"Increasingly, the party is made up of urban professionals who graduated from four-year universities and command relatively high salaries. Having more of these supporters has been a boon to the party’s finances, but electorally, the shift has been a disaster. The electoral power of high-income voters is limited: Not only are they a smaller demographic, but they are also concentrated in a handful of coastal states that do not decide presidential elections. By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome. Under this system, no candidate can win the presidency today without galvanizing the working class...."
Writes Brody Mullins, in "How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are some good graphs that show how the class politics flipped).
Posts
78 comments:
The peasants are revolting.
Oh, please. I don't know how many times I've seen similar articles about Republicans after a rough election season. The pendulum always swings.
And, as ever, the "well-to-do" can buy things. Like elections.
"The peasants are revolting."
“The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
– William Tecumseh Sherman
"the few" = democrat donors
"that class" = democrat politicians
"great body of 'mentally incapable' people" = their voters
Well maybe not that well-to-do. The Trump Administration has butchered the cozy lifestyles of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of these college educated drones, by firing DEI staff, while making much of DEI illegal in esp academia, shutting down most of the NGOs that used to employ them. And, to add insult to injury, their student loan payments (for their worthless college degrees) are no longer being suspended, but are now due (and not dischargeable in bankruptcy).
As I play a very small violin for them.
Easy prediction: much fewer celebrity ads to “make your voices heard” and vote.
The high income and concentrated wealth in the cities is a manifestation of government power. Throughout history there is a mandarin class that has always existed using “education” and connections to place themselves in the system and sponge off the efforts of the masses.
The reason these people have wealth and status is a direct result of favorable government policies. Most of them don’t produce wealth. They are parasites who are being detached.
That is why you are seeing a bunch of white boomers bitching about Kings.
Like Willie Sutton said, "That's where the money is!"
Are they just figuring out what Trump figured out a decade ago, that the Democrats had kicked their electoral majority to the curb, to be easily swept up by somebody willing to represent them?
Of course, this is what the shutdown is about, like the last shutdown, they are trying to create a new base of recent immigrants, on the Australian model, to engineer themselves a new electorate where they can't lose, no need to worry about the next John Howard, his like can no longer be elected!
Here is a prompt for AI "What percentage of Australian residents are recent immigrants?"
DEIsm
By their own admission, 75% of the funding of "Indivisible," the backers of No Kings, comes from a few wealthy individuals. The rest comes from rando suckers.
While I share Cracker's pessimism, something does feel different this time. Democrats aren't out of power because of some policy issue such as health care, taxes, or foreign policy. They have drifted further and further Left, powered mostly by identity politics. The dangerous elements aren't on the fringes anymore, they have the reins of the Party firmly in hand.
Being the party of the well-to-do didn't stop the Bush family, though perhaps it should have. The bigger problem for the Democrats is structural: not only did the working class abandon them, so did minorities- partly over insane social policies, but also over Gaza. Yet there is also a competing donor class of globalists and their lackeys who insist on aggressively pushing failed policies like free trade and various deviancies, while especially insisting that Israel has a right to defend itself.
There is not going to be a Democratic comeback without addressing that gap, even before realizing that cultist personalities already dominate the party, and their unrelenting aggression scares off halfway normal people. Before anyone thinks I'm being mean to Rich and Inga among others, DDriver had a similarly repulsive effect on the Ron DeSantis campaign. The campaign hired influencers who were energetic AND cultish, and that's wasn't even enough to clinch the nomination. RDS stopped paying those people and concentrated on Florida, which he's done a very good job with. The Democrats are very unlikely to act in a similar manner.
Progress is monotonic. Liberalism is divergent. There's your hope and change. Forward! To the past.
They an always hire people to steal elections just as they hire people to protest.
You mean to tell us Democrat policies lead to ruin?
Dems - you need better lies!
It is different this time
Dem candidates this cycle -
A Nazi in Maine
A communist in NY
A Navy cheater in NJ
A guy who wants to murder children in Virginia.
@Achilles, "Most of them don’t produce wealth. They are parasites who are being detached."
From eugyppius just a week ago:
"All of this has made Hamburg extremely prosperous, which prosperity has filled it with rafts of clueless virtue-signaling morons who have no idea how anything works, why they find Hamburg attractive in the first place or how their hip urban lifestyles are maintained. In this photo, published by BILD, you can see some of these unmitigated retards having a happy because they’ve just scored cheap virtue points by voting in their own personal energy apocalypse....Look again at this photo...It is absolutely imperative to get these sorts of people out of politics. They are crazy and they are doing everything in their power to destroy civilization. They are insulated from a lot of the economic chaos they wreak because they’re overwhelmingly government bureaucrats, university types and hipsters who are to varying degrees reliant on the state to make their living. They’re renters rather than owners, they live near the city centre rather than in the suburbs, they’re young rather than old (h/t Apollo News for that link) and they think what they’ve done is just fantastic."
Have you seen the graph of total fertility for conservatives vs. liberals that has been going around X? The number of children in conservative families is practically unchanged for decades. They are having something like 2.3 kids per woman, which is at or above replacement rates.
For the leftists, the numbers have fallen off a cliff. The careerist girl-bosses and cat ladies and lesbians and trannies and climate-panic anti-natalists that account for most of the Democrat base these days are down to about 1.4 children per woman. Even among minorities, their historic high fertility is dropping precipitously, and is now at or below replacement rate for both Hispanics and blacks.
These cultural factors, as well as continued abortion-on-demand in the blue states but restrictions in the red states, means that reapportionment will be a bigger and bigger disaster for the Democrats after every census. In two generations, they face complete and utter devastation, and consignment to being a regional rump party of no more consequence than the Greens and Libertarians.
This is the one and only reason that Democrats opened the floodgates to immigrants. All of their professed concern for refugees and hard-working illegals is a despicable lie in the service of their desperate grab for political power. If they still retained the support of the white union man, and weren't choosing the loneliness and despair of voluntary extinction over loving families in two-parent homes, they would still speak of illegal immigrants in the language of pest control (as Cesar Chavez used to do), and our massive, long-standing border wall would be fortified with land mines and machine gun nests.
Could not happen to a more deserving class of people. They deserve every misery that befalls them.
I don't know how many times I've seen similar articles about Republicans after a rough election season. The pendulum always swings.
Differential fertility rates are qualitatively different from swings in public opinion.
I think in many ways, the Democrats have made themselves obsolete. They've captured and cultivated a pet media that manages their public face, and maintains their brand for them, with complete cooperation. For quite a while, they had captured government funding of their web of NGOs and managed to keep it a pretty good secret, which greatly added to the leverage of accomplishing the objectives provided by their leftist billionaires who control the NGOs. The cash flow was used to implement a policy of unfettered illegal immigration, among other things, while the official government hamstrung the bureaucracy that is designed to control it. And the cash was also used to buy crowds, astro-turfing protests, paying workers for policy implementation, essentially buying the support needed to create visible crowds for sympathetic cameras. You remember them handing out cash on the street to recruited protestors for the Kavanaugh testimony? This meant their message was punching above its true popular weight - But the size of the enterprise attracted the very scrutiny that has led to its downfall, and I would add that much of this detective work has come from private citizens that post on social media and provide their information to what is now a responsive government. They are true citizen advocates, and they deserve our thanks and gratitude.
This has already happened before. From 1969 to 1993, a period of 24 years, the Dems held the White House for four.
It took Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate and announced "The era of big government is over" to break the long losing streak.
"The signature policy achievement of Mr. Trump’s second presidency benefits big business and the rich while cutting health care coverage, food aid and student loan programs for the poor."
How much of the above is actually about health care coverage for illegals, MAHA restricting junk foods, and student loans that don't lead to related employment but that benefit bloated universities?
The high income and concentrated wealth in the cities is a manifestation of government power. Throughout history there is a mandarin class that has always existed using “education” and connections to place themselves in the system and sponge off the efforts of the masses.
The reason these people have wealth and status is a direct result of favorable government policies. Most of them don’t produce wealth. They are parasites who are being detached.
------
It's Madison.
The professors often pull their children into academia, despite their lack of common-sense or experience. They beat themselves trying to do too much, when they can't really even handle the basics of life though...
It all depends on the soap opera production and eyeballs attracted for its survival, and in short on women voters.
Politics is locked in at the moment by freezing the dynamics to everybody voting in lockstep, but it's the entertainment business that drives everything.
Tim Dillon's recent podcast with Bernie Sanders is stocked full of reasoned facts why the Democrats have destroyed their party. Bernie weakly defended Democrats by describing many fundamental problems besetting the American middle class yet offers no concrete actions to be taken. He repeatedly blamed Trump's demagoguery, while Dillon tirelessly pointed out that the Democrats were handing Trump all the ammunition on a silver platter via urban crime, the border, the abandonment of the working class, transitioning children, the endless war fighting, etc.
The leadership at the DNC which runs the party with an iron fist, much like Trump, however, is drowning in the sunk cost fallacy. Meaning that they keep going to the same playbook and refuse to see consensus and compromise with the Republicans on the popular issues that Trump is promoting. Right now nobody is stopping the Democrat leadership in congress from putting together an outline of a red tape reduction act to unleash the creativity and initiative of the American people to build massive amounts of homes and apartments so that our young people may afford to actually live the American dream. The same thing goes for revitalizing our infrastructure of energy power oil and gas farming trucking roadways Bridges trains aviation system freshwater capture storage and distribution.
The Republicans are going to have to lay a giant egg for the Democrats to be able to get themselves out of the ditch and make any electoral headway over the foreseeable future.
The word is "demand". They "demand" relatively high salaries. As the DEI programs go away, their demands won't be met. Further, as the government stops funding all these NGOs, more "high salaries" will disappear. With poor communication, coping, and technical skills; the ability to command any salary will dissipate, which is likely why they are turning to violence.
Funny how the demographics flipped so soon after USAID was shut down and voting scrutiny began to increase.
What a revolting development this is.
Democrats have "We hate Trump" - and lies.
By the integration-cooperation metric, Trump is a high-impact mediocrity. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have all been some mix of political maladroitness and dull capabilities that were creatures of a way-over-powerful donor class.
Democrats could win in 2028 by going to a more open and voter-competitive election process and by reining in its donor class from its commanding position.
Democrats are too busy acting as loyal puppets to their evil masters.
Tim Walzian level corruption and vileness.
Dems are the party of assassination and Authoritarian Antifa thuggery
Bernie Sanders, owner of many homes, living the American dream. All the while decrying America. The commoners are beginning to see through his fraudulent rhetoric.
How the Democratic Party became “smarter.”
"The dangerous elements aren't on the fringes anymore, they have the reins of the Party firmly in hand."
Exactly, Which has often been a successful recipe for gaining power. 1917. 1933. The Donks are solidly within historical precedent.
It's the demand to allow men to compete in women's sports that has weakened the Democrat hold on women generally, I suspect. The Minnesota Supreme Court has just ruled that a man must be allowed to compete against women in power lifting. He'll shortly have the women's record, of course. No reasonable person thinks this makes any sense.
Minnesota is the state that forbids using talk to persuade a teen to accept their biological sex. One of the many reasons their population is declining.
Remember when the Democrats were never going to lose another election because “demographics was destiny”? Then a strange thing happened. Hispanics and, to a lesser degree Blacks, started voting Republican. Why? Because they discovered they had little in common with the affluent, college educated whites who were setting the Democrat agenda. And another trend is beginning to appear. Young voters, especially young male voters, are moving toward Republicans.
Democrats are losing because their agenda stinks. They are on the wrong side of almost every 80/20 issues. But they can’t give up their pretenses because they’re all so smart and good.
tommyesq said, "Funny how the demographics flipped so soon after USAID was shut down and voting scrutiny began to increase."
We were paying for it because we were paying for it.
"tcrosse said...
The peasants are revolting."
You said it, they'd stink on ice...
IYKYK
With AI making it hard for college grads to get jobs, progressives could move even further left and prevent the Democrats from moving to the center. What would a Bill Clinton Democrat have to offer the B.A. lumpenproletariat? In an ironic twist, as I think Barack or Hillary said about factory work, it turns out that those knowledge worker jobs are gone and they aren't coming back.
I linked in an earlier thread an interview by Ezra Klein of a political scientist in which they were very concerned about the future of the Democrat party. However, at no time in the extensive discussion did they mention two important issues to voters: illegal immigration and boys in girls’ sports.
Trump has exploited these 80/20 issues and has correctly hung them on the unhinged left. Politics are downstream of culture, and for the first time in more than two decades the Dems are having to play defense on two indefensible issues.
Hegemonic control of the narrative has made the left soft and incapable of advancing via persuasion their increasingly absurd woke policies. Their house will have to burn to its foundation before they can recover, yet they remain unwilling or unable to even look into the electoral mirror.
Someone needs to tell them what they don't want to hear
The professors often pull their children into academia, despite their lack of common-sense or experience. They beat themselves trying to do too much, when they can't really even handle the basics of life though...
A lot of smart people have trouble with the concept of "Regression to the Mean".
Query whether the Groups that fund the Democratic party and set its agenda actually *want* to win? Their fundraising is much more successful when the other party is in power.
"In an ironic twist, as I think Barack or Hillary said about factory work, it turns out that those knowledge worker jobs are gone and they aren't coming back."
Mmmm. You sure about that? The mold shops here that feed the plastics factories are all advertising for help. The places that make packaging machinery are doing well. A friend who should have retired two years ago has to turn away work for feeder bowls. He won't do any repairs and he won't drive any further than 20 miles.
Mmmm. That is the "ironic twist."
Hassayamper said...
The professors often pull their children into academia, despite their lack of common-sense or experience. They beat themselves trying to do too much, when they can't really even handle the basics of life though...
A lot of smart people have trouble with the concept of "Regression to the Mean".
The mistake is believing that Professors at colleges are smart.
In some majors mostly CS or engineering you know immediately which professors could get a job and which ones cannot. There are some soft/research sciences like meteorology where mediocrity can find a research niche but that is more limited.
Everything else in the university system outside of math engineering science physics CS is where lowest performers go to hide from the free market.
Rusty said...
”In an ironic twist, as I think Barack or Hillary said about factory work, it turns out that those knowledge worker jobs are gone and they aren't coming back."
It was Barry who tacitly admitted that the “shovel ready” jobs he wanted in his stimulus package turned out to be bullshit air conditioning chair jobs for fat whiny Karens.
Remember when the Democrats were never going to lose another election because “demographics was destiny”? Then a strange thing happened. Hispanics and, to a lesser degree Blacks, started voting Republican.
It turns out significant numbers of second-generation Hispanics are perfectly willing to marry whites, name their kids “Claire” and “Emily,” and cease overt self-identification as a minority. And it also turns out they don’t want penises in their daughters’ school bathroom.
Remember, this is just 4 short years past the day that Joe Biden allegedly received 81 million votes - far surpassing Barack Obama - and won the Presidency, despite having lost virtually every single bellwether precinct in the United States.
No other winning President has ever done that.
Democrats can win elections.
Any elections they can rig, they can win.
The government ngos were the greatest organized crime operation ever, but the government made it legal. It was how the northern VA Democrat basin was created and was the basis for wealth of politician’s children for half a century. No one new how these sociology majors were earning $750k, now we do.
Right now nobody is stopping the Democrat leadership in congress from putting together an outline of a red tape reduction act to unleash the creativity and initiative of the American people
The Democrats see no way to profit from leaving people alone.
They understand taxing wealth, redistributing wealth, and borrowing to spend. But things like free enterprise and the profit motive are words without meaning to them.
Here in Las Vegas there's a large Hispanic working class. The ones I speak to view the illegal migrants as scabs who want to steal their jobs.
Plastic mold production notwithstanding, industrial production was 25% of GDP in 1987, and somewhere around 10% of GDP today.
Man, that was one sweet headline. That would be great for the country, because democrats just want to overthrow the country.
Party corruption follows from what "seemed like a winning strategy" to the power-hungry young, but the consequences are always delayed by one to two generations.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the left following FDR painted itself as fighting Joe McCarthy's censorship, fighting the evil USA empire in Vietnam, and corrupt Richard Nixon. They were "progressive" and open to change. This mix attracted the Clintons, and they latched their wagon to the Party. It also attracted a legion of power-mad psychopaths who gravitated to D.C. and sought entry regardless of the details.
The power-mad personality type could not care less about ideology -- ideals are just a tool to obtain and maintain power.
This strategy works well, until it doesn't. They fell into the anti-Trump trap and routine manipulation stopped working. Those who opposed Trump gave themselves no way to back down and locked in their old worldview. With no way out, raw corruption and Machiavellian moves came to the fore circa 2016.
The conclusion is correct but they stil beleive itms only a matter of better messaging to the right groups. Still no intent to alter their major polices. I like that…
Okay but how does this explain the rise of Zohran Mamdani? Are those with high salaries supporting him more than Cuomo or Sliwa? If so then that undermines the argument.
According to the Pew Research center the Democratic party is made up of BOTH lower-income voters and upper income voters: "Approximately 58% of voters in the lowest income tier associate with the Democratic Party, compared with 36% for the Republican Party. And Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters hold a modest advantage among those in the highest income tier, with 53% affiliating with the Democrats compared to 46% for the Republicans”.
BUT
Republicans hold a modest advantage in the upper-middle-income voters’ category. And there is a partisan 50/50 split in the Middle and lower-middle-income voters.
Rusty,
You and I may be the only 2 people here who know what feeder bowls are. I prepped Service Engineering for 22 years. My former partner was a cofounder with Bob J.
Give me a call sometime and let's chat. Phone# is at changeover.com
John Henry
"According to the Pew Research center the Democratic party is made up of BOTH lower-income voters and upper income voters"
In keeping with the royal theme of today's posts, a very feudal enterprise indeed...
Jaq,
You may be right about % of GDP.
But manufacturing output per Capita, in inflation adjusted dollars has increased every year since 1970 with only 5-6 year over year exceptions.
I'm working on an article about reshoring of consumer goods mfg for Packaging Digest and the amount of us mfg expansion and new plant blows me away.
Don't forget that 100 years ago farming was 50-60%of GDP. It is 1-2% now.
By your logic we should be starving.
But we're not
John Henry
Okay but how does this explain the rise of Zohran Mamdani?
He''s fashionable. He's in with the in-crowd. It's not so much that he can be mayor, but that he can play one on TV.
@Matt: According to the Pew Research center the Democratic party is made up of BOTH lower-income voters and upper income voters
Both are dependent on the State and State funding. The lower classes get free housing, food, and health care in exchange for their votes.. The upper classes are given administrative jobs that pay $$$$$$$$, given ego-status jobs like professors, given jobs they could not compete for (i.e., DEI), and they are allowed to be gatekeepers for the elite.
Sell your soul for a basic existence, for become a kapo in support of a hegemonic regime.
Explaining Mamdani: people still equate white collars and college degrees with "high incomes." New York and other fashionable cities have a high proportion of young college grads who are living in tiny studio apartments and are poor by the Manhattan standards. Put them together with government workers, and you have a powerful political force.
Mamdani has the support of affluent, professional New Yorkers. I suppose the "rich rich" aren't as enthusiastic about Mamdani as they are about other Democrats. If some of them fall off, they are easily replaced by recent immigrants. I get the feeling that African-Americans aren't really that interested in the race and won't turn out in numbers as large as usual. That helped Mamdani in the primary and could help him in the general election.
Mamdani may not literally have a high and low coalition of billionaires and paupers, but if you squint it could look like that. He's certainly against the "middle class," "Middle American" New Yorkers.
WIC and SNAP will not work starting November 1 thanks to the Schumer Shutdown. The two parties MUST, MUST RESOLVE THIS ISSUE BEFORE NOVEMBER 1.
BABIES WILL BE HUNGRY.
WAKE UP, EVERYONE.
"From the palace came the fatal words of a laughing queen. They have no bread? Why don't they eat cake?"
WAKE UP!!!!
..."Okay but how does this explain the rise of Zohran Mamdani?..."
Mamdani if nothing else should serve as a wake-up referendum on the power of the Primary election. New Yorkers have been left with a choice that in all likelihood they want no part of, electorally.
Mambani got a little over 430,000 votes, out of a city of 7.9 million - in other words, less than 5½% of the city voted for him. Ranked Choice voting netted him another 102,000 votes. You read that right - Ranked Choice increased his votes automatically by 25%.
He won in Queens, since he's been their State Rep for 4 years. He won in the Bronx, because everybody there is cool for AOC. He eked out a win in Manhattan over Cuomo, which surprised everyone - your rich college folks I guess.
NYC's Democratic Party went for Ranked Choice hard, and now NYC is going to reap the reward - good and hard.
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2025/06/26/how-each-borough-voted-in-the-democratic-mayoral-primary
The laid-off, the not being paid, the non-essentials, [upper class] and the poor
NO WIC, NO SNAP after November 1
WAKE UP!!! The shutdown issues must be resolved!!!!! SOON!!!!
Note @Wild Swan's comment on SNAP running out Nov 1st, and ask yourself: With Chuck Schumer gloating that it gets 'better and better for Democrats every day', is there any chance they won't let the shutdown continue through Election Day in NYC on Nov 4th, with Mamdani promising city-run grocery stores and free food for everybody?
Remember, over 40 million people use SNAP in the US - 12½%. Remember how Democrats got a Socialist through the Primaries by ginning up a sufficiency of young, stupid voters to edge him through. Now everybody is going to be stuck with him. Good and Hard.
"You and I may be the only 2 people here who know what feeder bowls are."
3.
Enigma,
The article linked says: "By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome."
If lower income voters are getting so much free stuff then why would they stop voting for Democrats? I think it's not about free stuff so much as the promise of jobs that Trump made this last election.
Also, I'm not so sure that upper income are getting federal government jobs [only around 38,000 make $200K or more], teaching at universities and benefiting from DEI. Especially because most upper income are White and Asian. And when it comes to DEI I have rarely heard that it's Asians that benefit from that.
I would say the lower income voters do tend to feel they will get more benefits from Democrats than Republicans. But the reason I have seen cited is that upper income voters [which can be defined differently according to where one lives] tend to be more educated [with post graduate degrees] and this demographic votes more for Democrats. "Voters with postgraduate degrees were a strongly Democratic group in 2024, favoring Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by roughly two-to-one (65% to 33%)." [I know where this is going but I'm just providing data, not making judgements.]
tcrosse said...
Okay but how does this explain the rise of Zohran Mamdani?
......
He''s fashionable. He's in with the in-crowd. It's not so much that he can be mayor, but that he can play one on TV.
10/23/25, 4:47 PM"
Just imagine who he will bring with him, and who he will appoint to influential positions.
Potential long term damage.
For those wondering what rusty, rabel and I are talking about, here's a Machinery Minute video I made a few years ago on feeder bowls and how they work.
They are used in the hundreds of thousands in all industries. They are a basic building block of manufacturing automation
https://youtu.be/4Jmi6b9ECzQ?si=j4C816Jo1O_N3QBR
John Henry
@John Henry. Fascinating
Why in the hell do you think they got the Biden Administration to look the other way and let in EIGHT MILLION + ILLEGALS???? They did it to stuff the ballot box cause they know they are circling the drain.
Jaq
Per gemini ai US mfg output per Capita in1975 was about $1,467
Comparable figure for 2024 was $6,706 more than 4.5X increase
John Henry
John Henry
4.
Feeder bowls are specially designed bowls for pets (or industrial applications) that control food intake, prevent messes, and can slow down eating for better health or streamline parts handling in manufacturing.
The Democrats have to stop running a What and support a good Who.
@John Henry -- I enjoyed your video about feeder bowls. I had a vague idea what they were for but never had cause to learn the details.
Yet another unsung facet of the technological infrastructure that undergirds the comfortable lifestyle of the lotus-eaters in academia and government, as they sneer from their ivory towers and leather chairs at the people who do real work with real objects in the real world.
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