I asked friends to explain their rationale for voting before and after the recent Massachusetts election that sent Republican Scott Brown to fill a U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Democrats since 1954. Opinions of Coakley ranged from “mediocre party hack” to “evil opponent of citizens’ rights to, for example, videotape the police making arrests.” Nonetheless, all voted for Coakley with the expectation that she would hold the Senate seat until her death or retirement. The main reason cited was that they wanted her to be in the Senate to vote for the latest $1 trillion health care spending bill. I.e., they were electing her for decades, regardless of her fitness for the job, because they thought that her one vote on one bill would be so important.
I pointed out that the health care bill wouldn’t change anything in Massachusetts. We already have a similar state law that requires residents to purchase health insurance and, if they can’t afford it, sticks taxpayers with the bill (this increased demand for health insurance has resulted in insurers raising premiums to the highest prices in the U.S., and probably the world). “But people in other states won’t have guaranteed insurance,” was the response. I pointed out that the federal bill would still leave tens of millions uninsured (earlier post). “It will be a lot better than what they have now.”
I then reminded the Coakley voter that Massachusetts gets back only 82 cents of every federal tax dollar (source). Did he or she really want to pay for health insurance for some guy in Alabama ($1.66 back for every dollar put in)? The answer was a resounding “Yes!” If we wanted to be altruistic, was it truly better to buy gold-plated medical care for people in other states than to help out folks in Haiti who have nothing? The answer was that we can easily afford to do both.
Separately, a look at the election results map revealed that there was a fairly strong correlation between being bled by the government and voting for the Republican and being fattened by the government and voting for the Democrat. Economic basketcase towns such as Springfield, where the primary sources of income are Welfare or government jobs, were solidly for Coakley. Inner city districts where people live in public housing (perhaps next door to Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni) voted for additional government expansion; suburban districts where people work long hours at private employers and pay heavy taxes to support 35-hour/week government workers voted for Brown. What can the Democrats learn from this? If they can somehow ensure that 51 percent of voters are collecting Welfare, working for the government, or somehow else being net beneficiaries of government spending, they should be able to control the U.S. indefinitely.
Oh come on, this was one time, but in general blue states pay more to the federal government than they receive in benefits; opposite for red states. Not making any cause/effect claims here but relatedly richer states tend to be bluer. How does that jive with your theory here? Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very blue… why?
Andy: California being a rich state is not inconsistent with more than half of its voters supporting Democrats. Let’s suppose that 25 percent of Californians are very rich indeed, pay a lot of taxes, and support the Republicans. The other 75 percent collect welfare, belong to a union, work for the government, collect a government pension, or some combination of all four. Politicians in richer states are able to develop more lavish welfare programs, hire more government workers, and hand out more money to unionized government workers who may vote in a bloc.
There is a strong cultural and social component to voting. An individual vote does not matter (even the closest elections in the U.S. have not been decided by a single vote), so it costs little to support or vote for a particular candidate. I have met plenty of white chicks in the Boston area who opposed nearly everything that the Democrats want to do. These women did not want companies, government, or universities discriminating on the basis of race. They opposed higher taxes and increased welfare spending. They had no respect for Islam and would have bombed countries supporting Al-Qaeda back to the Stone Age before apologizing to the Muslim world. Yet these women habitually voted for Democrats. They did not listen long enough to Republican candidates to realize that their opinions were more aligned with the other party. They had learned in college that Republicans were old and uncool.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/polls/2004-08-25-female-vote_x.htm says that single women vote 2:1 for Democrats. If you were a lonely computer nerd in Silicon Valley you might decide it was best to be a vocal supporter of whatever party the single babes in town supported.
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
Alexander Tytler, 1747-1813
I’m curious. You seem to imply that any state getting back
less than $1 for every federal tax dollar paid, is getting “bled”.
(Loss of blood turning them blue, I suppose.)
Would this analysis apply at the state level? That is, if I reside
in a county that gets back less in state services than we pay
in state taxes, does that indicate bad state government?
Locally? Personally? Seeing as how it is impossible, in practice,
to balance services and taxes so exactly, I presume you must
believe that no government is legitimate, or that some imbalance,
at some level is acceptable. Care to elaborate?
Bob: I must not have done a very good job of writing the original posting. I used “bled” and “fattened” to refer to individual voters in Massachusetts. The ones who receive more government benefits than taxes tended to vote for the Democrat; the ones who pay more taxes than they receive in direct government benefits tended to vote for the Republican. I did not offer an opinion as to whether particular forms of government were good, bad, legitimate or otherwise.
I think it is legitimate for people to vote their perceived self-interest. However, I think we should recognize that, for the first time in U.S. history, it may be possible for one party to achieve permanent power. We have voters who will vote their self-interest. Due to shrinkage of the economy and growth of government, we have a government that controls close to half of the economy. If 51 percent of voters come to believe that their paychecks or welfare checks depend on keeping the ruling party in power, that means the opposition party will never win an election.
Thanks to Obama’s stimulus package, the Democrats have almost reached that tipping point – CNN Money points out that a Tax Policy Center study shows that 47% of American households will pay $0 in Federal taxes in 2009.
( http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/30/pf/taxes/who_pays_taxes/index.htm )
The end of democracy comes when the majority realizes that they can vote themselves a never ending stream of ‘goodies’ from the few remaining productive people. We’re treading close to that line now. The Economist last week pointed out the enormous growth of government.
( http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15328727 ).
Noting that government spending as a percent of GDP in Britain, France and much of western Europe is now higher than it was in the Soviet Bloc countries.
While I used to agree with your premise that tax-takers will vote Democratic and tax-payers will vote Republican — it’s no longer so clear cut. For some time, the Democrats have been the “Party of the Super Rich” with Plutocrats like Soros, Corzine, Buffet, Lewis, Rockefeller, general Hollywood types, and even many Silicon Valley types. But with recent elections, that has now been extended to the more ambiguously ‘rich’ – USA Today points out that Democrats in the House now represent 57% of households earning more than $200,000.
( http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-10-13-House-wealth-gap-Democrats-richest-districts_N.htm )
What can explain this seeming cognitive dissonance for the ambiguously ‘rich’? Simply continued anti-Bush blowback? Or that the Republican party is now perceived as deeply ‘uncool’ and is viewed as the party of religious wackos and rednecks?
At this time, there simply appears to be no political party relevant to upper-middle class America — fiscally conservative, socially moderate — so they just vote for the ‘cool’ party.
The attempt to correlate cash flow and color (“red” or “blue”, itself an amusing bit of marketing dichotomy) ignores that most people vote based on perceptions, biases and group affiliations rather than a simple spreadsheet. “Bought” votes are nothing new in this country but have been largely unsuccessful in determining large scale elections.
The more important factor is the perception that Democrats are interested in special interest groups of all types (including threatening and downright loony ones) and income levels whereas Republicans are often perceived as being profoundly self-interested and concerned with accelerating the income stratification that is already at its highest level in recorded history in the U.S. while whittling away the rights of anyone who is not rich and white.
Republicans have mastered the art of selling the fear of losing what little the working poor (including religious wackos and rednecks) have while continuing to assist in the export of the U.S. economy and its jobs and the conversion of the public trust into narrowly concentrated private equity. Democrats similarly sell the fear of losing what little people have (often to religious wackos and rednecks) while trying to keep everybody in their diverse roster of special interest groups happy which is its own recipe for disaster.
Mike: there are a few possible answers, right? It could be that upper-middle class voters…
* Prefer Republicans on fiscal issues and Democrats on social issues and vote based on whether they care more about fiscal or social issues
* Generally care more about social than fiscal issues overall and vote based on whether they are religious or not
* Really think that Democratic fiscal policies are better than Republican ones
* Vote based on what they think is “cool”.
Phil seems to think that #4 is the answer. What are some other ways that we could tell the difference?
This is one of the reasons that earlier in America, a qualification for voting was the person in question owning some land. Presumably someone who owned land would be sensitive to issues of taxation and the resulting infringement on property rights that excessive taxes would lead to.
Mike:
There isn’t so much a “class struggle” between “rich” Republicans (or Democrats) and “poor” Democrats (or Republicans) as there is a “class-narrative struggle” between two stories about the social contract. Parties can’t win elections without BOTH an upper tier of fundraisers and power brokers, AND a broad public outreach effort staffed by enthusiastic people of modest means.
The Republican class narrative is all “Horatio Alger” bootstrapping plus religious piety. I like to call it the “God and Mammon” coalition, with God talk for the poor and bucket-loads of cash for the rich. It’s fiscal conservatism for the business folks, and “oooh, a scary Democratic abortionist!” distractions for the grassroots. By providing the “God talk” they crave, the wealthier Republicans buy the loyalty of a politically active segment of the lower orders. They play Lucy-with-the-football to the religious Charlie Browns.
The Democratic narrative is more “mommy” oriented with the kindly state providing the security the non-wealthy crave in our risk-intensive system. The grassroots mobilization work is done predominantly by unions or identity-based issues groups. There’s a lot of Lucy-with-the-football played on the Democratic side as well. “I promise we’ll get healthcare done this time! Really? Absolutely!” etc.
There is no “class struggle” as such, just a game of what one segment of the upper class will give some other segment of the lower class in exchange for its support in a given election. The Tea Party game is just the latest variation on the theme. It’s a fun-house mirror inversion of the Howard Dean movement of 2003-4. Add some direct corporate sponsorship and a dedicated media sponsor in FOX, but with the same “gee, what a fun spectacle this is … for now” attention from all media.
The winner in these games is generally the status quo. Got a lucrative quasi-monopoly? Say in investment banking or health insurance? Cool. Play both ends against the middle, watch the tempest in a teapot, and laugh merrily as the whole attempt to attack your entrenched position collapses in a muddle of confused and angry recriminations. In playing this game, enjoyment is greatly enhanced by embracing an official ideology of market fundamentalism that proves via orotund tautological syllogisms that selfishness is the sole source of salvation. That way, the very possibility of serving the “public interest” is reduced to something to chuckle about while enjoying the spectacle from the sky boxes.
Thus the Republicans gain three branch control of the U.S. Government claiming to support a smaller role for government, and we get: a larger role for government. Then the Democrats get commanding control of two branches and manage to expand only the part of government which its supporters least like.
The only winners are the quasi-monopolists who steadily and reliably invest in political lobbying.
Andy, everything is a fiscal issue – wars, schools, taxes, fees, healthcare, benefits, etc. My biggest problem with most republicans is that they are for lower taxes and higher spending. I don’t know any who have any idea of balancing a budget from national to state level apart from Ron Paul.