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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Does the working class actually prefer Trump, though? In 2020 Biden won among people who make under $100,000 / year. Of course that metric is not precisely correlated with any reasonable definition of "working class", but it is some indication that maybe the idea of Trump being the working class' chosen candidate is wrong.

Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.

The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.