden administration implicitly assumed that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats embraced an agenda that was largely against the immediate material interests of their constituents, hoping that they could win over less affluent voters by appealing to their material interests. But Trump’s working-class supporters, like liberal elites, appear to have other things on their minds.