Im-Politic: Why Roseanne is Right About Trump Voters

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2016 election, Democrats, exit polls, Im-Politic, middle class, polls, Populism, Republicans, Roseanne Barr, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trump, working class

So is Roseanne right about Trump and his victory in the 2016 presidential elections? Normally I wouldn’t attach any special importance to what an entertainer thinks about politics (or anything else outside entertainment). But Roseanne Barr’s claim in the wake of her sitcom’s revival and reboot that “it was working-class people who elected Trump” has intensified an already heated debate among many American politicians and political analysts and consultant types about the real lessons that Democrats should be learning from that shocking White House loss. And coincidentally, new evidence has just appeared awarding the win to Roseanne.

By way of background, this debate is really two closely related debates, and they could not be more politically charged. The first, as indicated above, entails whether the Trump triumph mainly stemmed from a genuine populist revolt fueled by both the economic and social/cultural anxieties of Main Street Americans, or whether it principally represented a victory for the kinds of relatively affluent voters who tend strongly to vote Republican.

The second has to do with the size and continuing importance of the white middle and working class vote. Is it rapidly becoming a minor portion of the electorate, or despite demographic shrinkage, will its preferences remain decisive for many years?

The implications? If the 2016 elections were a standard Republican victory, then Democrats’ pitch to working- and middle-class doesn’t have to change much because they’re still generally voting for the party. So maybe Democrats simply need a better candidate than Hillary Clinton (who did, after all, win the popular vote). And if the those aforementioned white voters are quickly losing their historic dominance over presidential politics (because their shares of the total population and electorate are falling quickly), then Democrats can feel freer than they already do to focus more on the issues – like greatly loosening American immigration policies – that supposedly animate increasingly significant racial and ethnic groups even if this strategy might turn off working- and middle-class whites.

Roseanne’s comments generated considerable and vigorous pushback. (See here, here, and here for examples.) But it seems that her critics’ case is based on exit poll data from the 2016 race that public opinion experts now believe was seriously off-base. According to an article by the New York Times‘ Thomas Edsall, more recent studies have concluded that the exit polls seriously overestimated Trump’s support “among well-educated white voters” – and therefore seriously underestimated the President’s backing by less well-educated (and generally less affluent) whites. Moreover, those exit polls

“substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters — many of whom are culturally conservative — and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate, a far more culturally liberal constituency.”

“33 percent of Democratic voters and Democratic leaners are whites without college degrees. That’s substantially larger than the 26 percent of Democrats who are whites with college degrees — the group that many analysts had come to believe was the dominant constituency in the party.

“According to [the Pew Research Center], this noncollege white 33 percent makes up a larger bloc of the party’s voters than the 28 percent made up of racial and ethnic minorities without degrees. It is also larger than the 12 percent of Democratic voters made up of racial and ethnic minorities with college degrees.”

Further, Edsall cites reports from Pew finding that whites without college degrees also continued to comprise a pretty big share of Americans who voted in the last presidential race: 44 percent, to be precise. That’s fully ten percentage points higher than their share reported in the exit polls.

As the author makes clear, such polling is still far from an exact science, and many of the pollsters he quotes seem to agree. But unless the latest studies – and the consensus they appear to represent – are whoppingly wrong, they make clear that the Democrats’ leftward, “resistance”-oriented tilt since the 2016 elections reveals a learning curve that has not only been unusually shallow, but that appears to be growing ever flatter. 

Im-Politic: How I Scooped The Times on Trump and Nationalism 25 Years Ago

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America First, Democrats, elites, environmentalists, foreign policy, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, internationalism, interventionism, middle class, minoriites, nationalism, politics, Populism, Republicans, sovereignty, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trade, Trump, working class

However conceited it sounds, it really is time – again – 🙂 to pat myself on the back. This morning’s New York Times featured a long analysis by contributor Thomas Edsall titled “The End of Left and Right as We Knew Them.” The main thesis (as per a quote from the director of the “International Institutions and Global Governance Program” at the Council on Foreign Relations):

“The most salient political division today is not between conservatives and liberals in the United States or social democrats in the United Kingdom and France, but between nationalists and globalists.”

Edsall himself elaborates:

“By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. … On the liberal side, the Democratic Party and the center-left European parties have been allied in favor of globalization, if we define globalization as receptivity to open borders, the expansion of local and nationalistic perspectives and support for a less rigid social order and for liberal cultural, immigration and trade policies.”

Moreover, at the heart of these new divisions are class distinctions: The nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic are likeliest to be relatively poor and relatively uneducated – although Edsall does present research findings showing – unconvincingly in my view – that classic “racial resentment, more than economic anxiety, influenced the [U.S.} presidential election.”

Yet the author also unmistakably believes that the left “In recent decades…both in Europe and in the United States [has] begun to include and reflect the views of large numbers of well-educated elites — relatively affluent knowledge or creative class workers….” Indeed, he coins a nice phrase: “The rise of the affluent left.”

So what does this have to do with yours truly? Plenty. Because nearly 25 years ago, I predicted the development of exactly the same trend. My forecast came in an article for the journal The National Interest that was called (wait for it) “Beyond Left and Right” – and it got a fair amount of media attention from both liberals and conservatives. (The National Interest itself is on the right end of the spectrum.) 

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find versions on-line that aren’t behind pay walls, but here are a few excerpts from a dog-eared xerox:

“…a new underlying fault line [replacing the old left-right divisions] is already emerging in American foreign policy, dividing what might best be called nationalists and internationalists. In terms of American diplomacy, this new alignment will pit a generic model of foreign policy-making that long predates the Cold War – one based at bottom…on the belief that international activism itself is the key to American security and prosperity – against a rival approach…whose supreme goal is consolidating American military and economic strength, and enhancing America’s freedom of action. In the realm of economic policy, those who argue that the nation-state, as an economic player, is obsolete or dangerous will vie with those convinced of its continuing relevance and legitimacy. In electoral politics, sharp differences in economic interests and cultural outlooks will produce a widening rift between business, professional,and government elites on the one hand, and wage-earners on the other. The issue of class, in other words, is re-emerging in American politics.”

I added that these divisions were arising from “the different impact of world economic trends on different classes” and were producing “a foreign policy debate [that] increasingly pits social and economic classes against each other, focusing on the questions of who pays the costs and who incurs most of the risks involved in competing economic and security policies.

“Polls repeatedly show that the best educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues. The surveys also show strong support for internationalist policies to be lacking nearly everywhere else on the social spectrum. “

And there’s more. I wrote that “At the mass public level,” the nationalist faction would be comprised of “blue collar union members, white collar middle managers and small businessmen from the Perotista ranks; family- and community-oriented immigrants; and grassroots environmental activists.”

As for their rivals, “The social base of internationalism would include many big multinational businesses and their upper level managers, financiers, professionals, and retailers. Journalists and the rest of the mass media, as well as academics, also tend to support an idealistic globalism. Other members of a new internationalist coalition might include minorities whose fear of cultural conservative nationalists outweighs their qualms about job-destroying internationalist free-trade economics, and affluent, mainstream environmentalists.”

And there was more on the role of the media: “Much of what they lack in numbers, the internationalists would make up for in money, influence, and the aura of respectability that their media allies will continue to provide.”

What would happen to liberal and conservative internationalists in the process? The former

“may wind up permanently alienating labor, minorities, and the white-collar middle class whether they intend to or not – and lose their identity as champions of the underdog and as agents of progressive change in the process. Internationalists of the Right will face similar problems. Without offering their voters something more than NAFTA, the continuing “creative destruction” of their jobs, endless foreign interventions, and Marilyn Quayle’s definition of family values, it is difficult to see them avoiding George [H.W.] Bush’s political fate.”

For good measure, I added that if they do crystallize, the resulting new coalitions are likely to be “less inclined to compromise than their predecessors….”

Clearly, I didn’t get everything right. But I’m kind of amazed at how many developments I absolutely nailed. Further, we’re only a few months into the Trump era. In other words, the American political realignment I anticipated still probably has a long ways to go.

Im-Politic: Bubble Kool-Aid is Spreading Through the US Electorate

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2016 election, Democrats, Financial Crisis, Great Recession, Im-Politic, Immigration, politics, private sector, Republicans, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trade

It’s becoming increasingly and understandably popular to predict that 2016’s rock-em-sock-em presidential election could spark a major realignment in American politics. In particular, it’s nearly impossible to see how the current Republican Party survives the insurrection led by its presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Less apparent but no less important are the big shifts that are already taking place, as a new New York Times article unmistakably demonstrates. The piece, by Thomas Edsall, also shows that both major parties show signs of historic change, and unwittingly reveals that Democrats in particular are increasingly backing a model for the economy that has already failed catastrophically.

Edsall’s analysis relies on several recent polls and additional academic research, and although I have no illusions about the reliability of such surveys, especially when they’re looking at broad trends as opposed to political races, they’re difficult to dismiss. When they generally track one another, their credibility seems particularly high.

These studies and findings come from the Pew Foundation, the Brookings Institution, The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Virginia, and the Public Religion Research Institute – an impressive range of sources. The headline on Edsall’s story spotlights the trend he views as most important: American politics is experiencing a “great inversion” of the “New Deal order among white voters.” Specifically,

“From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.”

Couple this with the Democrats’ mounting support among minority Americans and immigrants and their offspring – who are acutely aware of the economic and social progress made since their parents’ days, or who compare life in the United States versus the circumstances in their home countries – and the party’s political prospects definitely seem on the upswing.

Whether a new age of such Democrats’ dominance will be good for the country is a separate issue, and here the developments described by Edsall are positively depressing. The main reason: The Democrats’ mounting belief in addressing some of the economy’s prime failings with bigger government handouts rather than with needed improvement in the structure and workings of the private sector.

For example, according to the University of Virginia report, even the white “social elites” who are trending Democratic strongly believe that “the system is rigged in favor” of the wealthy (by a 3 to 1 margin) and that Wall Street and big business “profit at the expense of ordinary Americans….” (by a 6 to 1 margin).  Nothing of course intrinsically wrong with that.

But here’s their solution: “[B]y better than 2 to 1…the government ‘should do more to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.’” Further, there’s compelling – though not conclusive – evidence that support for more government activism extends only to more generous import supports and actual subsidies, rather than reforms that could actually improve job availability and pay in the private sector.

Principally, the Virginia data show very strong support for more lenient immigration policies among the elites. And although this study contains no data on trade policy, the Public Religion Research Institute has just confirmed what numerous other polling groups have found: Many more rank-and-file Republicans have become more skeptical about the U.S. approach to globalization than Democrats. So although in recent decades, Democratic members of Congress (as opposed to Democratic presidents) have led the opposition to new trade agreements and similar policy decisions, they’re looking increasingly out of step with their constituents.

There’s no question that continually rising floods of imports and immigrants would serve the short-term interests of the elites who keep flocking to Democratic ranks. What’s not to like about cheaper and cheaper consumer goods, not to mention nannies and janitors and gardeners? So much the better if millennials – who for the most part lack any experience with or memory of the industrial economy and its blessings for working people – can be seduced by the false promises of prospering through waiting tables, developing killer apps, or taking on ever more gig work. And if low-income working class minorities believe that government largesse will adequately substitute for the destruction of factory jobs and the all the gainful employment they create outside industry – well, jackpot!

The problem, of course, is that the United States tried this formula for economic health during the 2000s. And it’s still living with the destruction wreaked by the financial crisis and Great Recession that inevitably resulted from neglecting two vital and connected needs: producing everyday goods and services at home, and generating adequate wage and salary income. Instead, the nation drank the kool-aid that it could borrow and spend its way to durable prosperity.

It’s been bad enough, in other words, that America’s political, economic and business establishments haven’t learned the lessons of the previous decades. Now it looks like their cluelessness will be reinforced by those groups on the rise in the U.S. electorate.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: De-Industrialization’s Toll in Pennsylvania

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budgets, China, demographics, Jobs, manufacturing, Pennsylvania, Pottstown, taxes, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’re having your doubts that the woes of U.S. manufacturing can translate directly into a weaker overall economy, shakier finances, and more hardship for individual Americans and their families, take a look at today’s New York Times feature on the decline of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Just as important, take a look at the Keystone State overall – whose troubles and closely related de-industrialization mirror those of Pottstown.

As reported by correspondent Thomas Edsall, this once-thriving community in the southeastern corner of the state, has since the 1970s seen the manufacturing that fueled its economy “collapse in the face of foreign competition.” Largely as a result, although its population has remained stable going back to 1950, its employment base has contracted by more than 23 percent during those decades. Nowadays, it suffers from a poverty rate that’s a staggering 27.7 percent.

But don’t get the idea that Pottstown is an island of misery in an otherwise prospering Keystone State. Research cited by Edsall claims that 27 of Pennsylvania’s cities are “financially distressed,” and that they contain 40 percent of the state’s population. Indeed, Pennsylvania is heading towards its second straight state budget crisis, as its leaders grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.8 billion.

No doubt, Pennsylvania’s woes stem from many sources, but flagging manufacturing looks like it’s taken a big toll – along with misguided trade policies. Let’s see what’s happened since the end of 2001, when China was admitted into the World Trade Organization, thereby essentially became immune from U.S. (and other foreign) actions meant to retaliate against its protectionist practices, and began flooding American markets with job- and growth-killing exports.

Between 2002 and last year, manufacturing shrank slightly as a share of the U.S. economy in real terms from 11.98 percent to 11.93 percent. And especially important for the nation’s tax base and therefore financial health, just over 3.3 million manufacturing jobs – which pay above average wages – were eliminated (though not all because of Chinese competition). That came to 21.18 percent of the January, 2002 national manufacturing workforce.

Moreover, those manufacturing wages have gone practically nowhere when you adjust for inflation. We don’t have figures for white collar manufacturing employees going back to 2002, but the data for production workers and other non-supervisory workers shows that real wages rose less than one percent during that 13-year period!

From 2002 through 2015, Pennsylvania manufacturing fared even worse – shrinking in absolute terms by 13.40 percent, and declining from 16.50 percent of the state economy in constant dollars to 12.14 percent. On the employment front, the state lost 27.36 percent of its manufacturing jobs. I wasn’t able to find a time series for Pennsylvania’s inflation-adjusted manufacturing wages. But in pre-inflation terms, since 2007 (the earliest figures available) they’ve been rising more slowly for all manufacturing workers than manufacturing wages nation-wide, according to the Labor Department. This industrial contraction and its employment fallout certainly hasn’t made it any easier for Pennsylvania to pay for state services in a financially responsible way.  

Pennsylvania is often described as a state with special problems – especially a population that’s both old and aging faster than the nation’s as a whole, and high individual and corporate tax rates.  But there can’t be any doubt that the shrinkage of manufacturing, a source of disproportionate productivity gains and innovation, as well as high wages, has made its challenges far more formidable.  And it’s hard to imagine that the same doesn’t hold for the nation as a whole.