Social Democratic America (25 page)

Climate change may prove to be a turning point. As I write, in 2013, climate experts are in near-unanimous agreement that human-generated carbon dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. There is uncertainty about the impact this will have on the planet if left unchecked, and there is considerable debate about the appropriate policy response. But we are now past the point at which it is reasonable to deny that climate change is occurring and that humans are causing it. Yet a number of Republicans in
Congress still espouse this view, hampering the US government's ability to take action to reduce carbon emissions.
²⁷
Their antiscientific orientation is reminiscent of cigarette manufacturers' denial that smoking causes lung cancer long after medical researchers had reached near-consensus on the facts.

This may usher in a shift in the standards to which the American public and media hold policy makers. Going forward, it is likely to become increasingly difficult for policy makers to rely on claims that are at odds with the preponderance of evidence.

Not every claim made in opposition to a large government role in protecting economic security, expanding opportunity, and ensuring shared prosperity can be assessed empirically. But some can, such as the notion that higher taxes will hurt the economy. As I explained in
chapter 4
, there is some level of taxation at which this is true, but available data suggest the United States is below that level. As evidence mounts, this claim will be heard less frequently. Hardly anyone today argues that nations should avoid democracy on the grounds that it leads to tyranny. The argument doesn't square with the facts. For the same reason, half a century from now few will claim that government taxing and spending at 45 percent of GDP is bad for the American economy.

Relative to its counterparts in other affluent nations, the Democratic Party in the United States has always been a centrist party, rather than a left party. Even so, most of the major advances in American social policy have occurred when Democrats held the presidency and one or both bodies of Congress. That's likely to continue.

As
figure 5.1
shows, Democrats dominated the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1930 to 1980, though the presidency swung back and forth. Since 1980, control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress has been split fairly evenly between the two parties. To achieve social policy advances in coming decades, the Democrats need to avoid a lengthy period of sustained minority status of the kind suffered by the Republicans during the New Deal era.

FIGURE
5.1 Democratic control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives

Lines indicate years of Democratic president, Democratic majority in the Senate, Democratic majority in the House. The end point is 2016 for the president and 2014 for the Senate and House.
Data source
: Wikipedia.

Two hypotheses predict that this worst-case scenario may well come to pass. The first says Democrats will struggle because working-class whites, the party's traditional base, are now guided in their party preference by social and cultural issues rather than economic ones, which leads them to favor the Republicans. The second says we are entering a period when enormous quantities of private money will flow into election campaigns, with Republicans the chief beneficiaries.

Working-class whites have moved away from the Democrats. In the mid-1970s, about 60 percent of white Americans who self-identified as working class said they preferred the Democratic Party. That number fell steadily from the late 1970s, bottoming out at 40 percent in the early 1990s, where it
has remained since.
²⁸
The same trend is evident among whites with less than a high school degree and among whites on the lower third of the income ladder.
²⁹
In the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, whites with less than a four-year college degree favored the Republican candidate over the Democratic one by roughly twenty percentage points.
³⁰

Why has this happened? Ronald Inglehart's “postmaterialist” hypothesis suggests that as a society gets wealthy, issues other than those connected to material self-interest become more important to people.
³¹
There is no clear working-class interest in being either pro-choice or pro-life on abortion or in favoring or opposing equal rights for homosexuals. Hence, as material issues lose their centrality, working-class identification with the party that better serves its material interests is likely to decline. In his book
What's the Matter with Kansas?
, Thomas Frank suggests that working-class Americans' conservative inclinations on social and cultural issues have led many of them, particularly in rural parts of the South and the Midwest, to side with the Republicans at the expense of their economic interests.

Will this consign the Democrats to regular electoral defeat? That seems unlikely. As Ruy Teixeira and John Judis pointed out a decade ago in
The Emerging Democratic Majority
, the Democratic Party has a new electoral base centered on urban professionals, women, African Americans, and Latinos.
³²
These groups are large, and most are growing. In addition, geographic trends will help the Democrats to remain competitive in national elections for the foreseeable future. The Northeast, the West Coast, and Illinois are now solidly Democratic, and most of the upper Midwest leans in that direction. None of this guarantees presidential victories or congressional majorities. But it does suggest that forecasts of impending electoral disaster for the Democrats probably are wrong.

Equally important, the health of the economy is the chief determinant of the outcome of national elections. Douglas Hibbs and Larry Bartels point out that presidential election outcomes can
be predicted fairly well using just a single measure of economic performance—per capita income growth.
³³
This is displayed in
figure 5.2
. On the vertical axis is the incumbent-party candidate's vote margin. On the horizontal axis is the growth rate of per capita real disposable personal income in the middle two quarters (April to September) of the election year, adjusted for how long the incumbent party has been in office. This simple model does a good job of predicting the vote outcome. Other models can predict even more accurately by including additional factors; but in all of them, measures of economic performance play a central role.
³⁴

What about Congress? House and Senate elections are, not surprisingly, more idiosyncratic than presidential elections. Yet the condition of the national economy has consistently been a good predictor of the outcome.
³⁵

The implication is clear: if the Democrats do reasonably well (or Republicans fare poorly) at managing the economy, they'll remain competitive in elections.

FIGURE
5.2 Income growth and presidential election outcomes

Vertical axis is the incumbent-party candidate's vote margin. Horizontal axis is the growth rate of per capita real disposable income in the second and third quarters of the election year, adjusted for incumbency (–1.29 for each consecutive term, beyond the first, that the incumbent party has held the White House). The correlation is .89. This replicates Larry Bartels's chart in “Obama Toes the Line,”
The Monkey Cage
, January 8, 2013.

The second hypothesis predicting electoral struggles for the American left suggests that the Supreme Court's 2010
Citizens United
decision will allow private money to flood into Republican campaign coffers. That ruling prohibited restrictions on political campaign spending by organizations, such as firms and unions, opening the door to unlimited expenditures by outside groups on behalf of their preferred candidate or party.

It's too soon to be able to render an informed judgment on the impact of the
Citizens United
decision, but the degree to which it altered the legal landscape is sometimes overstated.
³⁶
Before the super PACs (political action committees) and 501(c)(4)s that sprang up after
Citizens United
, individuals and corporations already could make unlimited donations to 527s. The only difference is that the new organizations are less constrained in naming the candidates they favor or oppose in advertisements running during the two months prior to the election.

Figure 5.3
shows campaign expenditures for Democrats and Republicans in presidential-year elections and off-year elections since 1998 (the earliest year for which data are available). In the 2012 election cycle, outside money favored Republican candidates, just as pessimists had predicted.
³⁷
But that isn't surprising, given that the Republicans were the opposition party (the Democrats held the presidency and the Senate). As Matt Bai wrote during the 2012 election campaign,

FIGURE
5.3 Campaign expenditures by and for Democrats and Republicans

Billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. Includes expenditures by candidates, parties, and outside groups.
Data source
: Center for Responsive Politics, “Total Cost of US Elections, 1998–2012,”
www.opensecrets.org
, accessed January 18, 2013.

Rich conservatives weren't inspired to invest their fortunes in 2004, when Bush ran for the second time while waging an unpopular war, or in 2008, when they were forced to endure the nomination of McCain. But now there's a president and a legislative agenda they bitterly despise …, so it's not surprising that outside spending by Republicans in 2010 and 2012 would dwarf everything that came before. What we are seeing—what we almost certainly would have seen even without the court's ruling in Citizens United—is the full force of conservative wealth in America, mobilized by a common enemy for the first time since the fall of party monopolies.
³⁸

Even if money totals continue to favor Republicans, it's unclear how much that will matter. There are diminishing returns to money in influencing election outcomes: when a lot is already being spent, additional amounts have limited impact. The Democrats had less money in 2012, yet they were competitive in the presidential, House, and Senate elections.

The history of campaign finance in national elections in the past four decades is one of each party and its backers seeking new ways to raise and spend large amounts of money in spite of existing regulations. In the 1970s, the Democrats had the advantage. By the end of the 1980s, the Republicans had the upper hand. Toward the end of the 2000s, it shifted back to the Democrats. We may now be in the midst of another Republican surge. Even if that happens, however, past experience suggests that Democrats and their supporters will figure out ways to offset the advantage Republicans gain from
Citizens United
, or at least to mitigate its impact.
³⁹
I'm not suggesting that money doesn't matter in American elections.
It does.
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The point is simply that future developments in campaign financing are unlikely to doom the Democrats.