Democrats Depend on Affluent Voters? That’s Rich

Thomas Edsall (image: PBS)

“How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?” asks a column by the New York Times‘ Thomas Byrne Edsall (10/7/15).

The short answer is—they didn’t.

There’s a key line at the beginning of Edsall’s column:

Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters.

The only substantiation comes from the link, which goes to one of Edsall’s own columns, one that FAIR debunked earlier this year (FAIR Blog, 2/10/15) for its bogus numbers on the supposedly disappearing middle-class voter. That column also has some equally dubious claims about the Democrats’ supposed increasing reliance on upper-income voters:

In 1992, Bill Clinton lost the most affluent segment of the electorate, voters with household incomes over $75,000, by 12 points. In 2008, Obama lost voters with household incomes from $100,000 to $200,000 by 2 points, 50–48, and actually carried voters making over $200,000, 52–46.

The sleight-of-hand here—aside from the fact that $100,000 in 2008 was considerably less than $75,000 in 1992—is comparing an election with three major candidates to one with two: Ross Perot got 16 percent of the over-$75,000 vote, making direct percentile comparisons  to 2008 impossible. If you want to see whether Democrats depend on affluent voters, you can just look at the exit polls for the most recent presidential election, which Edsall’s own paper turned into a handy table:

It’s clear that if Democrats actually depended on affluent voters, we’d be talking about President Romney’s re-election campaign right now.

From Pew

The class skew is even more obvious when you look at party identification. Looking at Pew’s 2014 polling, Republicans have a slight edge (48/44) among families that make over $75,000; there’s a tossup (45/45) among those making $50,000 to $75,000, and below that Democratic identification steadily increases: 40/50 for incomes in the 40s, 37/51 for incomes in the 30s and 31/54 for families making less than $30,000. (All these numbers include voters who lean toward one party or the other.)

But “exit poll data underestimates the importance of high-end support for Democratic presidential candidates,” Edsall says, “because high-income voters turn out in higher percentages than low-income voters.” (No mention is made of voter suppression efforts.) He offers this factoid:

Because of this higher turnout, the top two income quintiles of the electorate contributed the same number of votes to Obama’s victory in 2012 as the bottom two income quintiles…. In other words, upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters.

Well, no—because elections aren’t won by getting a lot of votes, but by getting more votes than your opponents. If Obama got many more votes than Romney among lower-income voters, as he surely did, and fewer votes than Romney among upper-income voters, then lower-income voters were, in fact, more important to his coalition.

Now, it’s true, as Edsall says, that the Democratic Party is dependent on affluent donors—and his column has some interesting things to say about how, because of this dependence, “the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.”

Source: Huffington Post, citing FEC, Forbes

Though even here, the headline writer’s notion that Democrats are “favorites of the rich” is wrong: By and large, the very wealthy still see the Republican Party as the primary vehicle for their interests. As Paul Blumenthal put it last year in the Huffington Post (9/25/14):

While both parties have received contributions from this upper-est of crusts, billionaires have largely put their money behind the Republican Party and its drive to win control of the Senate. Republican candidates and party committees have raised $18 million from billionaires and their families in the 2014 elections, compared with $8 million raised by Democrats. Leadership PACs linked to Republican lawmakers, which funnel money into party coffers or to other candidates, received an additional $926,555 from billionaires—nearly triple the amount received by Democrats.

While Edsall is not necessarily responsible for his headline, he should be embarrassed that he backed up a claim about “the altered partisan allegiance…of the very rich” with a link to a story in the right-wing Independent Journal Review, called “The Real Party of the Rich.” This piece makes the case that “the GOP has lost out to the Democrat Party in the eyes of fat cats”—pretty much the same claim the New York Times headline makes—with a chart that shows the Democrats getting their biggest donations mainly from such notable members of the silk stocking set as the United Auto Workers, the Carpenters & Joiners, the Laborers’ Union, etc.

When Obama holds a $14,000-a-plate fundraiser, as depicted in the New York Times, he’s looking for cash, not votes. (photo: Joshua Lott, NYT)

Still, while the claim that the Democratic electorate no longer tilts to the working class is false, the idea that the Democratic Party has shifted its policies to attract more money from the wealthy is all too true. But Edsall goes out of his way to confuse the two claims, equating going after votes with going after dollars, as if oligarchy were just another kind of democracy.

Thus a paragraph that starts off talking about the importance of “upscale voters” to the Obama coalition ends up in the next sentence talking about the “the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats”—as if “upscale” and “affluent” are being used as synonyms. But the “upscale voters” are from households that make as little as $65,000 a year, or not much more than the median income of $51,000.

Whereas the  “affluent” are people who benefit from “deregulated markets”—like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, a law that “restricted government oversight of most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps.”

Switching from that kind of “upscale” to those sort of “affluent” is a shell game—designed to make selling out your constituency in pursuit of donations from the 0.01 Percent seem like nothing more than smart politics.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan: public@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

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