To GOP's Dismay, Obama Won Affluent Voters
Among the lowlights of the presidential campaign was the bogus charge from John McCain and his Republican allies that Barack Obama's tax plan was "socialist." Ending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while providing tax relief for most working families, the GOP's amen corner shrieked, verged on communism. But as the election returns showed, voters were having none of it, including those making over $200,000 year. To the consternation of some on the right, the affluent in 2008 concluded that to do well, they needed to do good by putting a Democrat back in the White House.
As I first noted the day after the election, exit polls revealed that Barack Obama beat John McCain 52% to 46% among those earning over $200,000 annually. In 2004, the same group overwhelmingly backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by 63% to 35%. (Unfortunately, the exit polls do not show more granularity above the $200k threshold. In all likelihood, McCain did much better among the top 1% of earners who would have received 58% of the benefits of his tax cut.)
Writing in the Politico today, former Hillary Clinton pollster and strategist Mark Penn noted the significance of that seemingly surprising result. After all, during the campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly stated, "if you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down." Apparently, the 6% of voters making more were just fine with the prospect of a tax increase:
Barack Obama promised he would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans and presumably raise them for the 5 percent who benefited most under President Bush's tax policies. But, remarkably, the most affluent 5 percent supported Obama and that was perhaps the key to his victory last week.
For the Republican water carriers at the Weekly Standard, this apparent betrayal by the class traitors of the upper crust was more than they could bear:
Thomas Frank got a lot of attention a few years ago for his book What's the Matter With Kansas, in which he wondered why lower-income voters would back candidates who offered them little in the way of expanded government services. Frank and a host of liberal analysts found it astounding that so many Americans would vote against their perceived economic interests, and instead vote their cultural sensibilities...
...Don't hold your breath waiting for What's the Matter With the Top 5%. It's apparently understandable that educated and cosmopolitan voters regard other issues as more important than the personal bottom line. It's only the working voters of middle America whose votes ought to be predetermined.
Sadly for the downtrodden masses at the Standard, America's upper income earners unlike Frank's Kansans may well have been voting in their own economic self-interest.
Education and the changing global economy explain a lot. Penn noted that "69 percent of all Americans in polls I conducted in recent years now also call themselves 'professionals,' a new class transcending the old class labels or working or middle class or the wealthy." In 2008, Barack Obama won the support of voters at every level of education, including those with college degrees (50% to 48%) and post-graduate degrees (58% to 40%). In comparison, Bush lost to Kerry by only 11% among post-graduate voters and won those with university diplomas (52% to 46%).
And to be sure, Penn's new professional class remembers well both the glory years of the Clinton administration and the onset of the Bush recession. Having their tax rates returned to Clinton-era levels is a price many are apparently willing to pay in order to return to Clinton-era levels of prosperity.
Which brings us to a final point. Wealthier voters may be slowly absorbing the inescapable historical lesson that the American economy and the stock market alike almost always do better under Democratic presidents. As I noted previously:
The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.
There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of the UCLA study in 2003, "It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats."
(For more analysis and charts highlighting Democrats' superior stewardship of the economy, visit here.)
Back in 2000, George W. Bush famously told the audience at the Al Smith dinner in New York:
"This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."
Much to the dismay of Bill Kristol and his GOP echo chamber at the Weekly Standard, Barack Obama made that base a little smaller last week.
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But what would Joe the Plumber say?
Posted by Sara on November 12, 2008 8:21 AMIn an Ideas piece, Penn notes it was those who will be taxed under the new Obama plan that provided win.
Posted by brian2008 on November 14, 2008 8:32 PM========================
brian
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