US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  The Census Bureau generalizations about median income dramatically downplayed the deep concentrations of poverty that exist across the country. For example, North Dakota had the nation’s biggest drop in child poverty between 2011 and 2016, but the poverty rate for Native American children, the majority living on reservations, is five times higher than for the rest of the state’s children.42 Likewise, buried within a Detroit Free Press article headlined “Michigan Posts Its Largest Income Gain since the Recession” is the admission that the majority Black cities of Flint and Detroit continue to have some of the highest poverty rates in the United States, at 40.8 percent and 39.8 percent, respectively. The child poverty rate is even higher—more than half of the children who lived in Detroit and Flint in 2015 lived in poverty, at a rate of 57.6 percent and 58.3 percent, respectively.43

  The Census Bureau figures also ignore the enormous income disparities, often along racial lines, within individual cities. According to the Census Bureau, Washington, DC’s median household income rose to $75,600 in 2015, but that breaks down to $120,000 for white households compared to just $41,000 for Black households. The poverty rate for the city’s Black population is 27 percent—and 75 percent of all D.C. residents living in poverty are Black.44

  There is yet another way that the Census Bureau’s poverty statistics skew lower while its median income figures skew higher. In the introduction to its Current Population Survey, the Bureau makes the following caveat about its “sample” population: “People in institutions, such as prisons, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes, are not eligible to be interviewed in the CPS…. People who are homeless and not living in shelters are not included in the sample.” The list of those excluded from the survey thus includes millions of the most impoverished people in the United States. Despite the flaws in the Census Bureau’s findings, they still show roughly one in four African Americans and Native Americans and more than one in five Latinos living under the official poverty line. One in five children overall are living in poverty by official standards, and 10 percent of US households are trying to survive on less than $13,300 a year.

  But the most glaring problem with the Census Bureau’s methodology is its appallingly low poverty threshold. If the poverty line were scaled upward to a more accurate level, the official poverty rate of the US population would certainly skyrocket statistically. The Social Security Administration developed the current poverty measure back in 1963, adopting a formula based on the minimum amount of money necessary to buy a subsistence level of food, using data from the 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey. On the assumption that food expenditures made up one-third of what a family of four needed to survive at the time, that amount was then multiplied by three to define the poverty line. This definition, using obsolete fifty-year-old consumption patterns and even more antiquated sixty-year-old prices (adjusted annually based on the consumer price index), is still in use today. If that formula (food expenses times three) was ever adequate for survival—and it most certainly wasn’t in the era of Eisenhower—it is completely preposterous today. In 2015, the poverty threshold was set at just at $24,250 for a family of four and $11,770 for an individual. Even the Census Bureau recognizes some of the shortcomings of its formula. Since 2010, it has issued a “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” adding income from sources such as Social Security, tax credits, and food stamps, while subtracting some expenses, such as work costs, medical care, and child-support payments. While those cloistered in the bubble of the federal bureaucracy seem to find its poverty threshold adequate for survival, anyone with at least one foot in the real world is aware that no family of four can make ends meet on $24,250 a year. Just as every household needs a budget measuring its income in relation to expenses, we should examine the actual cost of just a few major household necessities to give a cursory sense of whether that 5.2 percent rise in median household income in 2015 actually made a dent in falling working-class living standards:

  Rent: According to Apartmentlist.com, using Census data from 1960 to 2014, median rent has risen by 64 percent after adjusting for inflation, while real household income only increased by 18 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, rents rose by 18 percent while household income fell by 7 percent.45 As Apartmentlist.com concluded, “As a result, the share of cost-burdened renters [households spending more than one-third of their income on rent] nationwide more than doubled, from 24 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 2014.”

  Childcare: The cost of childcare has nearly doubled since the 1980s—yet it is not considered a necessary household expenditure, even though 75 percent of mothers with children six to seventeen years old are in the labor force, as are 61 percent of mothers with children under three years old. In 2015, the average childcare cost rose to over $143 a week. As a result, fewer working parents can afford to pay for it. Those who cannot end up keeping children with relatives or trading off childcare shifts with a working co-parent, if there is one.46 Whereas 42 percent of parents paid for child care in 1997, only 32 percent did so by 2011. The poorest families spend the largest proportion—one-third of their income—on child care.

  Healthcare: The Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2015 showed that with medical expenses—including insurance premiums, copays, coinsurance, prescription drug costs, and other uncovered medical expenses—factored in, 11.2 million (or 3.5 percent) more people are living in poverty than the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey acknowledges. And we can expect the next survey’s statistics to be even worse, as employers continue to push more insurance costs onto their employees. More and more employers are turning to plans with higher copays and so-called high-deductible plans, offering premiums workers can barely afford and deductibles of $1,000 or much more—meaning workers must pay these amounts before insurance kicks in even a penny toward their medical care. In 2016, deductibles alone rose nearly six times faster than wages, according to the 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey of the Kaiser Family Foundation. According to the Commonwealth Fund, higher-deductible plans on average cost $5,762 for individuals and $16,737 for families.47

  A Downward Spiral

  A Georgetown University study on job creation showed that workers with a high school diploma or less lost the most income during the recovery, as more jobs go to those with at least some postsecondary education—likely reflecting a glut of “over-educated” applicants for low wage jobs. “Of the 7.2 million jobs lost in the recession,” the Georgetown study states, “5.6 million were jobs for workers with a high school diploma or less…. On net, there are now more than 5.5 million fewer jobs for individuals with a high school education or less than there were in December 2007.”48 This downward trend began well before the Great Recession. A report by the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution found that between 1990 and 2003, real median wages had already fallen by 20 percent for male workers without a high school diploma age thirty to forty-five, and by 12 percent for women in the same category. As the New York Times, citing the report, concluded: “Less-educated Americans, especially men, are shifting away from manufacturing and other jobs that once offered higher pay, and a higher share are now working in lower-paying food service, cleaning, and groundskeeping jobs.”49

  But this decline in wages is tied to more than the decline in manufacturing jobs. As the Times article added, “Pay levels are declining in almost all of the fields that employ less-educated workers, so even those who have held onto jobs as manufacturers, operators and laborers are making less than they would have a generation ago.” Inflation-adjusted annual pay for manufacturing jobs fell from $33,600 in 1990 to $28,000 in 2013. The greatest damage from neoliberalism was done early on, from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.50 The average real hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory workers fell by 15 percent between 1973 and the mid-1990s, lowering the ceiling for working-class wages ever since. Wages briefly rose during the economic boom of the late 1990s—only to be derailed by the early 2000s when wages began to stagnate again. The Great Recession once again accele
rated the decline.

  The Trump administration will undoubtedly further immiserate the working class, given the opportunity. But the “out of touch” Democratic Party establishment does not offer a viable alternative to the class and social status quo, in which it has embedded itself. It is unfortunate that Sanders chose to run as a Democratic Party candidate when the party establishment ruled him out from the beginning, in favor of its anointed neoliberal candidate. Meanwhile, the working class is desperately seeking a voice in electoral politics. The only way the working class can advance in this dire situation is to rebuild its fighting tradition, the same tradition that built unions from the ground up in the 1930s. It worked then, and it is the only way forward today.

  WE GOT TRUMPED!

  Charlie Post

  On the night of November 8, 2016, I boarded a flight to London, on my way to the annual Historical Materialism conference. As the plane took off at 7:30 p.m., the polls across the United States were still open. I was confident that, when I arrived in London the next morning, Hillary Clinton would have been declared the president-elect of the United States. I believed that not only would Donald Trump be defeated, but that the Democrats might regain their majority in the Senate. Only three weeks before, I had predicted that Trump’s middle-class, right-wing populist insurgency, which had temporarily captured the main party of capital in the United States, would go down in flames.1

  Clinton was the clear favorite of the US capitalist class, who were repelled by Trump’s nationalist hostility to neoliberal trade policies and the system of imperialist military-diplomatic alliances that guarantee US world domination, and his threats to deport all undocumented immigrants. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton received over 92 percent of corporate contributions in the 2016 election cycle, including over 80 percent of the contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate; communications/electronics; healthcare, defense, and “miscellaneous business.” Trump’s support was limited to 60 to 70 percent of contributions from construction, energy, and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness—which together accounted for less than 10 percent of total capitalist donations.2 With such a huge war chest, I expected the Democrats to build a “get out the vote” machine across the United States that would deliver a victory for its unpopular candidate.

  When the plane landed on the morning of November 9 and I turned on my phone, I was greeted by the unexpected—Trump had been declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election and the Republicans had maintained their majorities in both the House and Senate. The media had declared Trump’s victory a “landslide,” with his win of 304 Electoral College delegates, compared with Clinton’s 227. The revolt of the “white working class” in the former industrial Midwest and Great Lakes region was credited for Trump’s sweep.

  What Really Happened?

  I was not alone in my failure to foresee a Trump victory. Most of the political commentators in the United States and globally, based on preelection polling, had predicted a Clinton victory. How do we explain this unexpected turn of events?

  First, we cannot overlook the fact that Clinton won the majority of the popular vote. She led Trump by approximately 2.9 million votes. If the United States had direct election of the president, Clinton would have been on her way to the White House. However, the Electoral College—created by slave owners and merchant bankers to prevent challenges to their class rule—allowed a popular minority to elect the President. As in many elections in the past forty years, extremely small changes in the participation and preferences of minuscule portions of the US electorate produced a sharp swing in electoral votes and the continued Republican majority in Congress.

  While it initially appeared that voter participation rates dropped in 2016,3 as paper ballots were counted, voter participation came within 1 percent of 2012 rates.4 Clinton’s vote was still about one million below Obama’s last election. More importantly, voter participation among traditionally Democratic segments of the electorate fell.5 African Americans dropped from 13 percent of all voters in 2008 and 2012 to 12 percent in 2016. In some predominantly African American communities, the drop was even more precipitous. In Milwaukee’s Council District 15, which is 84 percent Black, voter turnout was nearly 20 percent lower than in 2012.6 Households earning less than $50,000 per year, who made up 51 percent of the US population in 2014,7 dropped from 41 percent of voters in 2012 to 36 percent in 2016. The percentage of households earning over $100,000, a mere 17 percent of the population, rose from 28 percent to 33 percent of voters between 2012 and 2016. Put simply, the electorate in 2016 was ever more disproportionately well-off than in the last three elections.

  Within these key categories, there were also small, but significant, shifts in voter preference. While 60 percent of voters in households earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton’s share of these voters dropped to 52 percent. Clinton only won 88 percent of the Black vote, down from 95 percent and 93 percent for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Especially alarming for the Democrats was their falling share of the Latino vote. Democratic pollsters had been confident that Trump’s racist diatribes would allow Clinton to sweep this key sector. However, the Democrats’ share of the Latino vote declined from 71 percent in 2012 to 65 percent in 2016. Finally, the percentage of union households voting Democratic fell from 58 percent in 2008 and 59 percent in 2012 to a mere 51 percent in 2016.

  Trump’s ability to retain the core sectors of the Republicans’ voter base since 1980—primarily the traditional (self-employed and small businesses with less than ten employees) and new (professionals, managers, supervisors) middle classes, including evangelical Christians; and a minority of older, white workers—was clear in all the exit polling. However, Trump’s margin of victory—greatly exaggerated in the fun-house mirror of the Electoral College—came from a tiny group of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.8 Of the 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly one-third (209) swung to Trump; and of 207 counties that Obama won once, almost 94 percent (194) went to Trump. The swing to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Democratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and experienced a rise in the Latino population. However, Trump’s victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the participation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than a sharp swing to Trump. Trump did gain approximately 335,000 more votes than Romney among households earning less than $50,000 per year in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However, Clinton received 1.7 million fewer votes than Obama among the same group.9 It was these minuscule shifts in voter preference and participation that gave Trump his razor-thin margins in a number of key states: less than 0.25 percent in Michigan, less than 1 percent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and less than 1.5 percent in Florida. According to one analysis, had about one hundred thousand Trump voters in these areas voted for Clinton instead, she would have swept the Electoral College.10

  Put simply, Trump did not so much win the 2016 election, as Hillary Clinton lost it. Despite her enormous campaign treasury, Clinton did not build a “get out the vote” operation to mobilize traditional Democratic constituencies—African Americans, Latinos, and working-class households.11 Instead, the Clinton campaign took these groups for granted, believing that they would have little or no choice but to turn out to defeat Trump. Time, funds, and energy were focused on “socially liberal” suburban, new middle-class professionals and managers. At a Washington Post symposium in July 2016, Chuck Schumer, the neoliberal Democratic senator from New York, was quite clear: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”12 Rather than knocking on doors in working-class and minority communities, and making a pretense of supporting the sort of social democratic policies championed by Sanders, the Clinton campaign targeted upper-middle-class suburbs, allowing
her to win substantially more votes than Obama among households earning over $100,000.13 Traditionally Democratic working-class voters were faced with the choice between a neoliberal who disdained working people and a right-wing populist who promised to bring back well-paying manufacturing jobs. Many stayed home and a tiny minority shifted their allegiances from the first African American president to an open racist and xenophobe.

  The Social Foundations of Trumpism

  The core of Trump’s support, like that of Tea Party since 2009, is the older, white, suburban/exurban middle classes.14 His success among non-college-educated whites—he won 52 percent of all voters without bachelor’s degrees—appears to be concentrated among traditional small-business people (construction contractors, small shop keepers, etc.) and those supervisors (factory foreman, store and office managers, etc.) and semi-professionals (technicians, etc.) who do not require a college education. His success among households earning over $75,000 a year reflects the support of the managerial and professional elite of this class. Put another way, Trump’s social base is that of the Republican Party since 1980—politically and socially conservative, older, white middle-class voters. However, the politics of these groups have radicalized since the economic crisis of 2008.

  Prior to 2008, hostility to the democratic gains of racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ folks animated the hearts and minds of Republican voters. For most of the past four decades, these voters were willing to settle for symbolic concessions on these issues (restrictions, but not a legal ban on abortions; limiting access to contraception; local anti-LGBTQ ordinances) while loyally supporting the neoliberal agenda of the mainstream Republicans—those who traditionally represented the majority of capitalists in the United States.