Ever notice how many Americans vote against their own economic interests? Republicans wouldn't stand a chance if the bulk of the population understood where the parties stood and actually voted for the party with their economic interests at heart. Yet the majority of white working-class voters in recent years have voted for a party that clearly sides with the truly wealthy against the voters' economic interests.
Maybe the Republicans are on to something. Maybe if we Democrats want our natural constituency back, we have to stop trying century-old strategies and look at what might be attracting lower-income people to vote for Republicans. I see two different sets of answers, depending on which group of voters you're talking about.
It's becoming a winner-take-all society. The differences between rich and the median are in banana republic territory. What's going on? Why would I, stepping into the shoes of those irrational voters, vote for lower taxes on the few rich winners and lower net pay for me?
Because maybe I could be one of the winners. I could win the lottery.
The lottery I'm really talking about isn't the state pick-5 or whatever it's called in your state. Yes, that's a small part of it, but that's just a symptom. The lottery I'm talking about is the one that's rigged, the one that hands out top jobs to a semi-hereditary cabal of CEOs and insiders who congratulate each other even as they run their companies and the country aground. Becoming part of that club is really winning the lottery, and our pretend "American Dream" is that anyone can rise to the top. Yeah, right. And somebody has to win Megabucks. It's hardly something to count on.
As I noted above, there are two different sets of answers for why people vote against their own economic interests. Before dwelling more on the lottery, I want to again reference a wonderful article that Jonathan Haidt wrote in 2008, What makes people vote Republican? What makes people vote Republican? A certain fraction of the population, notably among the Scots-Irish (Celtic Protestants) who dominate Appalachia and nearby parts of the south, may be even harder to reach, and outside of the lottery paradigm. I bring this article up because Haidt describes two different sets of values, roughly corresponding to liberal and conservative. A subset of the poor white Republican vote is explained by Haidt's thesis.
Remember the 2008 election returns, where Obama did really well in many places but absolutely horribly in Appalachia? No coincidence. Now bring in this wonderful 2009 Diary here from Geenius at Wrok, Yo, Pundits! Here's What's Up With the Republicans, and you see how Appalachia was settled by "borderers", another term for the Scots-Irish (who largely once lived in the Borders region of lowland Scotland).
Their society perfectly fits Haidt's conservative value-set model. They believe in deference to authority (tanistry), and especially in knowing one's place. In southern dialect, there's a word "uppity" which is somehow an insult meaning "someone who doesn't know their place". In the rest of America, upward mobility is a virtue, but in the borderer culture, it's a vice. One defers to wealth and power. So a poor person there is supposed to stay poor. You don't appeal to him with the "American Dream." Yes, LBJ's "war on poverty" cleverly started in Appalachia, where the poorest white people were, but it didn't make them reliable Democrats.
In GaW's diary, the Republican coalition features the cultural descendants of two of the major English settler groups, borderers and cavaliers, the latter being the aristocratic landowners who became the planters, the slave owners. Again, Southern society was ordered, with the cavaliers -- the aristocratic English who defeated the Scots -- on top. The more egalitarian Puritans and Quakers lived up north.
In English colonial societies even into this past century, the standard pattern was for the ruling class to keep the classes beneath them fighting each other, looking down, so to speak, rather than up. So if the ruling English (planters in America, colonials in India, etc.) were the A group, the A-1 group was not focusing on taking over, but on preventing the usually larger A-2 group from becoming the second dog in the pack. Only the ones on the bottom, the underclass, had nobody to push down on; they were dehumanized, such as the slaves. (Could this account for dogfighting and cockfighting among the poor?) The poor whites of the south thus didn't look up at the planters who had the wealth and try to get their share. They knew their place (a key value in their society) and it was above the negroes, and below the planters.
Hence there is a portion of the Republican coalition that is not waiting to win the lottery. I bring them up to point out that they're going to be harder to win over, and it's going to take a strategy that doesn't focus on economic self-interest. It's once you leave the mountains that things get more interesting. The real swing voters are the one who do want upward mobility, but don't see it coming easily. They're the ones who want the winning ticket. Maybe they're so discouraged about upward mobility by conventional, incremental means that they only care about the long shot, the one shot that still seems to exist. The US is clearly in a long-term economic decline, except for the wealthiest, so they cling to whatever hope they can find.
Most people are terrible at handling probability. They gamble without realizing that the house always wins. They panic over the smallest risk ("terr'ism!") and ignore huge risks, if the latter have less of an emotional immediacy to them. Maybe this is our ancient instincts at work: A big cat was an immediate, serious risk, and our forbears had little control over the environment or other slow-moving risks. The political game played by the Republicans, then, is to make these people think that they have a chance of becoming very rich some day, and by gum when they do, they shouldn't have to pay that higher tax either! So it's not as if we Democrats are "soaking the rich". Rather, we're threatening to soak them, once they become rich.
Contrast this with, say, modern English society. They do not exactly value knowing their place the way some Americans do, but they also have a more realistic understanding of the role of class in society. So they can be working class and proud, and want society to look out more for their interests. That's how the Labour movement worked. Tory success since Thatcher has largely come from importing the American memes about upward mobility, while "New Labour" abandoned its roots, so that many English now hope to win the upward-mobility lottery too.
Actual state lotteries merely play onto the same ideas. The really high-stakes games, like Powerball, are especially insidious. Yes, winning $100M would really transform your life. But the odds of getting it are so small that it just isn't worth rationally thinking about. Yes, somebody has to win, but a whole heck of a lot of people will lose in the meantime. And studies of actual lottery winners have shown that the big jackpot isn't all it's cracked up to be; many of these people's lives have not turned out happily ever after.
But by reinforcing the dream, advertising it on TV, and adding new games as a way to boost state revenues, state lotteries have helped perpetuate the idea that you too may be rich some day! So rather than seeking social justice for all, and seeking prosperity for all, people irrationally think that they will be the big winner, and everyone else will become their servant. (Who can forget "Bob's Country"? Only it wasn't truckers like Bob for whom the Wall Street casino was rigged.) It takes advantage of human imperfection to make inequality look attractive.
Since the "lottery player" class really does care about becoming better off, they are potential targets for political positions that emphasize economic improvement. Not necessarily "equality" for its own sake, though -- I don't think Americans are ready for that concept. But if we craft the message right, we may be able to win back some of these voters. They need to understand that even if they do somehow strike it rich, it's okay to pay, say, 45% in marginal taxes on the second million, rather than 33%, and they'll still be well off.
Yes, social-conservative "wedge issues" have been a tool too, and the red team has frankly had better advertising and message management. We need to counter these problems. But "it's the economy, stupid" still has a lot of clout, and it was largely jobs, and the lack thereof, that caused our side to stay home this past November. Social issues rise to the fore in good times.
We really need to produce a vision of a society where you don't need to be a lottery winner. We need to restore hope, not be the second party that panders to extreme wealth.