Why Poor Areas Vote For Politicians Who Want To Slash The Safety Net
Who turned my blue state red?
It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “intergenerational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.
It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.
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In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
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Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Bolding mine.
A lot of working-class/lower-middle income people really resent the reality that people poorer than them receive disproportionately more (direct) government assistance than they do. They are especially angered when "irresponsible" people (single mothers with lots of kids, drug addicts/alcoholics, people who are persistently unemployed) continue to receive "handouts"; thus, they don't want to pay any of their income (taxes) to support "those people" (and yes, there's definitely a significant racial element to it).
I also think there's another aspect of this that doesn't get talked about much: How the tax code has become more regressive in recent decades - the same period where real wages have stagnated, inequality has grown, and social mobility for lower and middle-income Americans has rapidly declined. When working people are making less money overall and simultaneously shouldering more of the burden of funding the US government, anti-tax populism grows among the working class.
As our economy becomes more of a zero-sum game, as poverty increases and working and middle class Americans become more financially insecure, and as more good-paying working-class jobs are automated or off-shored, feelings of solidarity with their fellow working men and women (let alone the poorest Americans or "illegals"
have rapidly declined (Notice how low the unionization rate is these days, particularly in the private sector?).
All of these factors together, along with social, religious, and racial conservatism, have conspired to make a significant segment of the American white working class very hostile to liberalism (which has actually changed a lot too since the days of the New Deal) in recent decades.
And there's this:
