Non-degreed voters hate welfare

The Democratic Party cannot win without “working” families.

That was the main message of the recent PPI retreat I attended in Denver. We must win back voters who don’t have a college degree, who generally earn less than area median income, are more likely to live in exurban and rural areas, and are also disproportionately young men.

None of that was news to me. I’m the hipster of “Democrats can and should try to win back bottom-half men.”

What I learned was how much these voters dislike welfare.

I’ve been making more short videos recently, a double-edged sword if there ever were one. They’re great for getting more attention to my ideas. But the audience is much less literate than you nerdy babies whomst I know and love.

Comments on my videos aren’t sure that low-education voters dislike welfare.

So it was good timing that I then read Matt Yglesias cite a 2023 NBER paper showing that I’m right. Further, the authors find that this preference mismatch explains about half of why less-educated voters in rich democracies have abandoned center-left parties in recent decades.

Specifically, the authors show that education predicts a preference for “predistribution” over “redistribution.”

In other words, these voters want the government to do things that create jobs and raise wages. They are much less excited about direct assistance.

They prefer policies like a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, pro-union industrial policies, and protectionist trade arrangements over my idea, which is to just write stupid men checks.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. When I was a Republican, I was embarrassed about growing up on public assistance.

The authors briefly go over a few other reasons this might be true.

But I think it’s best explained by narrowness.

All else equal, these voters tend to be lower in openness, higher in religiosity, and more emotionally invested in “tradition” than the kinds of people who now tend to reliably vote for Democrats.

What it means to be a good person and to have a good life is much narrower and less flexible for these voters.

And here’s what no one at PPI said, but I think is really true and extremely underrated: Male breadwinner marriages form the cornerstone of what it means to be a good person and to have a good life for these voters. These voters really, really want more male-breadwinner marriages, which most public assistance programs at best don’t help and at worst actively discourage.

One reason I’m connecting marriage to support for jobs and dislike of welfare is that the paper also showed that education has somewhat predicted voting since at least the 1940s. But in the 1970s, the direction flipped. More educated voters started to vote for Democrats. This is the same decade that the bottom-half started running out of male breadwinners. It’s also when their marriage rates started dropping. Divorce rates also began to concentrate among non-degreed couples.

Voters who graduated from college prefer checks over jobs programs for a few reasons. First, because checks are just better in every possible way. Many, many studies show that cash assistance beats literally every other form of help every time and in every way. Guess what you can buy with cash assistance? A move to a high-opportunity area. More training for better job opportunities. It’s more efficient and works better with less drag on the economy and opportunities for corruption.

But the other reason we like it is that we don’t have a male breadwinner problem. There are more male breadwinners in the top-half. Plus, even when they’re not available it’s less of a problem because our model of family is more expansive and flexible.

It’s true that the GOP is shitting the bed on everything working families care most about in every single poll: Their employment prospects, wages, and cost of living. His approval ratings are tanking, including among young male registered voters, whose support for him has dropped by 37 points. But if voters have taught us anything, it’s that they can hate both parties simultaneously and then hold their nose and vote for the one they trust slightly more on the economy. As Lauren Harper Pope and others are desperately trying to tell us, falling approval for the current majority party does not automatically, always translate into growing support for the opposition.

“Democrats suffer from The Big Cope, their belief that if only the public knew all the facts, it would become incredibly hostile toward Trump,” pollster Nate Silver said.

Democratic candidates must start to propose policies that expand economic opportunity. Democrats need to embrace the Abundance agenda. They need to say they’re going to yeet policies that inhibit employment for bottom-half men, like zoning, occupational licensure, degree requirements, and truancy laws. We need to promise to legalize more college alternatives, provide more career training in K-12, and streamline new business starts.

Maybe we should consider doing something about market concentration that isn’t as ineffective and easily corrupted as antitrust.

Because if our answer to Trump’s dumb bullshit continues to be “more welfare,” “Medicare for All,” and vague promises to “prosecute price gouging,” we’re going to keep getting trounced among the people we really need to start winning.