JACOB HACKER AND Paul Pierson consider it “puzzling” that the Democratic Party has pursued an ambitious progressive economic agenda even as they have “sought out and won over an increasing share of affluent suburban voters.” But why should the party’s “move up the income distribution” entail “closing the door on ambitious economic reforms”? The assumption here is a perennial favorite among political economists: policy preferences are determined by economic self-interest. But for better or worse, they’re mostly not. As one influential review of the relevant evidence put it, “Self-interest ordinarily does not have much effect upon the ordinary citizen’s sociopolitical attitudes.”
The 2020 Nationscape survey gauged the policy preferences of 55,000 people in the three months after the 2020 election. Dividing the respondents by party and income quintile reveals remarkably little opposition to the Biden administration’s “surprisingly ambitious” economic agenda among affluent Democrats—or for that matter, much relationship at all between income and economic policy preferences. Ensuring that all students can graduate from state colleges debt-free was a bit less popular among affluent Democrats than others, but the difference was modest. Largescale investment in environmental technology—one of the most ambitious items on the Biden agenda—was more popular among affluent Democrats than among those in the bottom two income quintiles, but here too, the difference was modest.
The absence of any significant income gradient in Democrats’ economic policy preferences undercuts the premise of Hacker and Pierson’s “puzzle.” But another striking fact is that, regardless of income, Democrats at the beginning of the Biden administration were strongly supportive of all these proposals. Even “government-run health insurance” for all—a much more ambitious progressive policy than any the Biden Democrats have tried to pass—was over whelmingly supported by Democrats across the income spectrum; among those in the top two income quintiles, 70 percent agreed and only 15 percent disagreed. The proposal with the weakest support was “strengthening unions,” but even in that case fewer than 20 percent of Democrats were opposed, and their views were unrelated to their own economic positions.