Elections and Voting
How the Working Class gets Left Behind
Participation and Class bias in American politics
Democrats’ passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the American Rescue Plan, ensures a vital extension of income support for millions of families, funds vaccination efforts, shores up state and municipal budgets, and includes a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit that is predicted to halve child poverty. It is no doubt a major victory after months of intransigence on the part of the Trump administration and Senate Republicans.
Excluded from the final bill, though, was an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, quashed late in negotiations by the objections of eight senators in the Democratic caucus on both substantive and procedural grounds.
Failure to raise the minimum wage — a move President Biden openly supported on the campaign trail and which enjoys high and rising public support — is only the most recent example of the chronic inability of our federal legislature to enact policy that is favored by a majority of the American people. And yet, Americans have also taken notice that procedural hang-ups never seem to be much of an obstacle to some pieces of legislation, even when most Americans disapprove of their passage.
There are any number of cases to point to of this fundamental dysfunction, and while the causes are many, the bias is clear. The least wealthy half of the country who own few assets, carry proportionally large debts, and receive low incomes, the American working class, are systematically underrepresented and disenfranchised by institutions and policy.
Pew post-election survey data collected after the 2018 midterm election, which marked a fifty year high in voter turnout, reveals the extent of this bipartisan class bias.
Half of white working class adults and 60 percent of working class people of color did not vote in the 2018 midterm election. Those without a four-year degree were even less likely to participate, and while the survey’s limited sample size prevents further disaggregation by race-ethnicity group, people of color as a whole were less likely than white Americans to vote even after controlling for education and income.
Even in an historic election that saw Democrats net 41 seats in the House of Representatives — and win a larger national popular vote margin than any opposition party in a midterm election since 1942 — neither party secured votes from a plurality of working class Americans. These figures illustrate both the stark overrepresentation of middle and upper class voters in the American electorate and the class- and identity-based political formations that structure inter- and intra-party politics.
Among white Americans, the likelihood of voting Republican was effectively uncorrelated with income or educational attainment; across all categories, roughly 30 percent of white adults cast a vote for a Republican candidate. More than income and education, whiteness itself is the most salient aspect of the Republican base’s identity and social class.
This bloc of white Republican partisans has embraced the anti-democratic politics of white Christian nationalism, and for the last fifty years, their leaders have tended the flame of reaction against the New Deal coalition’s major national legislative and judicial accomplishments between 1932 and 1980: the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, collective bargaining in the public sector, the Civil, Voting, and Housing Rights Acts, the Immigration and Nationality Act, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade, and yes, the federal minimum wage.
In contrast, Democratic candidates in 2018 secured large margins among all non-white race-ethnicity groups that persisted across income and education levels. Higher income, college educated white voters also broke by a much smaller margin for Democrats, the result of a multi-decade trend towards greater party polarization on the basis of education.
Given the stable share of Republican support among white Americans, this would suggest the influence of higher class status on Democratic voting largely flows from its effect on turnout. Put differently, had they not completed college, white Democrats with a four-year degree would have been more likely not to have voted than to have voted Republican. A college education does not turn Republicans into Democrats, it turns nonvoters into voters.
Scott Keeter and Ruth Igielnik of Pew note that while American politics’ class bias generally disadvantages Democrats, nonvoters are most distinguished by their irregular participation and general disengagement from organized political activity of all kinds. They are not a natural Democratic constituency “waiting in the wings,” but rather, disillusioned and disorganized, without strong ideological or partisan leanings and lacking the private and institutional resources to have much political efficacy.
While it cannot on its own account for the rising class bias of the electorate over the last fifty years, research has found de-unionization to have had a significant negative impact on turnout among low and middle income voters.
The wealthy, in comparison, are highly engaged politically and enjoy many advantages in shaping policy outcomes even when their preferences diverge from those of the majority. Recent work from political scientists Elizabeth Suhay, Marko Klašnja, and Gonzalo Rivero found that Americans in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are significantly more likely to attribute individual economic outcomes to work ethic and genetics rather than luck or social status. Higher income Americans generally — the top 20 percent — are much less likely to support redistributive policies to curb inequality.
Given the composition of the Democratic coalition, intra-party conflicts have as much of a class bent as political conflicts nationally. Look no further than the minimum wage debate. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that more than 30 percent of workers in West Virginia stand to benefit a higher federal minimum wage, with those affected seeing an average pay increase of more than 17 percent. In 2018, the state’s Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, was reelected to office by only 21 percent of his voting-age constituents; 57.5 percent did not participate in the election.
Based on the national data presented above, we can safely assume that the working class West Virginians who would be the principal beneficiaries of the $15 federal minimum wage were significantly underrepresented among the 21 percent of the state that constituted Senator Manchin’s bloc of supporters. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, his campaign committee raised $9.3 million between 2013 and 2018, over 60 percent of which came from large individual contributions in excess of $200.
All five of the no-voting senators reelected in 2018 failed to win a plurality of voters in their state. The three who did were reelected in presidential election years when turnout is typically higher, and yet working class Americans were as underrepresented in the electorate in 2016 as they were in 2018 (comparable data for 2020 are not yet available).
In a recent essay on the 2020 election, Princeton historian Matt Karp argues the country has been here before. The United States’ first Gilded Age — the half century between the end of Reconstruction and the Great Depression — was also characterized by fierce political contestation and partisan polarization. But then as now, this reflected the steady disempowerment of the Black and immigrant working class by corrupt party machines and Southern Democrats’ violent Redemption campaign to reestablish white supremacy and reduce Black workers to a state of total dependence on white landowners.
Karp rightly concludes that a viable political movement powerful enough to enact popular redistributive policies aimed at compressing inequalities in income and wealth will not come about through institutional reform alone. Independent redistricting commissions, term limited Supreme Court appointments, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico would all be major victories in the struggle for representative democracy in the new Gilded Age. Such reforms, though, address institutional imbalances in partisan power. They cannot on their own address pervasive imbalances in class power, which as the case of the minimum wage shows, shape conflicts within the parties as much as between them.
And yet, nothing short of a national mass mobilization will create the political conditions necessary to defeat reactionary authoritarianism. Already Republican-controlled state legislatures are escalating their assault on the franchise, pointing to President Trump’s claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 election. Stopping them will require organizing tens of millions of working class Americans who, though riven with racial, generational, regional, and linguistic divisions, share a common stake in the creation of a social state that ensures as a right to all the necessaries of a comfortable and dignified life.
