Support for these policies that advance middle-class economics is very strong. On average, about 75 percent say they are more positive about a Democrat advancing them, though even more significant is the nearly 50 percent who are much more positive.3
And if you want to understand whom the public is turning to at this tipping point, consider that on average the top policies in the Republican offer test about 6 points lower in intense support and 7 points lower in overall support. The top Republican policies involve reforming Congress so they are required to achieve fiscal balance or lose their perks and helping small businesses. And indeed, help for the self-employed and for independent contractors is one of the unaddressed problems in the new economy.
1. It’s Medicare and Social Security, stupid!
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SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE: Protect Medicare and Social Security so there is no reduction in benefits, and keep the politicians’ hands off Social Security so today’s and tomorrow’s seniors can retire with security.
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The elites have grand plans to cut and “reform” Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to “rein in out-of-control spending”—and that is the bulk of the cuts at the heart of the Ryan budgets passed by House Republicans. They are at the heart of most of the bipartisan commissions that have made their “bold” recommendations. Well, the voters see that very clearly, and protecting the safety net for retirees is at the top of the popular agenda, and for many voters nothing is more urgent than stopping the elite and conservative plans. That is particularly true for baby boomers, who are in the front line. It is also among the top priorities of unmarried women, white working-class men and women, and Independents.4
The security of retirement benefits and the social safety net is a growing issue in every election because people are now reaching retirement more dependent on those benefits. Many are still working because they have no choice. At the close of the U.S. Senate election in Louisiana in 2014, Democracy Corps explored how Mary Landrieu might get more of the white vote. Among the approaches raising the most serious doubts about her competition was an attack on Landrieu’s opponent, Republican Bill Cassidy, for not understanding what people face at this point in life. And despite her defeat, this issue will be close to the surface in every election to come.5
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Cassidy is a doctor, yet he voted to end the Medicare guarantee, which would force seniors to negotiate with insurance companies and cost them thousands more out of pocket every year. He also voted to cut Social Security benefits and to raise the retirement age to seventy, even though the average life span for poorer Louisianans is only sixty-seven.
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The policy agenda in these disruptive times begins with protecting and preserving the most important and legitimate parts of the social safety net, yet with people retiring with fewer assets, pensions, and homeownership, the reform agenda will almost certainly move to increasing Social Security benefits. For now, just keeping the elites from tampering with the safety net would be a big victory. However, that just may not be enough in this new economy.
2. Helping working families and working mothers
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WORKING FAMILIES: Recognize that working families need help by making sure parents have paid sick days to care for their children and access to affordable child care.
WORKING MOTHERS: Help working mothers by making sure they have access to affordable child care, have paid sick days to care for themselves and their children, and protect pregnant workers from being fired or demoted.
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The disruptive changes to the traditional family and marriage and to the role of women in work are a volatile combination—particularly when the regime of support for working women and working mothers dates from a previous era. Woman know they still have the primary responsibility for the children and have to work fewer hours because of it, and neither employers nor the government have done anything to help them balance the impossible.
The electorate gives impressive and intense support for the simple policy of helping working families with paid sick days to take care of their kids and affordable child care and helping working mothers with the same things, in addition to providing protection for pregnant workers. The policies are simple, though achieving them would require an all-new regime for dealing with work and family, with immense benefits for working women.
Support for the offer for working families is strongest in the rising American electorate, unmarried women, and white working-class women. Helping working mothers is embraced more by Millennials who are of childbearing age and, perhaps ironically, white working-class men. Help for working mothers gets some of the most intense support: 50 percent saying they would be much more likely to support a Democrat.
When we started testing a range of policy initiatives on their own—paid family leave, affordable child care, paid sick days, and protecting pregnant workers—none of them tested off the chart. That all changed when we brought them together under the broader and long-overdue recognition that working mothers need help. The cluster of policies takes on the unaddressed problems of discrimination against pregnant workers and new mothers, the reality that companies are being allowed to fire or demote these women, the fact that working mothers need to make use of child care to work while costs soar through the roof and they aren’t guaranteed paid sick days when they need to care for an ill child or other family member.
An agenda for working mothers and working families began to test stronger in the 2014 election cycle as women voters in particular became increasingly exasperated with the lack of help.
When President Obama made this cluster of policies a centerpiece of his middle-class economics, unmarried women and white working-class voters rushed to support him. They turned their dials dramatically up at each point.
State of the Union research was conducted on January 20, 2015, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund. Participants were 61 white swing voters nationwide who split their votes fairly evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates over the past several Presidential and Congressional elections, though there were slightly more Obama voters than Romney voters. The group’s self-identified partisanship was 33 percent Democratic, 34 percent Independent, and 33 percent Republican. The group included 27 women and 34 men, including 13 unmarried women.
State of the Union research was conducted on January 20, 2015, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund. Participants were 61 white swing voters nationwide who split their votes fairly evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates over the past several Presidential and Congressional elections, though there were slightly more Obama voters than Romney voters. The group’s self-identified partisanship was 33 percent Democratic, 34 percent Independent, and 33 percent Republican. The group included 27 women and 34 men, including 13 unmarried women.
How steep the lines go is a measure of how much America is at a tipping point and ready to finally address what’s happened to the family and working women with a reform economic agenda.
3. Equal pay and equal rights for women
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EQUAL PAY: Make sure working women have equal pay to men for doing the same work and make it possible for women to work in management positions by rewarding companies that provide leave policies that make it possible for all employees to work and balance their work and family needs.
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Seismic changes brought women fully into the labor force—though they are doing more of the lowest-paying jobs, are able to put in less time because of child care, and are facing discrimination up to the highest levels, so equal pay is becoming a flash point. A policy agenda for working women focused on equal pay is now in the top tier of policies among all likely voters and the new American majority and even higher for the white working class and independents. With about three-quarters of voters nationally saying that thi
s initiative makes them more positive about the Democratic Party’s economic plans, and nearly half saying so strongly, you have to accept that something is going on.6
When we asked voters in a poll of the most contested House seats to imagine what priorities a candidate for office might champion that might inspire them to vote for them, it surprised me how inspirational the idea of equal pay was for women. It inspired 60 percent of college-educated and non-college-educated women and almost two-thirds of white unmarried women. It inspired half the independents and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.7
You knew something had shifted when Republican congressional candidates running in blue states or districts began endorsing equal pay in principle to show they were attuned to this new world.
The great majority of Republicans, though, were surely not on board. When President Obama issued an executive order requiring that federal contractors comply with some provisions of the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republican leaders in Congress challenged him. They went to great lengths to show that the “pay gap” was exaggerated. Every Republican senator voted to block the Senate from taking up the equal-pay law.
Democracy Corps tested the power of an attack centered on this issue in the fall of 2014 in North Carolina, where state Speaker of the House Thom Tillis was challenging Senator Kay Hagan. The attack noted that “more and more women are breadwinners for their families, but women make just 77 cents for every dollar men make. Thom Tillis is opposed to requiring equal pay for women who do the same job as men.” The hit also attacked Tillis for letting insurance companies charge women higher premiums than men and not covering preventive care. Well, nearly two-thirds of likely voters in North Carolina said this raised serious doubts about voting for Tillis, with nearly 40 percent saying it raised very serious doubts. When we applied a regression model to see which attacks could shift the vote, Tillis’s position on equal pay and women’s equality was far and away the strongest.8
Survey of 1,000 likely voters in the 12 most competitive Senate races across the country conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Function, September 20–24, 2014, including an oversample of 1,200 voters across Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, and Colorado conducted September 12–October 1, 2014. Marginal effect estimates based on responsiveness to each message, comparing very serious doubts responses to no real doubts.
Senator Kay Hagan did run ads later in her campaign on Tillis’s opposition to equal pay, and in the end Tillis defeated Hagan by 2 points—which is much closer than the 11-point margin across the congressional races in North Carolina in 2014.9
4. Affordable college education—starting with free tuition
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AFFORDABLE COLLEGE: Make college more affordable by expanding the tuition tax credit that allows students to claim up to $4,000 for higher-education expenses. Get serious and provide free tuition at community colleges or technical schools for all qualified high-school graduates.
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The first principle in the new economy is that jobs don’t pay enough to live on and people are looking for ways to make more. People should not underestimate the underlying power of this point and how intensely people are pursuing personal strategies such as further training to deal with it. Women in particular are moving into colleges at all levels. So help making college affordable is part of the top tier of reforms to offset the contradictions of this new economy. These initiatives are virtually the top policy change for the Millennials.
The voters see the proposal to expand tax credits for college students and provide free tuition for community colleges and technical schools as a potential game changer as the political class is forced to focus on the affordability of college. That was reflected in the dial-meter reaction of white working-class and unmarried women voters who gave this policy offer their strongest positive turn-up on their dial meters.10
State of the Union research was conducted on January 20, 2015, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund. Participants were 61 white swing voters nationwide who split their votes fairly evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates over the past several Presidential and Congressional elections, though there were slightly more Obama voters than Romney voters. The group’s self-identified partisanship was 33 percent Democratic, 34 percent Independent, and 33 percent Republican. The group included 27 women and 34 men, including 13 unmarried women.
5. Long-term infrastructure investment to rebuild America and create middle-class jobs
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INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS: Create a long-term plan to rebuild America and create new good-paying jobs by investing in infrastructure, such as modernizing schools, improving roads, bridges, and airports, and investing in clean energy alternatives that create more new jobs.
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America will only get to its growth potential and create American jobs if it makes comprehensive long-term investments in rebuilding and modernizing its infrastructure. As we shall see here, the country is ready to rally around leaders who make that case and offer a vision. But understand that voters are cautious because they think politicians and government are corrupt and short-term in their thinking and select projects for political gain. That is why they are cautious about activist government—unless the reform starts with changing politics and government first.
In this first survey of the 2016 cycle, the top-rated initiative for the new American majority—the rising American electorate—was a plan of long-term investment in infrastructure to create jobs. It is hard to understate the strength of their support. Fully 73 percent were positive, but almost half were intense in their support. Support is also high among white non-college voters and white unmarried women, who are seeing the potential for job growth that could help them.
At the same time, you cannot underestimate the importance of the term “long-term.” For many voters, the concept stands in contradiction to politicians and government that operate short-term and with a focus to get reelected. In the focus groups with working-class men, “long-term” meant structure and goals—things that could not long survive politics, special interests, and Washington dysfunction.11
The voters’ theory about politicians and government is not very different from the dominant theory among senior executives and thought leaders on why there are so few large infrastructure projects. They think politicians get elected on a short-term basis and the benefits and social gains from infrastructure are long-term. Politicians and governments operate with a short time horizon when budgeting, but infrastructure requires long gestation, planning, and execution. Politicians get punished immediately by voters for unpopular tolls and gas tax increases, while the gains in efficiency and safety accrue socially and long-term. As one head of global infrastructure told us, “Politicians don’t think in seven-year or ten-year cycles. They think in terms of the next election cycle.”12
They might just as well have been speaking about infrastructure to a pretty typical American working-class voter in Virginia Beach: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a long-term plan for anything”; “we have never had a long-term plan to fix what’s wrong and we need to but of course our government changes every four years so it’s something they’ll need to work on.”13
I think that infrastructure leaders and political leaders are just misreading the ordinary voter. The ordinary politician may be focused on the short-term, but the ordinary voter is very focused on the “long-term” social and economic consequences of government decisions in their communities and for the nation.
Consider voters’ reaction to the national debt, for example. They thought rising deficits threatened key long-term government commitments such as Social Security and left the United States ever more beholden to China. They were very cautious about Keynesian policies—“stimulus” or “giving the economy a jolt”—even if those were indeed the best way to get to growth. They thought politicians were throwing money at problem
s, trying to bribe voters like themselves, or paying off special interests and moneyed donors.14
The argument that “growth requires public investment in things like transportation, science, and education” did not begin to prevail over the argument that economic health requires more spending cuts until recently in the United States. The public’s surprising support for austerity during the economic downtown was part of a conviction that Americans live off debt and had to take their medicine for their long-term health.15
The public also did not rush to support public investment in infrastructure because they were much less critical of its quality than were civil engineers. Even though they gave America’s infrastructure a D+ grade, a majority of Americans say they are satisfied with the condition of the transportation infrastructure in their own area. And if you want them to support more taxes to support improvements, an even larger majority thinks the gasoline tax has gone up every year. The federal gas tax, however, has not been raised since 1993.16
At the end of the day though, the most important reason the public holds back from investment is their distrust of politics, politicians, and political processes that control infrastructure decisions. A striking 85 percent of the public thinks transportation funding decisions are political, and more than 60 percent believe that strongly. They deeply dislike “earmarking” of transportation projects by members of Congress. They have no reason to believe that political leaders are selecting the best projects or doing what is good for the long term.17
America Ascendant Page 34
