The Ground Is Shifting Under Biden and Trump

Have Democrats and Republicans traded places?

How has the ascendance of well-educated, relatively affluent liberals among Democrats, alongside the dominance of non-college voters in the Republican coalition, altered the agendas of the two parties?

Are low-turnout elections and laws designed to suppress voting now beneficial to Democrats and detrimental to Republicans? Would the Democratic Party be better off if limits on campaign contributions were scrapped?

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, contended that the answer to these last two questions is changing from no to yes.

In a paper posted last week, “Election Law for the New Electorate,” Stephanopoulos argued that “the parties’ longstanding positions on numerous electoral issues have become obsolete. These stances reflect how voters used to — not how they now — act and thus no longer serve the parties’ interests.”

Stephanopoulos described the consequences of the reversal of the traditional class bases of the two parties like this:

One of the old rules of elections that no longer holds is that poorer voters lean Democratic while richer voters tilt Republican. Strikingly, the dominant traditional cleavage in capitalist societies — material well-being — doesn’t currently divide the American electorate. If anything, more affluent voters now modestly prefer the party of the left.

This switch reflects what Stephanopoulos described as “a post-Marxist electorate.”

Data cited by Stephanopoulos demonstrates how Donald Trump’s entry into presidential politics has accelerated these trends, pulling more voters without college degrees into the Republican Party while repelling Republican-leaning, well-educated suburban voters.

At the same time, Stephanopoulos continued,

the partisan divide between minority and white voters has narrowed somewhat. Cities have also become modestly less Democratic, exurban and rural areas have grown far more Republican, and suburbs have shifted from a reddish to a bluish shade of purple. And wealthier individuals’ campaign contributions have followed their votes by flowing increasingly to Democratic candidates.

A fundamental reason for the erosion of the traditional lines of cleavage, Stephanopoulos contended, is the emergence of education “as a potent new axis of electoral segmentation. Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling.”

Stephanopoulos also described the slow process of “racial depolarization” as Republicans make gains among minorities and white voters become more Democratic. He cited data collected by Catalist, a liberal voter analysis firm, that shows that “the share of African American voters backing the Democratic presidential candidate declined from 97 percent in 2012 to 91 percent in 2020. The share of Hispanic voters backing the Democratic candidate fell from 70 percent in 2012 to 62 percent in 2020.”

Simultaneously, “the fraction of white voters preferring the Democratic presidential candidate increased from 41 percent in 2016 to 44 percent in 2020,” according to Stephanopoulos.

He continued:

The transformation of the American electorate is only my starting point. My central aim is to analyze what voters’ changing behavior means for election policy and law. It means quite a lot, I argue, little of which has yet been grasped by strategists or scholars.

I’ll come back to look more deeply into Stephanopoulos’s thesis, but it has already provoked widespread interest among scholars of voting rights, election law and campaign finance.

I asked Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., about the “New Electorate” paper, and he emailed back, “Quite simply, this is the most provocative and important article in voting rights scholarship in quite some time.”

Issacharoff argued that Stephanopoulos’s analysis is based on the recognition that

we are in the process of a partisan realignment that could prove as significant as the post-1960s consolidation of the ideological political parties that we have now. The Republican Party is clearly becoming the party of the working classes while paradoxically retaining its hold on certain business elites.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the educated classes and their cultural agenda. Paradoxically, the Democrats have retained their foothold in minority communities, despite the cultural conservatism of many of these groups.

Other scholars with an interest in campaign law offered a mix of praise for and criticism of the Stephanopoulos paper.

Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford and the author of “Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide,” replied by email to my query: “Nick does a great job summarizing a number of important national trends. However, going forward, it is important to keep an eye on variation across regions and metro areas.”

Rodden agreed that “cities are moving very slightly away from Democrats” and it’s “true that rural areas have become more solidly Republican as they lose population, while some affluent and growing suburban areas have realigned toward the Democrats, at least in presidential elections.”

But, Rodden continued,

in the most recent round of redistricting, anyone who attempted to draw fair districts in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania can attest that ignoring partisanship and focusing only on compactness and respect for county and municipal boundaries would typically result in pro-Republican maps.

In these highly competitive states, it is only possible to achieve partisan fairness by actively trying. One must do things like split Milwaukee into two congressional districts or strategically connect college towns when drawing Ohio Senate districts. Even after such efforts, sometimes the most pro-Democratic maps under consideration still demonstrated slight pro-Republican bias.

“We should be careful not to speak too generally about efforts to restrict voting and ballot counting,” Rodden cautioned. “Some forms might hurt Democrats, while others are a wash or even hurt Republicans. Grand partisan bargains or unilateral disarmament might indeed be possible for some policies, while further hostilities are likely for others.”

Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University, replied by email to my query, saying that “Stephanopoulos is making an important intervention in the debate. Academics and policymakers should focus on the ways that the American electorate has and is changing and be open to the possibility that this renders certain debates obsolete.”

But, she wrote,

the question, in the end, is whether voter suppression laws impact poor white voters to the same degree and in the same ways that they impact voters of color. There are reasons to doubt the conclusion that they would.

Consider photo identification laws. The disparate impact of those laws on racial minorities stems from (a) lower propensities to have a driver’s license and (b) the difficulty older African American voters who migrated from the South face to obtain their original birth certificates. It is not clear to me that rural non-college-educated white voters are equally less likely to have driver’s licenses or that older non-college-educated white voters struggle to obtain birth certificates and thus the alternative forms of identification required by law.

In addition, Abu El-Haj argued, “to the degree that Democrats rely on younger voters, who tend to be less reliable voters regardless of their educational level, restrictions on early voting, absentee voting or ending automatic registrations would still burden Democrats more than Republicans.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A., questioned whether the changing demographic and cultural patterns Stephanopoulos described will endure after Trump leaves politics: “Will others be able to build on the Republican Party appeal to working-class voters after he’s gone?”

Hasen contended that “rather than seeing these issues as creating an opening for Democratic Party voter suppression — though that is certainly possible — I see this rather as an opportunity to strengthen voting rights.”

“There could well be a window of time in which both parties see it in their self-interest to expand voting rights in the hopes of increasing their voting share,” Hasen added. “That’s the time to lock in more voting protections to help all voters.”

Stephanopoulos made similar suggestions in his paper.

Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University, argued in an email that Stephanopoulos’s paper

may add value by: 1) chilling voter suppression efforts by reminding Republican politicians that they may inadvertently suppress their own base and 2) highlighting a path for Republicans to win elections by engaging voters of color (rather than by suppressing votes of color and playing on cultural anxiety to stimulate white voter turnout).

That said, Overton argued, “racially polarized voting persists,” and “a slight fluctuation of racial preferences in polling data in the current election or even exit polls in a couple of election cycles does not necessarily indicate the beginning of the end of racially polarized voting.”

In addition to racial polarization between the political parties, Overton continued,

white solidarity is growing as a political identity. Political scientist Ashley Jardina found that 30 to 40 percent of the white population in the United States identify heavily with their in-group as “white.”

Jardina found that white identity is “becoming a more salient force in American politics” because many people feel as though they are losing power and status due to demographic changes of the past 30 years stemming from immigration and birthrate differences across racial groups, as well as from symbolic changes like the election of Barack Obama.

More broadly, Overton argued,

Our primary challenge is to create systems that both respect identity while allowing people to work together and build new coalitions across cultural and political lines. Our current system was not established to facilitate a multiracial, pluralistic democracy — and that is our primary work today.

While Stephanopoulos addressed some of the ethical concerns raised by Overton and others, his focus was on the incentives and legal consequences of the upheavals involving income, education and race — his “post-Marxist electorate.”

One of the strengths of Stephanopoulos’s paper is his approach to the interaction of demographic and ideological shifts.

Take the impact of laws either suppressing or enhancing voting rights:

Because income and education are the main elements of socioeconomic status and the electorate has depolarized by income but polarized by education, Democratic voters now tend to be higher in socioeconomic status than Republican voters.

Higher socioeconomic status is strongly correlated with more political participation, including higher turnout. Today’s Democrats are therefore more likely to be high-propensity voters, while today’s Republicans are more apt to be lower-propensity voters.

Modern voting regulations (both restrictions and expansions of the franchise) primarily affect lower-propensity voters. Consequently, most modern voting regulations have negligible partisan impacts: if anything, slightly pro-Democratic when the franchise is restricted and slightly pro-Republican when it’s expanded.

Or take the case of income. Stephanopoulos wrote that polling data from 2008 onward showed “the emergence of a clear ‘U curve’ with Democratic presidential candidates faring best among respondents in the lowest and in the highest income quintiles. By 2020, the richest fifth of voters was the most Democratic income group in the entire electorate, narrowly surpassing the poorest fifth.”

Which wealthy voters became more Democratic?

This movement was concentrated among voters with an annual income of $150,000 to $500,000. The shift toward Democrats was also about the same across most professions: business/finance, human services/arts, professional/scientific and so on.

Geographically, wealthy voters in midsize metropolitan areas and the suburbs of large metro areas grew more Democratic. Wealthy voters in the cores of large metro areas began and ended this period as staunch Democrats, while wealthy voters in small metro areas, small towns and rural areas remained equally or even increasingly Republican.

In an email, Stephanopoulos noted that for low-propensity voters, the perceived costs of voting equal or exceeded the rewards and they “can be nudged more easily into not voting by anything that raises the perceived costs of voting (like a voting restriction).”

Stephanopoulos cited the 2024 paper “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins” by Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts.

Grimmer and Hersh defined “individuals as low in socioeconomic status if their family income is less than $80,000 (near the American median) and if they lack a college degree. In the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, respondents in this group supported Donald Trump over Joe Biden by close to six percentage points. In contrast, respondents high in socioeconomic status backed Biden over Trump by more than 20 points.”

Along similar lines, Stephanopoulos cited another paper, “The Crucial Role of Race in Twenty-First Century U.S. Political Realignment,” by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, political scientists at Brigham Young University. Barber and Pope plotted over time “the differences between the shares of more- and less-educated white respondents (those with at least a college degree and those with no more than a high school education) voting for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Barber and Pope found, “more-educated white voters were up to 15 percentage points more Republican than less-educated white voters.” Starting at the beginning of this century, “educational polarization among white voters exploded. At the presidential level, the partisan gap between more- and less-educated white voters surged from close to zero two decades ago to almost 30 percentage points in Democrats’ favor.”

For the first time in modern history, Stephanopoulos wrote, “more-educated white voters are much more Democratic than their less-educated peers.”

These shifts in income and education have a profound impact on turnout.

In 2020, Stephanopoulos reported, turnout was 47 percent for the poorest respondents (family income below $10,000), 72 percent for respondents close to the American median (family income from $50,000 to $75,000) and 85 percent for the richest respondents (family income above $150,000).

“Likewise,” he added, “2020 turnout was 38 percent for the least-educated respondents (less than ninth grade), 70 percent for respondents with near-median education (some college) and 83 percent for the most-educated respondents (graduate degree).”

The result?

“Since 2016, Democratic candidates have done better when turnout is low because they’re now preferred by richer and more-educated voters.”

Amid this turmoil, why is the Democratic loyalty of minority voters eroding, albeit by relatively small percentages? And why is it that poorer minority voters and less-educated minority voters are abandoning what was historically the party of the working man and woman?

Stephanopoulos’s answer: ideology.

In a manner reminiscent of the way conservative working-class white people left the Democratic Party in recent decades, “the relationship between ideology and voting behavior has recently tightened” for Black and Hispanic voters.

In 2016, Stephanopoulos noted, “according to the Cooperative Election Study, 80 percent of conservative African American voters and 30 percent of conservative Hispanic voters backed the Democratic presidential candidate. In 2020, these proportions plunged to 64 percent and 15 percent.”

Ideological sorting, according to Stephanopoulos, “has thus reached the minority electorate. Conservative minority voters are no longer as glaring an exception to the modern rule that ideology and partisanship go hand in hand.”

What can we infer from the “New Electorate” argument, assuming the trends described by Stephanopoulos continue? Quite a bit.

First, that the Democratic coalition will continue on a path toward becoming increasingly upscale and well educated and that the growing share of minorities in the coalition will be slightly tempered by strengthened white support and by marginal losses among minorities.

This is a wholly different party from the New Deal coalition that operated from the 1930s to the 1960s. Strangely, the banner of progressive economic redistribution, according to poll data, will be carried by those whose personal interests lie elsewhere: middle- and upper-middle-class, largely white liberals.

Despite its support for pro-business public policy favoring the wealthy, the Republican Party is moving toward the goal of becoming the party of the working class, including growing numbers of working-class minorities. The contemporary Republican Party will test the viability of such a conflicted coalition, although it is no more and no less conflicted than the contemporary Democratic coalition.

In this sense, the politics of Stephanopoulos’s “New Electorate” are strikingly symmetrical: Both Democrats and Republicans must deal with a “post-Marxist electorate.” Both face built-in class conflicts and fragile alliances between haves and have-nots, reflecting frustration when the disadvantaged on both sides are unable to share fully in the benefits of what we sometimes forget is our $27.36 trillion national economy.

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