One of the most maddening problems for the Democratic Party must be the conundrum that the people likeliest to benefit from the party's agenda are also the voters who are least likely to turn out. You can see it when you look at
exit polls: Even in a good year like 2012, people with above-average incomes are overrepresented among the ranks of voters, and those upper-income brackets are likelier to vote Republican.
You can really see it when you start comparing counties to each other. Take DuPage County in Chicago's suburbs, and Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley, as examples, which have fairly similar populations (917,000 for DuPage, 775,000 for Hidalgo, in 2010). DuPage County has a median household income of $77k and 5.7 percent of its population lives in poverty. In Hidalgo, the MHI is $32k and 34.4 percent are in poverty. In 2014, both states had competitive gubernatorial races; there were 286,000 votes cast in DuPage County ... and 80,000 votes cast in Hidalgo County.
Pew Research just came out with a fascinating new study that looks in depth at this tendency. While they don't really propose solutions, they accurately diagnose the problem. Pew finds that voters who are less financially secure are likelier to prefer Democrats, but they're also likelier to be politically disengaged and have no preference at all. And regardless of which party people who are less financially secure prefer, they're much less likely to be registered to vote, and less likely to actually vote.
You can see the disparities in the graph above, which shows that in the most financially secure bracket, there was a 49-42 preference for Republicans, with only 10 percent not sure. In the least financially secure bracket, there was a 42-17 preference for Democrats, but 41 percent fell in the "other/not sure/refused" category. But skip down to the lower part of the graph: among the most financially secure bracket, 63 percent were likely voters, but among the least secure bracket, only 20 percent were likely voters. Before even getting to the disengaged "don't know" voters in the least secure bracket, of the 42 percent who preferred the Democrats, only 12 percent were likely voters and 30 percent were non-voters.
We'll dig deeper into this study over the fold.
You've probably seen lots of pundit hand-wringing over the 2014 elections in particular, which had
historically low turnout, with turnout especially low among the young and among non-whites (groups that figure prominently in the current Democratic coalition). The Pew study quantifies just how bad that was in 2014, bearing in mind that young and non-white people are likelier to be in the less financially secure brackets. In the most financially secure bracket, 63 percent were likely voters in the 2014 election. In the least financially secure bracket, only 20 percent were likely 2014 voters.
That same pattern extends to political knowledge and to political behavior outside of voting. Among the most financially secure bracket, 62 percent knew which parties control the House and Senate, and 42 percent had contacted an elected official in the previous two years. Among the least financially secure bracket, 26 percent knew which parties control the House and Senate, and 14 percent had contacted an elected official. And while the most fundamental building block—simply being registered to vote—was much more common, even that showed the same disparity. Among the most financially secure bracket, 94 percent were registered to vote, and among the least secure, only 54 percent were registered.
Pew also asked a battery of policy questions, and found that, at least on safety net and government spending questions, the less-secure brackets were likelier to support the Democratic agenda and the more-secure brackets were likelier to agree with Republican-sounding propositions. For instance, in the most-secure bracket, 62 percent agreed with the statement that "Government can't afford to do more for the needy," while 34 percent said "Government should do more for the needy, even if it means more debt." In the least secure bracket, that was flipped, with 60 percent saying "do more" and 37 percent saying "can't afford to do more."
The disparity was even greater in the reactions to the phrases, "Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return" and "Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently." Obviously, there's a difference in perception based on whether or not respondents are actually familiar with what it's like to be poor; the ones who are actually in the middle of being poor see it much differently than people who are distantly removed from financial insecurity.
Interestingly, the biggest disparities between the different brackets are only there for the questions about spending, the safety net, and the very nature of government. (Another question for which there's a big disparity is "Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient" versus "Government does a better job than people give it credit for." The most secure bracket favors "wasteful and inefficient" by a 61-36 margin, while the least secure bracket agrees by only a 49-48 margin.)
Questions about, for instance, environmental regulation and homosexuality show little difference between the various financial security brackets. And the one question where the more financially secure brackets take a more progressive position is the one about immigration, which makes a fair amount of sense, since more financially secure persons are probably less likely to view immigrants as someone they might have to compete against for a job (and, instead, as a potential source of cheap labor). The most-secure bracket favors "Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents" over "Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs" by a 65-27 margin, while the least-secure bracket favors it by only a 51-44 margin.
If you look under the hood at the demographics of who falls into which financial security bracket, again, it makes pretty clear that the key elements of the current Democratic coalition are disproportionately found among the ranks of the financially insecure—and, thus, the ranks of those less likely to turn out or even be politically engaged. In the most-secure bracket, for instance, 85 percent are white, 4 percent are black, and 5 percent are Hispanic. In the least-secure bracket, 48 percent are white, 16 percent are black, and 26 percent are Hispanic. There are also big disparities according to age (8 percent of the most-secure bracket is 18-29, 34 percent of the least-secure bracket is 18-29) and marital status (69 percent of the most-secure bracket is married, 31 percent of the least-secure bracket is married). Perhaps most surprising is how big the disparity is according to gender, too. While 49 percent of the most-secure bracket is women, while among the least-secure bracket, fully 62 percent are women.
While Pew asked questions about how people feel about their own finances, they didn't rely on that to sort out people into the various financial security brackets. Instead, they used a more objective measure, asking 10 different specific questions about finances, and sorted people based on the number of times they responded a particular way. For instance, they asked whether people had checking accounts, credit cards, and 401(k)s or IRAs; they asked whether people had recently had trouble paying the rent or deferred medical care because of the costs; they asked whether people had received SNAP or Medicaid benefits. (People's self-reported status still dovetails pretty closely with the different brackets that they were sorted into, though, if you look at the chart above.)
And lest you think this kind of disparity is a worldwide problem, it's one that's particularly pronounced in the United States. Sean McElwee of Demos, writing for Politico, rounds up a number of different studies showing that the U.S. is very much an
outlier when it comes to the link between political engagement and poverty. When you plot inequality against turnout, there's a clear relationship, and the U.S. stands out like a sore thumb on both scales (with both lower-than-usual turnout and higher-than-usual inequality). And when you compare turnout among the wealthy versus turnout among the poor, the United States has the biggest gap of any OECD country. Every country has at least a small gap, but only Germany comes anywhere close to the large gap in the U.S. (as you can see in the graph above).
Pew doesn't really do much to discuss the "why" behind the disparity, or pose some solutions, but other observers writing about the Pew study have certainly done so. One explanation that looms large is that people in the less-secure brackets simply don't have the time to get away from their jobs to go to the polls, because they have less flexible hours (or might be working more than one job). The more nefarious forms of voter suppression (like ID requirements) aren't the significant barriers as much as the simple mechanics of carving out time to vote, and the best solutions may be as easy as extending more early voting hours or, better yet, allowing vote-by-mail. Turnout in 2014 was strong in vote-by-mail states, most notably in Colorado, which didn't allow vote-by-mail in 2010 and saw a large turnout gain in the intervening four years.
Higher incarceration rates among the less secure brackets—and more significantly, felon disenfranchisement laws, which continue to deprive offenders of the vote even after they're no longer incarcerated—also contribute the disparity. These problems don't necessarily explain the different levels of indifference and lack of interest, though, which is just as much a problem as are obstacles to voting. Lower unionization rates may factor into that, meaning less organization and less voter outreach.
Thanks to the changing nature of work (more service industries, more freelancing), unions may not be coming back, though, at least not to the levels of their mid-20th century strength. The Democratic Party itself may need to change its messaging approach to do more of what unions used to do in terms of educating members: reinforce the reasons for and importance of voting Democratic, period, and the importance of voting in every election, not just the glamorous presidential elections. Instead of ads trying to convince people that an individual Democratic candidate is better than his or her opponent (good only for convincing swing voters), maybe the next step should be ads that reinforce the basics: what the parties' agendas are, the fact that the Democratic agenda doesn't move forward without congressional and legislative majorities, and the importance of voting in the small as well as big elections.
