JACOB HACKER AND Paul Pierson provide a powerful, empirical rejoinder to pundits who assert a necessary tradeoff between economic and cultural liberalism—or who say that Democratic elites have chosen culture over the material basis of their New Deal roots. We would like to drill down on three interrelated points in response.
First, after decades of What’s the Matter with Kansas?–style arguments about working-class white people voting against their economic interests, we are less hopeful than Hacker and Pierson are about “ building power through policy.” In our era of “partisan hearts and minds,” voter behavior is no longer strongly correlated with income levels, policy platforms, or even incumbent performance. Instead it is primarily driven by social identities—and class consciousness is a much less potent social identity than it used to be, at least if understood in terms of incomes. Similarly, the political feedback effects of economic policy—even very visible things like building roads and infrastructure—vary across space, and credit for these investments may be particularly hard to garner in the rural areas of recent Democratic losses. In this environment, it is unlikely that even single-minded Democratic campaign messaging on pocketbook issues—of the sort that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call for—would lead to significant electoral wins, at least in the short term.
Muted pocketbook voting makes affluent, highly educated suburban Democrats less of a puzzle. The Republican embrace of Trumpism has repelled them. The sustained mobilization of suburban women (even before Dobbs) has been particularly notable, generating a dynamic akin to the “capture” of African American voters by the Democrats. White working-class MAGA voters are not the only ones whose partisan loyalties do not turn on policy-based appeals.