Red, white and blue. And green.
by Tom Sullivan
That Republicans and Democrats live in different worlds is readily apparent. With Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement Tuesday that the House would launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, that divide just got wider.
The red-blue divide in Congress is not only political and cultural, but economic. “Attitudes about race, gender, and cultural change played outsized roles in the 2016 Republican primaries and general election,” Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossman found in May 2018, “with economic circumstances playing a limited role.”
Yet the economic divide defines some of the way Trumpworld has diverged from the rest of the country, Thomas Edsall suggests in the New York Times. He cites a new study written by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings, and research analyst Jacob Whiton.
“Not only are red and blue America experiencing two different economies, but those economies are diverging fast,” they write. “In fact, radical change is transforming the two parties’ economies in real time.” Even as Republicans gained House districts between 2008 and 2018, the economies of red and blue districts have gone from near parity to rapid divergence:
With their output surging as a result of the big-city tilt of the decade’s “winner-take-most” economy, Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade—from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. By contrast, the income level in Republican districts began slightly higher in 2008, but then declined from $55,000 to $53,000.
Underlying these changes have been eye-popping shifts in economic performance. Democratic-voting districts have seen their GDP per seat grow by a third since 2008, from $35.7 billion to $48.5 billion a seat, whereas Republican districts saw their output slightly decline from $33.2 billion to $32.6 billion.
A series of charts indicate partisan polarization “across demographic and economic indicators.” A host of them.
A set of psychology experiments indicate inducing a sense of vulnerability tends to make liberal subjects test more conservative. Priming subject to feel themselves invulnerable makes conservative subjects test more liberal.
Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has studied authoritarian right-wing movements. He tells Edsall, a “combination of economic insecurity and cultural insecurity has contributed to the Trump vote.”
Edsall asks:
Why does Trump spend so much time and energy keeping people off kilter? He has no interest in increasing the sense of security of his base. To do so would only make these voters more receptive to Democratic appeals.
The relative material deprivation of many Republican voters that continued into the first two years of the Trump administration reinforces their sustained dedication to Trump, even as the regions of the country where they disproportionately live fall further behind.
Conversely, the exceptional success in 2018 of Democratic House candidates in well-to-do, highly educated, formerly Republican districts suggests that Democrats gain from prosperity, affirming the Inglehart thesis that liberal values thrive under conditions of economic security.
That suggests there is an untapped market for economic security in places experiencing prosperity in decline. Contra Trump’s habit of poking at sore spots, Democrats might expand their reach by addressing economic decline in red districts whose economic and cultural anxieties Trump merely exploits. Cultural divides and demographic shifts may be more intractable, but money? People understand that.