About those “downtrodden voters”
Right now our best and brightest pundits are trying to make us believe lots of things that just aren’t true:
1. That fiscal stimulus can work while the Fed is raising i-rates.
2. That trade deficits cost jobs.
3. That manufacturing has been hit by trade, not automation.
4. That monetary policy is ineffective.
Another another phony theme is that Trump won because he appealed to the “downtrodden voters”, which coastal elites like me don’t understand. That’s nonsense:
As you can see it’s exactly the opposite, both the low income and the lower middle income voters went strongly for Clinton, while the middle class tilted slightly to Trump
So why do our pundits keep lying to us? They have an agenda to massively increase the size and scope of government, and want to use this election to discredit free market economics, which supposedly favors the rich.
So how do the pundits keep lying to us? They start by singling out low income white voters, who did indeed opt for Trump (AFAIK). Then they simply assume that black lives don’t matter, Asian lives don’t matter, and Hispanic lives don’t matter. Low income whites are the only low income people who matter. Hence in their view it’s perfectly accurate to say that Trump represents America’s downtrodden voters, even though it’s technically a lie. It’s true in spirit (in their warped minds).
There’s a certain type of commenter who talks a lot about struggling low income whites, but couldn’t care less about low income minorities. When they mention the minorities at all, it’s just to point out how “lazy” they are. In contrast, the low income whites are not lazy, rather they are “victims of the neoliberal system”. When leftists used to argue that minorities were the victims of the system, these very same born again populists would roll their eyes in disbelief. Let’s call them “SJWWs”, social justice white warriors.
Now let’s all watch Trump abolish the 45% estate tax on his $10 billion estate. His way of helping the downtrodden.
PS. The exit polls are interesting. It seems that 47% of voters didn’t think Hillary was qualified to be President, and 61% of voters felt Trump was unqualified. I felt that Hillary was qualified, but Trump was not. I still feel that way. On the other hand, I don’t agree with Hillary on lots of issues.
The most amusing factoid was that 2% of voters had a favorable opinion of both Trump and Clinton. That’s about 2.72 million Americans. I think it would be kind of interesting to attend a cocktail party with about 120 of those people, get a sense of how they look at life. I’m pretty sure they are not leaving comments after my blog posts.
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10. December 2016 at 12:42
“Then they simply assume that black lives don’t matter, Asian lives don’t matter, and Hispanic lives don’t matter.”
-Trump made gains among both Blacks and Hispanics relative to Romney. Possibly even Asians. But, given Romney’s unique lack of appeal to Blacks (who opted for Ron Paul in the 2012 GOP primary and gave him third place in the city of his birth), and Romney’s exceptionally poor performance with Mexican-Americans, that’s not saying much.
As I’ve said:
“This all may seem to be about trade, but it’s actually about automation and low-skilled men who feel emasculated.”
-It’s not even about that. It’s about education. The sheer extent and broadness of Trump’s gains relative to Romney (and Clinton’s losses relative to Obama) with the non-college-educated of every race, location, and sex is something which cannot be explained by the loss of manufacturing jobs, racism, or any other facile and wrong explanation. Trump even made gains (percentage-wise, at least) relative to Mitt Romney in most counties in Texas, even as he got a smaller percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney nationwide (and in Texas, due to the cities shifting against him). Most counties in Texas have never had an interest in protection of manufacturing jobs. Almost all were solidly Democratic (pro-free-trade) in every sense until 1928. In the county of Indiana which went heaviest for Cruz in the primary, Trump in November got a higher percentage of the vote and a higher number of votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
Focusing on manufacturing jobs (proof: rural Texas), racism (proof: 1964 election, Trump’s gains among Blacks and Hispanics), sexism (proof: Hillary 2008, Trump’s gains among non-college women), or even primary vote (proof: Indiana 2016 primary), as an explanation for Trump’s gains over Romney is a fool’s errand. It’s about education.
Trump also made massive gains with the low-income and massive losses with the high-income relative to Romney, but that was a byproduct of his gains and losses with the poorly- and well-educated.
“When leftists used to argue that minorities were the victims of the system, these very same born again populists would roll their eyes in disbelief.”
-Non-White minorities didn’t build America, Scott.
Poor post.
10. December 2016 at 13:12
E. Harding “Non-White minorities didn’t build America”
Who built the railroads? Who was the workforce behind King Cotton that made America an economic powerhouse? Who does all the farm work today that feeds America?
10. December 2016 at 13:37
So how do the pundits keep lying to us? They start by singling out low income white voters, who did indeed opt for Trump (AFAIK). Then they simply assume that black lives don’t matter, Asian lives don’t matter, and Hispanic lives don’t matter. Low income whites are the only low income people who matter.
I would assume an economist is alive to confounding variables.
Blacks at all income levels vote Democratic by margins exceeding 5-to-1 (with 10-to-1 about normal) and their voting behavior over five decades has been fairly insensitive to the identity of the candidate in presidential contests or to external circumstances. It’s difficult to tease out much one can interpret in examining black voting patterns. Blacks do, however, form a disproportionate share of the country’s most impecunious people (around about 30%, I believe).
Various hispanic subsets (bar Cubans) are well represented among the impecunious as well, though their voting behavior is more variegated (and one may guess less driven by considerations of identity). Note, descriptive statistics on non-whites stratified by education indicate that HRC won the college crowd by 3.1 to 1 and the non-college crowd by 3.7 to 1. That suggests that social stratum (as delineated by income and education) is likely a weak vector in influencing the voting behavior of non-whites generally, though stronger among mestizos and orientals than it is among blacks. By contrast, the college crowd among whites favored Trump by 1.1 to 1 while the non-college crowd favored him by 2.4 to 1. Social stratum has more of an influence over voting behavior among whites than it does among other segments.
10. December 2016 at 13:37
Aha! Proof that for Sumner it is all about the cocktail parties (no doubt mostly attended by his establishment, elitist, liberal, globalist and cuckservative friends!)
—
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10. December 2016 at 14:23
Who built the railroads?
The laborers who constructed the first transcontinental line were largely Irish and Chinese. You can see from here:
http://www.cprr.org/Museum/RR_Development.html
That railway mileage was noticeably denser outside the old Confederacy than within it. As late as 1910, the population of the northern states was < 3% black. You did not have much of a mestizo or oriental population at all at that time (the labor force of the California Pacific construction crews notwithstanding).
It think it is true that service personnel employed by railroads was an occupational set which was disproportionately black. IIRC, the union which organized railway service personnel (not technicians) was a black union from the get-go, and it's president was the most prominent black public figure in the country (outside of entertainment figures) from about 1925 to about 1955. The writer George Schuyler was the son of a railway employee (cook, to be precise). Schuyler grew up in Syracuse, NY, a town that might have been 1% black at the midpoint of his upbringing.
10. December 2016 at 14:26
Prof. Sumner,
I’m interested in your general thoughts on our relationship with China. In particular:
– To what degree should China’s leaders over the past ten years be considered “bad people who inflict pain for authoritarian purposes”?
– Should the U.S. sound any alarms about that more than it already has?
– Were George W. Bush and Obama’s posture toward China greatly misguided or just a little misguided?
– Should the U.S.’s current posture toward China be more hostile?
10. December 2016 at 14:28
Who was the workforce behind King Cotton that made America an economic powerhouse?
Cotton did not make American an economic powerhouse. It was important in the lowland South, but the story of economic development there as anywhere was a story of technological applications.
Who does all the farm work today that feeds America?
Commercial farming is highly mechanized and has been since the early 20th century. Migrant workers have been important in fruit-harvesting, but that’s only one modest segment of the agricultural sector.
10. December 2016 at 14:30
Scott: The percentage of rich/poor people who voted R or D isn’t what you want to focus on. A priori, rich people are more likely to be Republican and poor people more likely to vote Democrat. What you want to see is if Trump got more votes from poor people and less votes from rich people compared to traditional Republican candidates. On that metric, Trump succeeded in mixing traditional voting patterns: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls
Notice clinton’s margin among the poor and trump’s margin among the rich have both shrunk considerably contra 2012.
10. December 2016 at 15:49
Scott,
1. Do you agree that increases in the CA deficit can cause the loss of individual jobs?
2. As an economist you should know that what happens at the margin is what counts, not absolute numbers or absolute percentages.
3. In your mind, is poor and downtrodden the same thing?.
4. Changing the estate tax rate would require a majority of the elected representatives of this country. And, it’s not something specific to Trump, nearly all Republicans and conservatives favor the repeal of the estate tax.
5. And why do you assume that African-Americans prefer Trump because they’re black? Isn’t it possible that the difference is urban voters versus rural voters? Have you checked or are you just making an assumption based on skin color?
6. Why don’t you do a post sometimes on the voters who voted for Trump because they think he will make all Americarns especially minorities better off? Nearly all the people I know who voted for Trump are humanists. Not racist or misogynist or misanthropic as the New York Times narrative would wish us to believe.
10. December 2016 at 16:26
Lots to like in this post. Still, I think it is the tight-money crowd—generally right-wingers—who spread the canard that monetary policy is ineffective or “out of ammo.”
Larry Summers is open to helicopter drops, for example. He also pondered issuing 50-year bonds when interest rates are zero, which might be fiscal policy.
10. December 2016 at 16:45
To be fair to the pundits I think quite a lot of them said Trump won because he won the middle class and that seems to be exactly what happened according to your numbers.
The most amusing factoid was that 2% of voters had a favorable opinion of both Trump and Clinton.
That might be the only time I am in the 1-2% ever. I always said that both would have done a good job.
This and the last article are great. Both articles finally helped me to understand how I arrived at certain estimates and decisions.
I always said that Obama is okay (as a person) but also that I was very optimistic that Trump (and Hillary) have the potential to be relevantly better. Now I can better pin down why I estimated this. Obama is all bleeding heart, all activist, a lot of emotions, a “nice” person, and why? Because of all the (often very silly) novels and books he has read in his life. He means nice but his means are wrong. Similar traits apply to Hillary only not that extreme.
So in short: I picked Trump for utilitarian reasons. Ha!
10. December 2016 at 16:55
Scott, don’t you usually add the disclaimer that “low income” doesn’t actually mean poor? This group includes the beleaguered college students and suffering RV parks filled with vacationing retirees. It’s not surprising this demo voted Hillary in solidarity with those who actually are poor.
Nor is it surprising that $50k-$99k is Trump’s strongest demo. These are people who are earning $15-20/hour (and therefore threatened/insulted by a $15/hour min wage). It also includes people at the top end of the Obamacare subsidy phaseout, and hence dis-insured by Democrats. Finally, $50k-$99k under-represents college grads (especially with higher degrees) as post-grads generally alternate poor or rich (based on income) for most of their earnings lifecycle.
But I am just repeating points made on this blog in the past, that were strangely not mentioned in this post.
P.S. People who feel Trump and Hillary are both unqualified overwhelming preferred the incompetence of change to the incompetence of the status quo. They are also likely to feel the swamp is filled with unqualified people, hence draining it is has appeal.
10. December 2016 at 18:12
Republicans generally do much better among high-income voters. You need to look at how Trump performed relative to the Republican baseline to get an idea of the Trump treatment effect.
If you do this, you’ll find that there was a very strong income gradient. The lowest income categories shifted heavily to Trump relative to recent Republican candidates, while high income shifted towards Clinton.
(Of course, this may not all be attributable to Trump. Some of it may be that Obama was not on the ballot, which reduced turnout among low-income African Americans.)
This article has a nice graphical depiction of the relevant data:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/exit-poll-analysis.html
10. December 2016 at 19:05
It’s not quite clear what you mean by ‘qualified’, but shouldn’t Hillary’s being wrong on so many issues “disqualify” her from the Presidency?
10. December 2016 at 21:02
– not a Trumpeter
– I like Zito’s notion that Trump supporters took him seriously but not literally, while opponents (did Clinton have many actual supporters beyond those who were voting against Trump?) took him literally but not seriously.
– Trump is exceeding my (very low) expectations.
– I now see Trump as a dealmaker more than anything else, meaning that I see his “positions” (Taiwan, the wall…) as nothing but opening bids in the deal making process. No idea whether that approach will work.
– read that Clinton’s numbers in the rustbelt crashed after her “deplorable” gaffe. An appallingly incompetent candidate. Right up there with Romney.
– the sound bite of Trump’s that most resonated with me was at the convention: “I am your voice”. So different and better than “I’m with Hillary.
– gotta read Hillbilly Elegy if you haven’t. There you will see what has happened to a once-unbreakable pillar of American culture. They voted for Trump. The only surprise in this election was what happened in Pa, Mi and Wi. It was hillbillies.
10. December 2016 at 21:29
“I now see Trump as a dealmaker more than anything else, meaning that I see his “positions” (Taiwan, the wall…) as nothing but opening bids in the deal making process. No idea whether that approach will work.”
-Yup. Anti-environment EPA head, anti-labor labor secretary, and Exxon Mobil CEO as Secretary of State. Fun times!
“read that Clinton’s numbers in the rustbelt crashed after her “deplorable” gaffe.”
-Not the case. That remark did not affect the polls.
“An appallingly incompetent candidate. Right up there with Romney.”
-True!
“gotta read Hillbilly Elegy if you haven’t. There you will see what has happened to a once-unbreakable pillar of American culture. They voted for Trump. The only surprise in this election was what happened in Pa, Mi and Wi. It was hillbillies.”
-Don’t bother. Just drive to East Bridgewater, Blackstone, or Saugus.
Hillbillies went Republican as a reaction to Clinton-Gore-Kerry-Obama anti-Jacksonian liberalism. They voted overwhelmingly for McCain. They are not enough to elect a president. Trump became President by doing better with non-college voters of every region.
“the sound bite of Trump’s that most resonated with me was at the convention: “I am your voice”. So different and better than “I’m with Hillary.”
-Agreed.
11. December 2016 at 04:46
@Larry -what Larry said is true, and indeed Trump’s performance post-election so far has pleased me (I didn’t vote). And what Tyler Cowen says about Trump supporters being middle and upper middle class whites afraid of globalization (their service sector jobs being next to be outsourced) is right on. The super rich like myself may have voted for Trump just for the inheritance tax issue.
@ssumner – good cross-link to CNN. Seems the rest of the post is an implicit admission by Sumner that he was out of touch with the USA’s political mood, a ‘mea culpa’. Fair enough, you’re forgiven professor. Blog on!
@Ben “Excellent Post!” Cole – it’s funny to read this guy’s warped world view, who believes in short term money non-neutrality despite the evidence and who does not believe in fiscal policy despite JP’s 1930s performance given the war buildup in Manchuria. To Ben, everything, including the tides, who wins the Super Bowl, the weather, etc, depends on monetary policy. Cult of the poisoned mind.
11. December 2016 at 06:52
Harding, Typical racism that I expect from you. And has no bearing on my post.
Art, Tell me something I don’t know (and didn’t mention in my post.)
Travis, I think we should try to get along with China.
John, You said:
“The percentage of rich/poor people who voted R or D isn’t what you want to focus on.”
In this post it is.
dtoh, Any economic change, including cap gains tax cuts, will kill individual jobs.
A permanent repeal of the estate tax requires a supermajority. And didn’t you tell me that temporary tax cuts were almost worthless?
You said:
“And why do you assume that African-Americans prefer Trump because they’re black?”
I don’t assume that.
And no, I don’t assume that downtrodden means poor. Read the post again, and see what I actually said.
Steve, You said:
“Nor is it surprising that $50k-$99k is Trump’s strongest demo. These are people who are earning $15-20/hour”
If you make $15 to $20/hour that’s $30,000 to $40,000/year, a group that opted for Hillary.
Jonathan, You said:
“You need to look at how Trump performed relative to the Republican baseline to get an idea of the Trump treatment effect.”
No I don’t. I look at the facts that pertain to the question of whether pundits are lying to us.
Philo, Trump was wrong on just as many issues, if not more. And being right on the issues is different from being qualified.
Larry, I was born in Michigan and raised in Wisconsin; they are not “hillbilly states.”
11. December 2016 at 10:44
Art, Tell me something I don’t know (and didn’t mention in my post.)
You framed it incorrectly. It’s not that black voters or hispanic voters ‘do not matter’. It’s that their voting behavior is insensitive (in the case of blacks) or less sensitive (in the case of hispanics) to what is incorporated into social stratum. The descriptive statistic which has Hilligula as the preferred candidate among the impecunious is misleading for that reason.
11. December 2016 at 10:52
dtoh, Just today I answered your question at Econlog.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/automation_and.html
Pity you don’t read that blog. 🙂
11. December 2016 at 11:17
Marcus Nunes on Ken Rogoff’s new unrealistic prediction of rapid economic growth:
http://ngdp-advisers.com/2016/12/11/rogoffs-predictions
11. December 2016 at 13:32
Ray Lopez–¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥.
That is how Takahashi Korekiyo, the greatest central banker in history, beat the Grreat Dression in Japan.
You might raise an interesting question, and that is what is the difference between fiscal and monetary policy when the solution is helicopter drops.
Ray, do not succumb to orthodoxy.
11. December 2016 at 14:00
Take away all the data from California.
What happens?
11. December 2016 at 15:21
Nate today: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/807987340941684736
11. December 2016 at 16:16
@Ben Cole- the difference between printing money and dropping it to people to use (no real effect, RatEx; monetary policy) and printing money and using it to buy guns, solders, etc to exploit a resource rich region like Manchuria (real effect; fiscal policy) is the difference between Friedman & Hayek (largely charlatans) and Keynes (a giant). Got it now? No wonder Keynes “won” the debate. Too bad he’s been perverted so that governments run deficits every year, but that’s an aside.
11. December 2016 at 16:50
Scott says…
so twisted of you… actually “the pundits” are making it extremely clear it is WHITE downtrodden voters that turned out for trump… What kinda info bubble do you live in ?
Honestly, can’t believe you don’t know this…No way you missed this… It seems you intentionally mislead to offer red meat to your readers…
….without your setting up the false prior that the media are NOT singling out a white backlash…. your rant that sarcastically and unfairly accuses the scary “media ” as acting if only whites matter…. would sound like the completely incoherent self-victimisation it is….
this is complete bull shit… Just because one can focus on one factor as a key thing that changed among other factors…. ( poor white votes vs poor people of color votes… it in NO way means that you are saying the people represented by the vote that did not change in any significant way…don’t matter… My… What an appalling and mean conclusion you have baselessly jumped to…
….all built on a foundation of a false prior…
If you look at the demographics of the vote the biggest thing that stands out is the swing in white suburban/exurban votes…
And a lot of them were “downtrodden ” Others weren’t, but they felt downtrodden… and how they felt was as important as if they actually showed up on your chart up there… The “lying pundits” have made that clear too…
You have a typical conservative knee-jerk reaction to any race-based stat that makes white people look bad…
DENIAL…and projection…
would you be for eliminating race/ identity-based demographics ? Seems like you might …
11. December 2016 at 17:07
“Harding, Typical racism that I expect from you. And has no bearing on my post.”
RacistSexistIslamophobeHomophobeXenophobeBigot
There is an eerie similarity between the 19th and 20th century communist demagogues who substituted “capitalist pig!” polylogist attacks for rational discourse, and today’s leftist SJWs.
11. December 2016 at 19:22
This post is directed to Sumner’s Econlog post that claims automation is the same as outsourcing jobs (it is not). But I’ve been banned by the moderator at posting there so I post here. – RL
Contrary to Sumner, automation does not steal jobs. Another Sumner point refuted. –RL –
12/12/16 WSJ Asia edition – Christopher Mims “Automation Can Actually Lead to More Jobs” : Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand. Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.
11. December 2016 at 19:25
“Nor is it surprising that $50k-$99k is Trump’s strongest demo. These are people who are earning $15-20/hour”
If you make $15 to $20/hour that’s $30,000 to $40,000/year, a group that opted for Hillary.
The exit polls clearly show median voter income is well into the $50k-$99k range…probably in the upper $60s if I interpolate.
Given that this is well above median US household income, I assumed that voters are reporting household income on exit polls, not individual income. Either that or voters are lying their asses off.
That means a married couple working 2000 hours/year each would show up in the $50k-$99k range if the pair have average wages between $12.50/hour and $25.00/hour, which means my original assertion of $15-20/hour being overrepresented is likely correct.
But you do raise an interesting point. Nobody knows WTF the poll methodology is. I can’t find it published anywhere, and 99% of the journos who post snarky analysis likely don’t know either. Perhaps they really just ask “income” and let the voter decide if that is AGI, W2, household, or individual? And then voters lie if they feel uncomfortable???
No matter what the answer, there are serious data interpretation problems, given that the data mixes singles and marrieds, college students, trust fund babies, welfare recipients, workers, and retirees.
So my original point stands, although it’s obvious our disagreement is 100% rooted in opaque methodology, rather than brilliance or stupidity.
11. December 2016 at 19:34
Also note that median voter household income would be higher than median household income because:
1- richer voters vote more? Maybe?
2- married households have twice as many voters as single households.
However, median voter individual income might be lower than median household income, because you would be splitting household income in half for all the married voters. (unless marrieds are really rich)
I inferred from this that “income” is really “household income”.
If I’m right, then “rich” voters also overrepresent married voters. BWTFDIK unless someone can find the methodology reported (I can’t).
P.S.
I updating my estimate: 99.999% of journos don’t understand the data they snarkily post.
11. December 2016 at 21:39
Scott, you said;
“Just today I answered your question at Econlog. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/automation_and.html
Pity you don’t read that blog.”
Were I to read that blog, I would respond.
The aggregate effects of trade are well understood. It’s like first grade math. There’s no need to keep repeating it over and over again. (Your readers will think you regard them as dim-witted.)
Automation has a very different effect on individual job loss than trade.
1. First, it’s gradual and jobs are generally eliminated through attrition rather than layoffs.
2. The jobs that are eliminated are mostly low wage low skill jobs so the loss of human capital and wages is much less severe It’s much easier for an $11/hour packer to find a suitable replacement job than it is for $75/year machine operator.
3. Automation does not enrich and empower corrupt, brutal, illegitimate and undemocratic governments.
12. December 2016 at 04:37
@dtoh – automation, on balance, does not decrease jobs, contrary to Scott’s statement (though I’m sure he will read his remarks as applying as a narrow thought experiment, not ‘on balance’), see my post above yours.
12. December 2016 at 08:35
Steve, You said:
“Given that this is well above median US household income, I assumed that voters are reporting household income on exit polls, not individual income. Either that or voters are lying their asses off.”
Why do you assume that? It’s a well known fact that more affluent people are more likely to vote.
In any case, I don’t follow your argument. Are Americans earning above the median household income now considered “downtrodden?”
dtoh, You said:
“Automation has a very different effect on individual job loss than trade.
1. First, it’s gradual and jobs are generally eliminated through attrition rather than layoffs.
2. The jobs that are eliminated are mostly low wage low skill jobs so the loss of human capital and wages is much less severe It’s much easier for an $11/hour packer to find a suitable replacement job than it is for $75/year machine operator.
3. Automation does not enrich and empower corrupt, brutal, illegitimate and undemocratic governments.”
No, automation has identical effects to trade.
No, job loss from automation is not gradual, old plants shut down and new more efficient one’s open, just like trade. Are you claiming that auto and steel jobs have been lost to trade? If so, you are wrong, it’s mostly automation.
And the jobs lost to automation are similar skill to those lost to trade—mostly lower skilled, but not entirely.
And no, trade does not empower corrupt governments, trade tends to lead to political liberalization. There’s a reason why places like North Korea and Burma (before 2010) do little trade. There’s a lot of empirical studies to back that up. Even China is dramatically freer than before it began trading.
So you are completely wrong on all of your assertions.
12. December 2016 at 08:40
There was a 16 point swing in low income voters. They went from strongly Democratic voters to more evenly split.
12. December 2016 at 10:09
“Why do you assume that?”
I explained that in the next paragraph. Median household income is mid 50s. Given the low LFPR, median individual income is going to be lower than that (splitting up couples, adult dependents, etc).
But median reported voter income is nearly 70k. That simply isn’t plausible if people are reporting individual wage income. It is only plausible if people are reporting household income, but even then its a big bump from mid 50s to nearly 70, requiring a big (but plausible) skew toward the rich voting.
I also said I suspect that there are deeper methodological problems. I doubt the pollsters are clarifying their definition of “income”; it’s not like BLS surveying and verifying employer data.
12. December 2016 at 10:16
<I?Are Americans earning above the median household income now considered “downtrodden?”
I explained why people dead center in household income would be most likely to support Trump. That’s where you are going to find married, hourly wage hard working stiffs w/o advanced degrees.
The low-income tranches are too polluted with college kids, retirees, tax-evaders, welfare recipients, and various other Democratic constituencies to really represent a cohesive working-class demo group. And I didn’t use the word “downtrodden”; now you’re being like Harding inventing something I didn’t say because you don’t like what I actually did say.
12. December 2016 at 10:30
And no, trade does not empower corrupt governments, trade tends to lead to political liberalization.
Trade is trade. It has no necessary relationship to the political order. The United States had little engagement with world markets in 1925 (the ratio of exports to domestic product was about 0.05), but was far more Whiggish in its political economy than it is today.
12. December 2016 at 10:45
Joshua, How is that relevant to this post?
Steve, You didn’t respond to my claim that affluent people are more likely to vote.
Sorry that I put words in your mouth, but I took you be responding to the claims I made in this post. So do you agree that Hillary won low income and lower middle-income voters? Even if you aggregate all groups up to $100,000/year, she still won. Trump won the over $100,000 group.
Art, Sure, if blacks, women, Chinese-Americans, gays, people who drink alcohol, and a zillion other groups are completely off your radar screen, in other words if you are a typical white male American conservative, then I suppose the country seemed freer in 1925.
12. December 2016 at 11:25
I acknowledged higher income voters might vote more.
But what percent of voters don’t even have jobs? 30%? Students, out-of-labor force, stay-at-home, retired, etc.?
If 30% don’t work, then 50/70 employed voters would need to have $70k+ salaries to produce that median income. Not credible.
I argued two things:
1- the income data is probably garbage in garbage out
2- to the extent there are discernable political patterns in the income data, they can be better explained by demographics: age, marriage, education, labor force participation
12. December 2016 at 13:00
We’re missing the most important factor here.
It is not that all poor people voted Trump and that all rich people voted for Hillary.
We should look at the CHANGE in voting behavior compared to prior years.
Michigan specific data:
2012 HHI under 100K were Obama voters 57-42. Richer households were Romney voters 52-48
In 2016 HHI under 100K were Clinton voters by only three points! (49-46). Richer households were Trump voters by 51-43.
So Trump closed the lower income gap from 15 points to 3 points. That’s a huge swing.
The same is true in other Rust Belt states.
Ohio’s less affluent group went for Trump 48-46. Its upper income group was solidly Trump (59-37).
But again, there wasn’t a big swing with rich folks. In 2012 they supported Romney by 59-40. Clinton lost a handful of richer voters to third parties. Trump held his ground.
In 2012, however, lower income folks pushed Obama over the edge and gave him a 54-44 margin over Romney.
Look at the *change* in voting behavior by income/education group.
12. December 2016 at 13:39
The pattern is about what I would expect. The welfare dependant favoured Hillary, the working class The Donald; the professional class favoured Hillary; capital split between the two–with urban-cosmopolitan favouring Hillary (who won Orange County California, Manhattan and Arlington) and locally dependant favouring The Donald.
It is a pattern, btw, that makes perfect sense is Borjas is correct about the economics of immigration. (And I remain sceptical of Card’s ongoing attempt to argue that supply and demand operates really differently in labour markets.)
One of the issues in the election is that when Democrats talk about “poor Americans” the working class does not think that means them. A usefully revealing piece on The Donald is here
https://medium.com/@rortybomb/learning-from-trump-in-retrospect-dce431b23ed0#.bwx29hd3c
“Trump and his team were a mess on campaign discipline. But when it comes to the economic platform in his speeches he remained disciplined and clear: he’s going to crush undocumented workers, roll back globalization, and cut taxes and regulations in DC. He has catch-phrases and symbols for each (the wall, rip up trade deals, drain the swamp), and it’s easy for his (white) voters to see how those line up with a better economic situation for themselves. As I’ve emphasized, this is what policy is, and Trump was fantastic at it.”
12. December 2016 at 13:40
Art, Sure, if blacks, women, Chinese-Americans, gays, people who drink alcohol, and a zillion other groups are completely off your radar screen, in other words if you are a typical white male American conservative, then I suppose the country seemed freer in 1925.
This really is not that difficult. Four of the five groups you list I never made an explicit or implicit reference to, that’s just chaff in everyone’s face on your part. As for blacks, their voting behavior is an identity affirmation. In Ulster, protestants vote for the Unionist parties. In this country, blacks vote Democratic. Black voting behavior is insensitive to other social markers or to external circumstances. There is some old polling data which indicate that Gerald Ford (who had no baggage on any racial question) might have lost by only a 5-1 majority among blacks (against a Democrat with quite a mess of baggage), though other polling data at the time indicated he lost by the usual 11-1 margin. It hardly matters what class in society you come from, blacks at all social levels vote Democratic by huge margins. Understanding descriptive statistics on the voting behavior of the impecunious is complicated by this confounding variable.
12. December 2016 at 13:41
That should be “if Borjas is correct”.
Also, Prof. Joan Williams’ piece on working class culture and the political implications thereof is very informative.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
12. December 2016 at 13:45
Do pundits have an agenda, or are they just as racist and misogynistic as voters?
Focusing on working class white men just seems natural to a lot of people.
12. December 2016 at 13:57
Art, Sure, if blacks, women, Chinese-Americans, gays, people who drink alcohol, and a zillion other groups are completely off your radar screen, in other words if you are a typical white male American conservative, then I suppose the country seemed freer in 1925.
It was freer, because the apparatus of coercion had fewer points of contact and conflict with the public. Whether you had a higher quality of life or not depends on how you value that benefit in comparison with other benefits.
As for your specific contentions:
1. Homosexuality was contained by shame and by social disapproval. There were laws proscribing consensual sodomy, but these commonly had minor penalties (it was a class b misdemeanor in New York). People violated them with impunity (see the life of Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, and Quentin Crisp). You could lose your job if you were exposed in this matter, but that was your employer exercising his freedom of contract and association.
2. Outside the Southern United States, disabilities attending being black were, again, things people did on their own time exercising their own freedom of contract. The one exception might have been enforcement of restrictive covenants on real estate. Down South, you had segregation laws. These were a constraint on the liberty of both parties to a transaction, though experienced as more of an insult to blacks than to the merchant. The real problem down South was not so much the black-letter regulatory environment, but the systemic unfairness of the police and the courts.
3. Not sure what you imagine was the infringement of liberty on ethnic Chinese in 1925 (who were not numerous at all). They likely weren’t treated well by a great many people, but living in a free state is not a guarantee of kindness from anyone.
4. No clue how you got the idea that women were somehow not free in 1925. The internal dynamics of family life were different and the social dynamics of workplaces were different (women in line administration were quite rare). Again, employers were exercising their own liberty.
5. Yes, liquor was prescribed, by the judgment of a supermajority of the voting public. Of course, it hadn’t been proscribed a dozen years earlier. What’s your point, if we’d had free trade we’d have never passed prohibition?
12. December 2016 at 16:13
Scott,
All I can say is that you appear to have zero experience and knowledge of how a real world manufacturing business works.
China – Freer yes…. but still a corrupt, brutal, illegitimate and undemocratic government.
13. December 2016 at 02:55
..”among the postwar youth of Europe, of writers like Dostoevsky and Kirkegaard, who had emphasized the irrational as a regenerative force and exalted faith over logic”….
All the fundamentals of life have been affected by the ____ and something deeper has been worn away than the renewable parts of the machine.. among these things is the Mind. The Mind has been cruelly wounded… It doubts itself profoundly.—Valery
I used to read this blog but now…..if you cannot see the parallels to an earlier time in the sentences above taken from a book entitled European History Since 1815 then I don’t think you understand what happened to us when the markets crashed in 2007. And if you don’t see that, then I wonder whether you can really call yourself economists? Can’t you see that most people doubt the experts now.
13. December 2016 at 08:46
Cooper, I have no interest in change, I’m looking at levels.
Lorenzo, Konczal is wrong about Trump being clear. He was all over the map on trade, immigration, taxes, and virtually ever other issue.
Art, As I expected, you are completely out of touch with the underside of American history. Try reading a book on the Chinese American experience in the US. And “outside of the South” is not a very helpful comment for a time when most blacks lived in the South. And why are non-legal infringements on freedom not important?
Dtoh, If you don’t have any specific objections, I’ll draw the natural inference. The only difference between automation and trade is that the job loss from automation is an order of magnitude greater. Otherwise there is no difference. If you look at the decline in steel jobs in America from 800,000 to 130,000, it was certainly not “gradual” and it was certainly due overwhelmingly to automation and only slightly to trade.
rick, What makes you think I don’t see that? In any case, criticizing the “experts” is lazy. What’s the specific problem? Where are the experts wrong? I don’t see any answers, just personal insults.
13. December 2016 at 11:17
Change is what matters in elections, not levels.
If Trump had won the exact same level of support as Romney among all groups in all places, he would have lost the election.
He won because he managed to pull in a bunch of “downtrodden voters” in the Rust Belt. That was the biggest single shift and it gave him victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Nothing else mattered much.
If Senator Tim Scott had been the nominee instead of Trump and he had carried 25% of the African American vote (while maintaining Romney numbers everywhere else), he could have won the election with victories in OH, VA, NC and FL. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to claim that Scott was victorious because of his support with black voters. You don’t need to win a group outright in order for that group’s support to explain your victory. http://www.270towin.com/maps/yVQA2
I’m no fan of Trump. I think he’s economically illiterate on many key issues. But I think any analysis of this election has to show that it was Rust Belt working class voters who abandoned Clinton in droves to vote for Trump. We didn’t see a wide swing in upper middle class professionals towards Trump, it was their less educated small town cousins.
Whether we like it or not, there are a bunch of people who feel left behind in this economy. Someone has to give them *something* to pacify them or else they’ll pick a real Socialist next time around.
13. December 2016 at 11:34
Cooper, Again, you may be interested in that issue, but it’s not what this post is about. Believe it or not, there is more than one interesting issue in the world, worth considering. Sometimes change is interesting, and sometimes levels are interesting. In this post I looked at levels.
I suggest you leave this sort of comment after a post where I am responding to people who talked about changes, not levels.
I agree that Trump did better than other recent GOP candidates among the working class. But that has no bearing on this post.
13. December 2016 at 14:52
Art, As I expected, you are completely out of touch with the underside of American history. Try reading a book on the Chinese American experience in the US. And “outside of the South” is not a very helpful comment for a time when most blacks lived in the South. And why are non-legal infringements on freedom not important?
There wasn’t much ‘Chinese-American’ history in 1925. The previous immigration streams had been disproportionately male (27 to 1 ratios in Manhattan) and did not reproduce much. There wasn’t any Chinese immigration between 1882 and 1942 and very little until 1925. There were about 60,000 ethnic Chinese in the U.S. in 1920, or less than 0.1% of the population. About 1/2 lived in California. There would have been more in insular dependencies, of course.
What’s a ‘non-legal’ infringement of freedom? That’s a nonsensical statement except in loci where the police and the courts do not enforce contracts or general public order. Well, they often didn’t. In the slums of Baltimore and Detroit, they still don’t, but the real problem is that cops issue too many tickets in the suburbs. We have Alex Tabarrok’s word on that.
About 52% of the black population lived in the Deep South in 1920, about 33% lived in the peripheral South, and about 15% lived up north. These last are apparently chopped liver in your book. At the time, the black population wasn’t peculiarly tied to agriculture. In the population at large, 30% of the heads of households listed an agricultural population, while about 35% of the black heads of households did. There was a gradual redistribution of the black population toward the north underway at the time, which would continue until about 1970. There was a certain amount of mob violence (primarily in the Deep South), with lynchings running at about 25 a year from 1920 to 1935; this phenomenon was in a rapid decline, however. The bulk of the black population was literate by the end of the 1st World War and there’d been the gradual development of a professional and business class among Southern blacks. For a variety of reasons, there hadn’t been a mass exodus from the Deep South after 1890.
13. December 2016 at 16:11
Scott,
Really! You’re taking an employment number from more than half a century ago. Look at the numbers since 2000. Domestic employment in the industry is down 35%. Productivity is up 20% in the same period, but really what has been happening is a loss of market share. Domestic production is down 20% and if you look at production relative to GDP it’s down close to 40%.
Productivity growth of a little over 1% per year will not cause job losses in a growing economy.
14. December 2016 at 06:19
dtoh, You are cherry picking a single time period for a single industry. If you look at all of industrial production, output is up 9% since 2000, and the job loss is almost entirely due to rapid productivity growth—much more than 20%. The numbers don’t lie
In any cases, job loss is very similar in Europe since 2000, and they run a massive current account surplus, bigger than China. So who are we going to blame for Europe’s problems? Mars, Venus? The planet Earth is a closed system, and we are losing manufacturing jobs everywhere, even China’s rust belt is hemorrhaging jobs. Sorry, but the claim that this is about trade just doesn’t add up. It’s automation, just as it was 100 years earlier with farming. The factory jobs are not coming back—Trump will fail.
But then if you had read my recent Econlog post on China’s rust belt, or the Econlog post on Europe, you’d know this.
🙂
14. December 2016 at 19:41
Scott,
Again, you’re talking about aggregate effects. I don’t disagree with anything you say about aggregate effects.
The issue is the effect on individual jobs and the political ramifications thereof. If politicians and economists ignore individuals in the pursuit maximizing aggregate utility, the risk is a backlash against trade in general which results in the loss of the aggregate benefits.
Isn’t this obvious to you after seeing the campaigns run by Trump and Sanders.
17. December 2016 at 12:13
“They start by singling out low income white voters, who did indeed opt for Trump (AFAIK). Then they simply assume that black lives don’t matter, Asian lives don’t matter, and Hispanic lives don’t matter.”
You miss the point –
“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
Poor people voting for a republican, that’s news. The news makers happen to be white.