Democrats are hoping that the suburban shift that fueled their takeover of the House in 2018 will return them to full control of Washington next January. But the party’s increasing reliance on suburban voters could complicate their policy agenda once in power.
A lot has been written about how the Republican coalition changed under President Trump. The GOP’s increasing dependence on white working-class voters and seniors has meant a move away from Paul Ryan style policies toward one more skeptical of free trade, more hawkish on immigration, more eager to fight in the culture wars, and less interested than ever in reforming entitlements.
Though these changes have generated lots of digital ink, not as much has been written about how the evolving Democratic coalition will affect them once they find themselves in power.
The Democratic Party’s coalition is younger and more diverse than that of Republicans. It has become more culturally liberal over time, and its progressive base has become increasingly assertive with each election. In the Trump era, Democrats also benefited from the fact that the president has been a huge turnoff to suburban voters with college degrees — especially women.
It’s these voters who played a key role in Democrats’ ability to flip close House districts, and they are key to Joe Biden’s chances of winning back Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
The tricky part for Democrats is that the policy preferences and priorities of suburban voters are not likely to align with young “woke” liberals and the socialist Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crowd.
Some potential areas for tension are already becoming clear.
During the primaries, Biden vowed to repeal the Trump tax cuts, which would translate into a significant middle-class tax hike. He eventually migrated to say that he only wanted to repeal them for wealthier households. More recently, he declared that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anybody earning less than $400,000. That’s a number that conveniently spares many upper middle-class suburbanites. Subsequently, Senate Democrats have started signaling that raising taxes isn’t their top priority and noting that doing so could backfire during a weak economy. Instead, they said, they’d at least wait until the economy improves before raising them.
But raising taxes is not an ancillary part of their agenda. Particularly at a time of record debt levels, Democrats are not going to be able to finance trillions of dollars in Biden spending proposals while sparing the middle class and upper middle class and somehow holding off on tax hikes.
Liberals are pushing a dramatic expansion of government’s role in healthcare with such passion that Kamala Harris, during her own presidential run, felt the need to endorse eliminating all existing private insurance plans. While Biden rejected going quite that far, he endorsed adding a government-run plan to Obamacare, which liberals hope would destroy private insurance — just over a longer time frame. The idea was considered too extreme by centrist Senate Democrats in 2009 and thus was abandoned during the original Obamacare fight.
Last year, I analyzed census data in eight key suburban counties spread across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Not only was coverage near universal there, but on average, 81% of those who had coverage had private insurance. Let’s see how such voters react once they understand that the coverage that they overwhelmingly like will be in danger.
Biden wants to overhaul the 401(k) system in a way that he claims would allow lower-income Americans to save more for retirement by shifting the tax incentives. But, according to a Tax Foundation analysis, his plan would reduce the tax benefit of 401(k) contributions for those earning above $80,250 but below $400,000.
The overarching issue for Democrats is that the younger and more progressive wing of the party, at its core, believes that there is plenty of wealth in America to provide everybody with access to free or affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, a secure retirement, and so on.
Yet there are plenty of Americans who earn too much to qualify for many of the new benefits being promised while earning far too little to insulate themselves from the effects of changes in government policy. And those people happen to be heavily concentrated in the suburbs. This makes for a growing but fragile coalition for Democrats.
It’s one thing to paper over differences during an election year when all of these groups just want to get the common menace of Trump out of the White House. But it’s another thing when Trump is out of the picture and it actually comes to governing.
