Washington, D.C., has the greatest extremes of wealth and poverty of almost any place in the United States. Yet, ironically, both extremes — the rich and the poor — vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, observes David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The same pattern applies across the country: Places with greater income inequality vote for the Dems, places with more egalitarian incomes prefer Republicans. The danger for the GOP is that the nation is becoming more unequal, Frum argues in “The Vanishing Republican Voter,” an article published Sunday in the New York Times Magazine.” As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican,”
To advance his argument, Frum hones in on Fairfax County, a once solidly Republican stronghold that now leans Democratic, and Prince William County, where the GOP lock is loosening.
The million residents of Fairfax County have an economy larger than Vietnam’s. Incomes average more than $100,000. But that high average conceals wide variations between those with great educations and high incomes, and the arrivals “speaking 40 different tongues.” Inequality has created new social problems, contends Frum: “The schools are stressed. The roads are choked. Land use is more contentious.” And the county is shifting steadily into the Democratic column.
Why? Frum doesn’t really explain why. He just notes that super-affluent Americans generally trend Democratic. Says Frum: “Al Gore beat George Bush 56-39, among the 4 percent of voters who identified themselves as ‘upper class.’ America’s wealthiest ZIP codes are a roll call of Democratic strongholds.” It goes without saying that poor people prefer Democrats, who look more favorably upon the redistribution of wealth.
Moving on to Prince William County, Frum says, “There are no more egalitarian and no more Republican places in the United States than these exurbs. The rich shun them, and the poor can find no easy foothold.” But even here, the Republican dominance is slipping. Democrats Gov. Tim Kaine and Sen. Jim Webb both won majorities here.
Frum argues that Republican policies under the Bush administration have yielded few benefits to middle-income Americans. He then focuses on Prince William as “ground zero” for the illegal immigration debate. Illegal immigration is bad for the poor because it drives down wages, and it helps the rich because it lowers the price of personal services like landscaping and restraurant meals. In other words, it fosters inequality. Making matters worse, middle-class communities like Prince William are paying the cost of maintaining social services for the illegals.
Frum points to one other crisis: the rising cost of health care. What the middle class needs even more than tax breaks, he suggests, is for someone to tame the soaring inflation in health care that has bitten deeply into wages and salaries. “If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years,” he writes, “middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation.”
Bacon’s bottom line: Frum’s article is a good read, and parts of it are quite perceptive. But he fails to close the loops of logic in a number of his arguments. For instance, I agree with Frum’s economic analysis about the disparate impact of illegal immigration, but he never explains how that issue would induce the stressed-out middle-class residents of Prince William County to vote for Tim Kaine or Jim Webb, neither of whom have championed the anti-illegal immigration cause.
On health care, Frum may be on firmer ground. If middle-class Americans are worried about the impact of health care costs, they may be drawn to the Democratic pitch for a national health care system. Even then, though, he doesn’t take his argument quite that far.
Finally, Frum omits what may be the most crucial cluster of issues of all: those relating to transportation, land use, energy and the environment. Middle-class NoVa residents fall into the demographic that Ed Risse refers to as the “Running As Hard As They Cans” (RHTCs) whose lives are impacted by dysfunctional land use patterns — unaffordable and inaccessible housing, traffic congestion, fiscal stress at the municipal level, rising energy costs — in ways they do not fully understand. It’s possible that they’re losing faith in the old Republican mantra: Just keep keep taxes low.
Without question, taxes matter to the middle class, but so do wage levels, and health care costs, and mortgage costs, and housing values, and gasoline/energy costs, and traffic congestion, and the quality of the schools… What those problems have to do with income inequality, I’m still not certain. I would think they would matter to everyone. If Republicans want to hold on to middle class voters, they’d better find a bigger bag of tricks — regardless of what happens to income inequality.