Democrats lost white voters without college degrees—a big chunk of the middle class and an important swing vote—by huge margins this month. Why?
Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told the Washington Post that his party had failed to credibly address these voters’ basic economic concerns including wage stagnation and the skyrocketing cost of higher education. “People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”
The problem Mellman is diagnosing for his party is also an opportunity for conservatives. As he points out, voters have both deep economic anxieties and little confidence that big-government solutions will relieve them. The challenge for conservatives is to explain, with specific examples, how limiting and reforming government can address those concerns. A new post-election poll conducted for YG Network—and first reported by Fox News—shows how much potential this approach would have.
The evidence for Mellman’s diagnosis is strong. Most voters continue to rank economic concerns as their top priority on Election Day. They are frustrated that Democrats have not delivered on their promises to bring about a real economic recovery. The chief fear of the middle class is that a stagnant economy is making their position weak, and a lack of economic growth will make it far too easy for them or their children to fall out of the middle class altogether.
Liberals tend to respond to voters’ economic concerns with costly and bureaucratic policies that fail, or even make matters worse. Their top-down, technocratic sensibility results in sclerotic institutions that are out of sync with the times. And voters know it. While almost everything else in their lives is becoming leaner, more agile, and more customizable, government is increasingly cumbersome, inflexible, and rigid. Exit polls found that 54 percent of voters in last week’s election believed that the government does many things better left to business or individuals.
But conservatives shouldn’t crack open the champagne just yet. While the credibility gap seems to be catching up with liberal politicians at the ballot box, most voters aren’t becoming economic libertarians—as strong support for minimum-wage-boosting ballot initiatives earlier this month made clear.
And conservatives have had too little to say to the anxious middle class. Sometimes our talk of budget balancing makes it sound as though we want the same dysfunctional big-government policies as liberals, just with a cheaper price tag. In recent years, conservatives have rarely even tried to explain how decentralization, choice, and flexibility could work to address the problems that worry Americans.
Too often the public is forced to make a choice between liberals who are overly confident in big government, and conservatives who have little to say about their concerns.
Conservatives shouldn’t have to settle for the choice between being the party of John Galt or liberalism-lite. And the public shouldn’t have to settle for the choice between economic hardship or big-government policies. The alternative to both dilemmas is a robust conservative policy agenda that takes seriously the economic concerns of most voters and applies conservative principles to them. Thankfully some of conservatism’s best and brightest have provided an outline of what such an agenda could look like. And YG Network’s new polling suggests that voters are open to this agenda.
Voters do not think, for example, that we can spend our way to better schools—or that Washington, D.C., can create them. But a huge majority of voters, 71 percent in our poll, continue to rate education as a very important issue when voting in federal elections. Conservatives, especially in state and local government, should outline a K-12 education agenda that empowers parents to choose the curricula that meet the needs of their children. And they should free teachers from endless government red tape, too, so that they can work with parents and communities to create better schools. These plans should be met with the enthusiastic support of conservative legislators in Washington, who can also do their part by cutting burdensome federal regulations.
Families feel squeezed these days—and 91 percent of voters think that working parents need tax relief. In particular, 68 percent of voters believe that parents should be able to keep more of their own money through a $2,500 tax credit for children. Conservatives should stand for a reformed tax code that is both pro-growth and pro-family.
Our higher education system is broken, and a majority of voters don’t believe we should double down on that failure. Skyrocketing costs have led many students and parents to seek out alternatives to traditional bricks-and-mortar colleges. This presents a tremendous opportunity for conservatives to think creatively about the needs of young people training for jobs in the modern workforce. Nearly 60 percent of voters in our poll say we need to rethink traditional higher education so that it’s more affordable and better tailored to students’ needs. Too many graduates cannot get good jobs or pay off student loans, and a majority of voters believe colleges, which benefit tremendously from student loan money, should share the costs when graduates default. They also believe colleges should be more transparent and tell students and parents how their graduates are performing in the labor market after they graduate. These voters understand that a bachelor’s degree isn’t the best choice for everyone, and they favor better occupational training and apprenticeship options as worthwhile alternatives.
Two decades ago conservatives shepherded the most successful domestic policy overhaul in a generation with welfare reform legislation. Now 62 percent of voters believe that by applying those successful reforms to other welfare programs—namely, insisting on and rewarding the consensus American value of work—conservatives could help move more Americans in need from dependency to self-sufficiency. These voters also believe that federal anti-poverty money should be sent to the states, which are better equipped to design programs that will be responsive to the needs of their poorest citizens.
An agenda that includes these ideas could have broad appeal to the white voters without college degrees that Mellman worries about. These voters have swung between the parties in recent elections. But it could also appeal to voters who have often been out of reach for Republicans. More than three-quarters of black and Hispanic voters, for example, support tax relief for parents, as do 69 percent of single white women.
The new congressional majority is going to have a lot on its plate, and it will be easy to get distracted by the political fight of the week. If conservatives want to achieve true and lasting political success, though, they will need to take on the challenge of responding to middle-class anxieties with a bold agenda that offers real solutions.
Kate O’Beirne is a policy advisor to YG Network. April Ponnuru is the group’s policy director.
