Democrats are facing a dilemma, and Michigan's primary perfectly illustrated it. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, defeated Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed moderate. The energy was unquestionably on his side, but a Washington Post analysis finds his support was concentrated in the state's most educated counties and college towns. Stevens, the moderate, did better in many rural and lower-income areas. So, you see, the left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes the Democrats need to win in general elections. The progressive answer is that Democrats can solve this by becoming more economically populist, attacking billionaires, expanding benefits, and thus appealing to the working class. But these ideas don't appeal to the actual working class. Among Democrats, a Pew survey shows 41% of college graduates say they like politicians who call themselves democratic socialists, compared with only 26% of those without degrees. Upper-income Democrats are also much more favorable toward democratic socialists than lower-income Democrats, 40% to 24%.
Democrats have spent years dreaming of a working-class restoration. Joe Biden mounted the largest effort to court them with economics in decades. His administration poured hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure, factories, clean energy, and semiconductors, much of it flowing to Republican counties. Yet, in the next election, 2024, Donald Trump won voters without college degrees and those earning less than $50,000 while making gains among working-class Hispanic and Black voters. You see, over the last 30 years, the Democrats have moved left on economics consistently. Obama was to the left of Clinton, and Biden was to the left of Obama. And in that same period, the working class has steadily abandoned the party. The lesson is not that economics don't matter, but the Democratic Party's problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare and even now the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues: crime, immigration, the border, and the so-called woke agenda.
One example: according to Pew, 43% of voters agree with Republicans on crime policy, while only 29% agree with Democrats. When Democrats come under pressure, they find it much easier to move left on economics than toward the center on culture. If they could speak plainly and say that the border must be controlled, repeat offenders punished, standards of merit defended, or that biological sex matters, they risk revolts from activists, advocacy groups, and highly educated staffers. So instead, Democrats offer a larger subsidy, a new benefit, or a fiercer attack on billionaires while leaving untouched the cultural attitudes that are actually alienating many voters.
The evidence suggests that this strategy is backwards. One study tested democratic shifts across 29 policy issues and found that the largest electoral gains tended to come from moving toward the middle on social and cultural questions. Another report found that working-class voters placed far more emphasis than liberal college graduates on securing the border, reducing crime, and adding police. Liberal college graduates placed far more emphasis on resisting authoritarianism, protecting trans rights, climate change, and abortion. The divide widened not because working-class voters simply lurched to the right, but rather that college-educated Democrats moved left further and faster. In 2000, according to an analysis by American politics scholar Nicholas Jacobs, only about 8% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored increasing immigration. By 2020, 48% of Democrats did, compared with 24% of working-class voters. A 3-point gap over abortion in 1980 became a 30-point gap by 2024.
Large gaps also opened up over religion, family, and trust in government not to waste taxpayer dollars. Trump understands the political force of this estrangement. Listen to what he rails against in his campaign rallies: transgender athletes, DEI bureaucracies, elite universities, crime, and an out-of-control border. "There's never been a border in the world like this." He knows that these issues hit voters in their gut. The answer is not for Democrats to imitate Trump, abandon minorities, or become reactionary. It is to stop imagining that Medicare for All and wealth taxes will restore the New Deal coalition. That world and that coalition are gone. The good news is that the party already has a formidable modern coalition: college-educated voters, women, minorities, younger Americans, and many working- and middle-class voters in metropolitan America. These voters want not a socialist revolution, but effective liberal government that delivers affordable housing, good schools, accessible healthcare, safe streets, a controlled border, legal immigration, and economic growth. And perhaps this will help Democrats to make inroads with the rest of the working class again, too.
Senator Mitch McConnell has been absent eight weeks and counting from Senate proceedings. His office says he's recovering from a fall, but public speculation rages on about his declining health. McConnell, at 84, isn't the first member of the upper house to serve into old age. Dianne Feinstein served until her death in 2023 at 90, even as she grew increasingly frail. The median age is now 66 in the Senate and 58 in the House, while the median age for Americans is still under 40. Our president is 80. The average age of a sitting federal judge was nearly 68 in 2024. There is even one serving at 102. Aging politicians may just be the most visible feature of government for and by the elderly. That is what the scholar Samuel Moyn argues in his new book, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It." America is in a golden age for being of golden age. The average net worth of 65- to 70-year-olds was $1.88 million in 2022, up 178% from 1989. People 70 and older had 19% of the country's total household wealth in 1989. Now they have 32%. That's why the share of wealth for those under 40 has almost halved, from 12% to 6.6%.
It wasn't always this way. After the Great Depression, poverty was widespread, particularly for the elderly. That's what prompted Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sign into law the 1935 Social Security Act, which for the first time established regular payments for the elderly financed by payroll taxes. The goal, FDR said, was to give some measure of protection against poverty-ridden old age. That effort turned out to be a tremendous success. The elder poverty rate dropped from 35% in 1959 to less than 10% in 1999. Until the 1970s, the poverty rate among those 65 and older used to trend higher than other age groups. Now it is consistently lower. But America has overlearned its lesson. Federal spending is weighted overwhelmingly towards seniors today. For every $6 the US government spends on those 65 and over, it spends just $1 on children and young adults. As the Wall Street Journal notes, it's almost as though the US is stuck on a loop, continuing to lavish the elderly with benefits even though the pain in the economy has moved elsewhere.
The problem is not just with federal benefits. States also shower the elderly with tax breaks on housing, on income, including Social Security, and on pensions. And many of these benefits accrue to the wealthy. The NYU professor and podcaster Scott Galloway says America is waging a war on the young. Minimum wage, which he used as a proxy for how we value youth labor, has not kept pace with inflation. Housing and stock prices have soared, making it even harder for young people to buy homes or enter the stock market, the main engine of wealth creation in America. This is a story we already know about rising inequality in America. The solutions are partly redistributive. Galloway suggests taxing capital gains as income and streamlining permits so more housing could be built, which would drive down housing prices. He also believes we should reform Social Security.
It's easy to say there's no political will to do any of this, but there may be a solution to that problem, too. Moyn notes in his book that part of the reason we're stuck with aging politicians who serve an aging electorate at the expense of the young is that older people are the ones who vote, and children under 18, of course, have no vote. The median age of the general election voter is 52. Outside the presidential election, it is 55. But in primaries, which determine 90% of the seats in the current House, the median voter is 65 years old. Instead of pressuring politicians to act in defiance of their voters, we could adopt policies to encourage the young who can to vote, like mandatory voting or a national holiday on voting day, both of which are law in many countries. In a democracy, after all, the surest way to change policies is to throw the old bums out.
