Lindsey Wasson/AP Photo
Maddie Arthur signs her ballot before placing it into a drop box at a voting center at Lumen Field on Election Day, November 7, 2023, in Seattle.
One of the more interesting research papers I’ve seen in a while is called “‘Compensate the Losers?’: Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US.” It presents some of the best evidence for what has been called “education polarization,” the tendency for political parties to now separate on the basis of level of schooling. In the U.S., that has manifested into people with more degrees siding with the Democratic Party, and those with less formal education siding with Republicans.
This was not always the case. The key graph in the paper looks at Democratic Party identification as a function of education. In the 1960s, someone with a college degree was about 14 percent less likely to be a Democrat than the national average; today, college-educated people are 14 percent more likely to be Democrats.
Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
The paper ties this to the rise of 1970s neoliberal Democrats and their support for “redistribution” policies (like taxes and transfers) rather than “predistribution” (like minimum-wage hikes, stronger unions, and job guarantees). I think there are probably a lot of reasons why this shift occurred, not just due to economics but to identity politics within both parties. The point is that the intensity of the shift is pretty clear, and it’s accelerated in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise.
That has changed a prior truism about elections that was the conventional wisdom for a few decades. With their disproportionate share of older voters, Republicans were seen to have an advantage in midterm and off-year elections, relative to drop-off voting groups like those aged 18–29 and people of color. This has completely turned around. Thanks to education polarization, Democrats are more likely to be politically engaged and aware, and this gives them the advantage in low-turnout and oddly timed races.
I think that’s clear in the resounding election results this week. It’s not the only reason for Democratic success; Samuel Alito has been the greatest activist for the Democrats’ cause in this century, as his ruling in Dobbs completely changed the primary issue set of U.S. elections. But even before that, in 2018, Democrats figured out how to turn out voters in an off year. Democrats have been winning special elections at a high rate this year as well. It turns out that educated neurotics addicted to doomscrolling vote at high rates. Who knew?
Unfortunately, the flip side of that development is that in elections with broader turnout, including from those who only occasionally check in, Democrats may be at more of a disadvantage. That would include the 2024 presidential race. Even though Democrats have won seven of the last eight popular votes for president, they underperformed relative to polling in both 2016 and 2020, with key demographic groups (particularly working-class people of color) moving into the Republican column.
You need look only at the Ohio exit polling this week, where voters for Joe Biden were actually in the majority of the electorate by a couple of points, to get a sense of this. Nobody expects Biden to win Ohio next year.
So relief about the outcome in 2023 should not really have any bearing about your perception of the increasingly dire polling for Biden in 2024. It is now more expected that Democrats will overperform in off years and underperform in the presidential year. The drop-off voter problem is now more of a Republican problem. The overall electorate is more of a Democratic problem.
Highly educated Americans are in fact a minority of the country. There are more workers than bosses; only about 35 percent of all Americans have a bachelor’s degree. For master’s degrees and higher, that goes down to 13 percent. If we correlate advanced-degree holders with higher engagement in politics, then of course this dynamic will take hold. Democrats have struggled to connect with rural voters, who are concentrated in states with even lower levels of higher-education degrees.
But there’s another factor here too, a policy factor that can explain both Democratic success this week and peril for the presidential ticket. Polling on the economy from the Reid Hoffman–backed strategy group called Blueprint shows that, by a 3-to-1 margin, respondents want “lower prices” over “higher wages,” with more jobs coming in significantly lower than that. If prices were to actually go down, we’d likely be in a recession; deflationary environments are typically bad. But it shows the gravity of the problem facing federal policymakers. People saw a major increase in the price level and are, however irrationally, pissed off that those numbers haven’t receded the way, well, COVID deaths have.
Between inflation and jobs, the public has generally coded the former as more of a federal issue, while the latter is a local matter. A Morning Consult poll back in July showed that every single state governor had a positive approval rating, with 47 of them over 50 percent. They all have gotten to preside over job-producing economies, where they can go to factory openings and tout economic development. Inflation is seen as more of this thing imposed from Washington. So if your governor is up for re-election in 2023, you might say he’s done a good job. In 2024 for president, that is a different equation.
The Blueprint poll showed that respondents don’t think Biden and the Democrats are focused on prices enough. If you have an unemployment crisis in the country, maybe five million or seven million households are affected. If prices go up, virtually every household in the country is affected. And so it’s a pretty enormous problem, and it would be for any Democrat running at the top of the ticket next year.
What can be done? Former National Economic Council deputy director Bharat Ramamurti had some good thoughts the other day. The administration did use supplies in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices, which are back to the pre-pandemic level. Caps on insulin for older Americans went into effect, as did hearing aid rules that broke the cartel and lowered prices. The junk fee agenda is largely about price reductions, though lately the administration has leaned more toward transparency on prices before purchase, which is too much like asking companies to let consumers know when they’re screwing them. All of these scored through the roof in the polling. (Incidentally, a message of fighting higher prices by tackling corporate profits scored highest in the poll.)
One problem is that even where Biden has made progress on prices, the electorate kind of doesn’t believe it. Only 47 percent of respondents believed inflation-adjusted income was up since 2021. Fewer knew that inflation has come down faster in the U.S. than in industrialized countries abroad. And a whopping 62 percent of those polled did not believe inflation had come down from 8 percent to 3 percent in the last couple of years. Having a campaign that can project a convincing message will be critical.
So you can put more abortion rights measures on the ballot, and play up the fact that the likely opponent in 2024 has four indictments and could be convicted of one of them soon. But the electorate that will come out next year will be significantly ornerier than this week’s. They want something done that’s frankly hard to do. And they don’t think Biden has been trying, or at least not paying attention to what they want as he praises job growth. That’s to say nothing of the age question.
All of this adds up to a tough 12 months. Don’t expect to necessarily relive this week in 2024.
